SCOTUS Bolsters Conscience Rights in the Mifepristone Decision

​The media is abuzz today about the unanimous ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that rejected a challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s regulation for the use of the abortion drug mifepristone. What’s overlooked, however, is that the Court’s opinion, authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, firmly nails down the conscience right of physicians and healers to abstain from participating in abortions and prescribing mifepristone.
 
This opinion firms up national policy on conscience rights. At a time when some in the federal bureaucracy and the states seem determined to chip away at conscience rights, the Court’s opinion will act as a concrete bollard to block further efforts at encroachment.
 
Justice Kavanaugh wrote that the Church Amendments, which prohibit the government from imposing requirements that violate the conscience rights of physicians and institutions, “allow doctors and other healthcare personnel to ‘refuse to perform or assist’ an abortion without punishment or discrimination from their employers.” The Court’s opinion also repeatedly quotes the Biden Administration in affirming that “federal conscience protections encompass ‘the doctor’s beliefs rather than particular procedures’ … As the Government points out, that strong protection for conscience remains true even in a so-called healthcare desert, where other doctors are not readily available.”
 
The opinion notes as a matter of law and fact that federal conscience laws have protected pro-life doctors ever since the FDA approved mifepristone in 2000. The pro-life plaintiffs in this case argued that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) might be interpreted to require individual emergency room doctors to participate in emergency abortions. But the administration rejected that reading of EMTALA, and the Court declared today “we agree with the Government’s view of EMTALA on that point.”
 
These declarations are not as sensational as upholding a drug that is used for the majority of pregnancy terminations. From now on, however, any effort to restrict or violate the conscience rights of healers will go against the declared intent of the Biden Administration and the unanimous opinion of all nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.