Certain health care providers are worried because the Obama administration is removing Bush era regulations that allow health care providers and institutions to refuse treatments that they find morally wrong. From Today's SF Comical, reported by Matthai Kuruvila:

If a patient wants an abortion or if McAllister sees an end-of-life decision she might question, she can discreetly find another nurse who would help the patient in the way the patient seeks.

But, like many Catholics, evangelicals and others, McAllister now worries that an Obama administration proposal to repeal "conscience" protections for health care workers will imperil her rights.

First we need to establish a point of fact: Most elective abortions are performed in specialized clinics. Planned Parenthood runs many of these clinics. People who object to abortion on moral grounds have no more business working for one of these clinics than a vegan has working at a steak house. That's the way it works in urban areas and, from what I hear, it is also the way it works in the heartland. There are just more clinics that perform elective abortions in urban areas.

Now there are two other choices that a health care provider "of faith" could object to in an ordinary hospital setting. These would be: abortions required to preserve the life or health of the mother and various choices to avoid medical care made by terminally ill patients and their families.

Now when Wonks Anonymous last checked even Catholic theology considered both of these areas to be open to the judgment of patients, their doctors and their families.

Nurse McAllister and her ilk are simply not privy to the information which patients, their doctors and their families use to make these decisions and have not participated in the often difficult decision process so how, Wonks Anonymous wants to know, does she presume to come on shift and make moral judgments about the actions of others.

If a nurse or a hospital chain is absolutely opposed to all abortions or unwilling to allow people to make reasonable and appropriate end of life choices - withdrawal of life support and so on - they really have no business being in health care. Wonks Anonymous would go on to add this: Any medical personnel who reserve the right to regularly sit in judgment over difficult decisions that patients, their doctors and their families have made and to refuse to help in the treatments that they have decided on should look for work elsewhere.

I don't think that the Office of the Holy Inquisition is still around but maybe the Taliban is hiring.