{"id":239102,"date":"2021-02-02T09:45:03","date_gmt":"2021-02-02T15:45:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=239102"},"modified":"2021-02-01T11:46:10","modified_gmt":"2021-02-01T17:46:10","slug":"groups-press-biden-eliminate-conscience-protections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/groups-press-biden-eliminate-conscience-protections\/","title":{"rendered":"Groups press President Biden to eliminate conscience protections they deem ‘discriminatory’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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President Joe Biden is facing pressure from fellow Democrats to eliminate a division of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) created under the Trump administration in 2018. The Conscience and Religious Freedom Division in the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) was established to ensure the federal enforcement of laws that exist to protect the fundamental rights of conscience and religious freedom.<\/p>\n

“Laws protecting religious freedom and conscience rights are just empty words on paper if they aren’t enforced,” said OCR Director Roger Severino at the time. “No one should be forced to choose between helping sick people and living by one’s deepest moral or religious convictions, and the new division will help guarantee that victims of unlawful discrimination find justice.”<\/p>\n

Both the Democratic Women’s Caucus (DWC) and Secular Democrats of America<\/a> are calling on President Biden to end the division. Sixty female Democrat lawmakers penned a letter<\/a> to Biden in December encouraging him to “use executive powers to immediately begin reversing the harm wrought by the outgoing administration…” On the list of their demands<\/a>\u00a0is the elimination of the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division of HHS, claiming that it “has been weaponized to justify discrimination.”<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0California to Office for Civil Rights: We will keep forcing religious institutions<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Similarly, on the list of demands from the Secular Democrats of America is, “Dismantle the HHS Conscience and Religious Freedom Division,” along with the call to repeal an executive order that protected free speech and religious liberty, and to withdraw funding for pro-life pregnancy centers and abstinence-only education programs. Another demand is to increase vaccination rates by repealing all nonmedical exemptions to mandatory vaccination for children in schools and daycare centers.<\/p>\n

The elimination of the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division could end the enforcement of conscience protections that currently exist for medical professionals who don’t want to participate in abortion or euthanasia. Since its inception, OCR has dealt with multiple cases in which a medical professional’s conscience protections were ignored, including a case in which a nurse at the University of Vermont Medical Center was forced to participate<\/a> in an abortion after she was led to believe the baby had been miscarried.<\/p>\n