Conscience Protections

Conscience freedoms are foundational in the healthcare process, and it applies to both healthcare professionals and patients alike. Our increasingly amoral society and gradual move away from the commitment to and practice of Hippocratic medicine creates a great need for conscience protections for healthcare professionals—so they will not be forced to choose between their career and their conscience, ethics, and faith.

In collaboration with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), we have worked to introduce and pass healthcare conscience protections in select states. A model ADF-prepared bill, known as the Medical Ethics and Diversity (MED) Act, protects diversity of belief within the medical profession and benefits patients by protecting the supply of healthcare professionals and healthcare entities within the healthcare system. Such conscience protections could include protecting from having to train for, participate in, perform, or refer for a procedure in which a medical student, resident, or healthcare professional has a conscientious objection. The bill does not permit healthcare professionals, institutions, or payers to decline to serve a person based on their race, color, sex, or any other protected characteristic. The bill simply protects from being required to perform specific procedures. Read an example of the model bill here.

Gender

We affirm that all human beings are created in the image of, and beloved by, God. We also affirm the historic understanding of gender as referring to biological sex and the enduring biblical understanding of humankind as having been created male and female and that this is good. We cannot support the recent usage of the term “gender” to emphasize an identity other than one's biological sex, that is, a subjective sense of self based on feelings or desires leading to identification somewhere on a fluid continuum of gender identity. Mutilation of normal tissue and profound disruption of normal physiology that occur during gender transition procedures are very difficult to justify, as this constitutes deliberate harm. Christian healthcare professionals are obligated to care for patients struggling with gender identity with sensitivity and compassion. Attempts to radically reconstruct one’s body surgically or hormonally for psychological indications, however, are medically, ethically, and psychologically inappropriate. These measures alter healthy tissue and increasingly are not supported by scientific research evaluating behavioral, medical, and surgical outcomes.

We are glad to collaborate with the Family Policy Alliance and family policy councils to introduce state model bills to protect children from being exposed to dangerous medical therapies prescribed to falsely attempt to change the gender of that child. Model bills such as these state examples of Help Not Harm and the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act have been introduced in select states.