Fr. Berg said that in his understanding, the HHS rule does “nothing more than to give force to the previous rules that were already on the books, essentially enforcing regulations that should have been in force. Unfortunately, our culture coaxes us into a practice of not honoring the right to exercise conscience in health care.
“We are being coaxed into a culture that allows new pressures on Catholic health care workers to comply with practices and services that are contrary to their conscience,” he said.
“The right to conscience, the right to follow conscience in healthcare is a bedrock, a foundational issue in the practice of medicine. Healthcare professionals must exercise fidelity to their conscience’s determination every day,” Fr. Berg stressed.
“There is no reason why a certain portion of the healthcare profession should be constrained in their exercise of conscience by these kinds of cultural pressures,” he told CNA in a Friday phone interview.
Fr. Berg also authors the CNA column “With Good Reason.” In his December 9, 2008 column he also wrote about the HHS rules and the nature of conscience in medical ethics.
“The outright denial of free exercise of conscience in the healthcare field undermines the very practice of medicine as we know it. In the scenario where conscience rights are not protected, health care workers have no recourse; violation of their conscience is not a temporary limitation, but a shocking desecration of their most deeply held beliefs and moral convictions, and of the very virtue of justice on which our democracy stands,” he wrote.
In his Friday remarks to CNA, Fr. Berg said situations which depict people being totally denied medical services are implausible.
“In our culture today, that’s simply a non-argument.”
He mentioned the case of a Catholic hospital that does not want to administer ‘Plan B’ as part of their rape protocol. Should any woman come into the emergency room requesting such treatment, he said, “All she has to do is go down to the local pharmacy and buy Plan B.”
Another argument frequently raised by the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project is the distinction between individual and institutional rights of conscience. The project’s 2002 report “Religious Refusals and Reproductive Rights” advocated that individual conscience rights be emphasized and institutional rights minimized.
Fr. Berg questioned the extreme distinction between the two.
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“In practice, that hard and fast distinction doesn’t work,” he argued. “It’s not the proper paradigm in a Catholic institution where personal exercise or personal set of values and institutional set of values and practices really are meant to be one and the same.”
“There’s meant to be kind of a communion of thought and practice, such that this hard and fast distinction falls to the wayside.
“Ideally, in the case of the Catholic health care worker, their conscience is being informed by the institution of the Church.”