ROME — The U.S. bishops’ conference (USCCB) warned this week new HHS regulations mandating harmful surgical procedures are “a violation of religious freedom and bad medicine.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued proposed revisions to its regulations this week that “would force health care workers to perform gender transition procedures, require health insurance issuers to cover them, and entertain a mandate to perform elective abortions,” the bishops note with concern on the USCCB website.
“Sadly, Monday’s proposed regulations threaten our ability to carry out our healing ministries, and others’ to practice medicine,” reads a joint statement issued by Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, chair of the Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley, chair of the Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, chairman of the Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth, and New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, chairman of the Committee for Religious Liberty.
The new regulations “mandate health care workers to perform life-altering surgeries to remove perfectly healthy body parts,” the bishops lament. “Assurances that HHS will honor religious freedom laws offer little comfort when HHS is actively fighting court rulings that declared HHS violated religious freedom laws the last time they tried to impose such a mandate.”
“This is a violation of religious freedom and bad medicine,” they add.
“The proposed regulations announce that HHS is also considering whether to force health care workers to perform abortions against their will or lose their jobs. We call on HHS to explicitly disavow any such intent,” they write.
In their statement, the bishops note that Catholics have been called to care for the sick since the earliest days of the Christian faith and currently, the various agencies and social service ministries of the Catholic Church taken together “are equivalent to the largest nonprofit health care provider in the country.”
The bishops also underscore the Catholic Church discriminates against no one in providing health care and Catholic health care ministries “serve everyone, no matter their race, sex, belief system, or any other characteristic.”
“The same excellent care will be provided in a Catholic hospital to all patients, including patients who identify as transgender, whether it be for a broken bone or for cancer, but we cannot do what our faith forbids,” they declare, adding that we “object to harmful procedures, not to patients.”