Modern liberals have a habit of denying the inevitable consequences of their policies. They refuse to concede that a healthcare bureaucracy created and run by persons who embrace utilitarian views of human life might unsettle Americans concerned that government would, as Senator Chuck Grassley put it this week, “pull the plug on Grandma.” 

And they seem baffled by those who find President Obama’s professed desire to “reduce the number of abortions” difficult to reconcile with his efforts to subsidize and expand access to them.   

Worst of all is the left’s position on conscience protections for those with religious or moral objections to participating in life-destroying medicine.  Obama says he supports “robust” conscience protections.  But don’t be fooled. 

A current legal case illustrates what life could be like for pro-life healthcare professionals in the Age of Obama.  As a lawyer involved in the case explained in an exclusive interview with this column, if Obama and his allies get their way, all pro-life healthcare workers will soon need to ask themselves: Will I be forced to perform abortions?

On May 24th, Nurse Catherina Lorena Cenzon-DeCarlo was beginning her early morning shift at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City when a superior told her that she was needed to assist in an abortion of a 22-week preborn child. 

Cenzon-DeCarlo reminded her superior that she had made her religious objections to participating in abortions clear when she was hired five years earlier.  But Cenzon-DeCarlo was informed that if she did not participate, she would be charged with “insubordination and patient abandonment.”  These charges would cost Cenzon-DeCarlo her job or nursing license or both, if she did not help out.   

With these threats, Cenzon-DeCarlo participated in the gruesome procedure, watching as a doctor removed the bloody arms and legs of the child, then treating the bloody body parts and delivering them to the specimen room.

She later told the New York Post “I felt violated and betrayed. I couldn’t believe that this could happen …I emigrated to this country in the belief that here religious freedom is sacred.”

Pro-life law firm Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) is representing Cenzon-DeCarlo in a civil case against Mount Sinai. 

In an interview, Matt Bowman, the lead attorney representing Cenzon-DeCarlo, said ADF has “asked for a preliminary injunction to prevent the hospital from continuing to violate the rights of conscience of its employees.”

ADF is asking that Mount Sinai be ordered to obey federal laws that protect conscience or be stripped of the roughly $200 million a year it receives in federal funding, and that Mount Sinai compensate Cenzon-DeCarlo for emotional trauma. 

Mount Sinai claims that Cenzon-DeCarlo has no right to sue and that the abortion was necessary and could not have been delayed.   But the hospital’s own records show that the abortion was not labeled a Category I, which requires “immediate surgical intervention for life or limb threatening conditions” and that the supervisor that forced DeCarlo to assist is herself a nurse who could have stepped in.   

Importantly, as Bowman pointed out, even had it been a Category I situation, federal law protects the right of health care professionals not to participate in abortion in any situation.  Bowman said, “When Congress created conscience protection, they did not include exceptions that would let hospitals, even in alleged emergencies, compel medical professionals to assist in abortions against their beliefs”

The Cenzon-DeCarlo case is hardly unique.  According to Bowman, “In the last couple years, we’ve seen an effort to mainstream abortions into our nation’s leading hospitals, and simultaneously a more aggressive attack on conscience rights.”

President Obama and his pro-abortion allies have been doing all they can to weaken conscience protections at the federal level.  In April, Obama overturned a provision put in place by President Bush that didn’t expand federal law but helped enforce it, so that medical professionals would not have to violate their consciences by participating in medical procedures they deem immoral. 

Amendments to the spring’s budget containing conscience protections were voted down by Democrats in Congress. 

And then there’s healthcare reform.  If legislation passes that covers abortion as an essential benefit and without a conscience clause, pro-life professionals and hospitals could be forced to choose between their deeply held beliefs and their careers.  Catholic hospitals, which make up about a quarter of all hospitals, would be forced to shutter their doors.

Notably, in November 2007, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) issued an opinion called “The Limits of Conscientious Refusal in Reproductive Medicine.”  It stated that pro-life ob-gyns should be compelled to practice next door to abortionists and to refer abortion-seeking patients to abortionists. 

ACOG further declared that “in an emergency,” healthcare providers “have an obligation to provide medically indicated and requested care.” 

Not surprisingly, most Americans don’t agree with Obama and ACOG.  To take just one poll, a recent survey by The Polling Company found 87 percent of respondents believed it is important to “make sure that healthcare professionals in America are not forced to participate in procedures and practices to which they have moral objections.”  Even 78 percent of those who said they support legal abortion support conscience protections, as did 80 percent of those who voted for Obama for president.

In May, President Obama told Notre Dame graduates that he supports “sensible” conscience protections.  He also said concerning his abortion policies, “not everyone will agree with me.”  These caveats can only mean scaling back on conscience laws as they currently exist, consistent with his rescission of the Bush regulations. 

As we’ve seen so often in their first few months in power, Obama and his allies will not allow popular opposition to deter them from enacting their radical agenda, in this case expanding what is already the developed world’s most permissive abortion regime.

After all, Obama has written that abortion, or “reproductive justice,” is “one of the most fundamental rights we possess.”  If that’s true, then it would be not only nonsensical—but unconscionable—to deny it.