We occasionally hear about this – in fact you can look at my recent post on a story from right here in Rome, GA, where a pharmacist wouldn’t obtain Plan B for a local woman and caused the Kroger Co. to have to clarify its position on protecting the rights of pharmacists to their conscience. This story is very similar, it’s about doctors, though.

Although a proposal to protect the conscience rights of health care providers and institutions that don’t want to participate in certain medical procedures isn’t getting much action in Congress, the issue of conscience protection is a hot topic in several states and within the medical community.

The Abortion Nondiscrimination Act of 2007, sponsored by Sen. David Vitter, R-La., has gotten no co-sponsors since its Jan. 22 introduction and no hearings have been scheduled on it by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

Both the AMA and the New England Journal of Medicine have been making statements on behalf of doctors’ conscience rights. Yet,

Connecticut legislators are considering a proposal that would require all hospitals receiving public funds — including the state’s four Catholic hospitals — to offer emergency contraception to rape victims, without performing a test to ascertain whether the woman is already pregnant.

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Across the country, the Oregon Catholic Conference was fighting a similar battle over a bill that would require all health plans paying for prescription drugs to also cover prescription birth control.

That means a health insurance plan for Catholic school teachers could be forced to provide for gravely evil services as well as drugs.

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