WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is planning to announce a broad new "right of conscience" rule permitting medical facilities, doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other health care workers to refuse to participate in any way in morally "objectionable procedures" such as abortion and possibly including birth control and artificial insemination.
For more than 30 years, federal law has dictated that doctors and nurses may refuse to perform abortions. The new rule would go further by making clear that health care workers may also refuse to provide information or advice about abortion to patients.
It also seeks to cover far more employees. For example, in addition to a surgeon and a nurse in an operating room, the rule would extend to "an employee whose task it is to clean the instruments," the draft rule said.
Health and Human Services Department officials said it will apply to "any entity" that receives federal funds. It estimated 584,000 entities could be covered, including 4,800 hospitals, 234,000 doctor's offices and 58,000 pharmacies.
Proponents of the rule, including the Christian Medical Association and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, say it is not limited to abortion. It will protect doctors who do not wish to prescribe birth control to unmarried girls or to provide artificial insemination, said Dr. David Stevens, the president of CMA.
"The real battle line is the morning-after pill," he said. "This prevents the embryo from implanting. This involves moral complicity. Doctors should not be required to dispense a medication they have a moral objection to."
Critics of the rule say it will sacrifice patients' health to the religious beliefs of providers.
The American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association urged HHS last month to drop the regulation. The Planned Parenthood Foundation and other backers of abortion rights condemned the rule as a last-gasp effort by the Bush administration and said the rule would allow politics and ideology to compromise health care.
Despite the controversy over the rule, HHS Secretary Michael O. Leavitt said he intends to issue it as a final regulation before the Obama administration takes over.
If the regulation is issued before Dec. 20, it will be final when the Obama administration takes office, HHS officials say. The new administration would then have to begin new rule-making procedures to overturn it.
