Mar 122009
 

Remember when pro-abortion people used to say that reproductive choice should be a matter between a woman and her physician? What they didn’t tell us was that a woman is now to be denied the choice of making this decision with physicians who are personally opposed to performing abortions themselves. (WSJ Health Blog: Obama will move to rescind ‘conscience’ rule on abortion, birth control)

Remember the bumper stickers that said, “If you don’t like abortions–DON’T HAVE ONE”? I used to think it was a valid point, if not a deciding one. But now we’re told that if don’t like abortions, we have to participate in having one, anyway. We’re throwing out the uneasy compromise by which people are allowed to exercise their own abortion-choice while others are allowed not to take part, and are replacing it with an anti-choice system in which we all will be required to take part in abortion whether or not we find it to be right.

Remember those people who say we need to ban smoking in all restaurants in order to protect the workers? Sure, people should be allowed to choose whether or not to patronize an establishment that allowed smoking, but what about the workers? We can’t tell them that if they don’t like it they should find a different employer (they would tell us). But now it turns that we can very well tell doctors and nurses that if they don’t like participating in certain activities detrimental to the health of a fetus, that they should find, not just a different employer, but an entirely different line of work.