USA – ‘Conscience’ bills let medical providers opt out of providing a wide range of care

Carly Graf, KFF Health News
July 31, 2023

A new Montana law will provide sweeping legal protections to health care practitioners who refuse to prescribe marijuana or participate in procedures and treatments such as abortion, medically assisted death, gender-affirming care, or others that run afoul of their ethical, moral, or religious beliefs or principles.

The law, which goes into effect in October, will gut patients’ ability to take legal action if they believe they didn’t receive proper care due to a conscientious objection by a provider or an institution, such as a hospital.

Continued: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/07/31/conscience-bills-healthcare-providers-not-give-medical-care/70470186007/

A legal scholar sizes up the religious argument against abortion bans

ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
JULY 9, 2023

(JTA) — The abortion debate is often portrayed as a clash between religious beliefs on the pro-life side and secular or humanist convictions on the pro-choice side. Indeed, lawmakers and activists have often invoked God in enacting state bans on abortion since the Supreme Court, in last year’s Dobbs decision, struck down a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy.

Some clergy and faith groups, however, including a number of Jews, are pushing back. In efforts to overturn these restrictions, they have been pressing a legal strategy claiming that abortion bans violate their religious liberty. In Kentucky, a case brought by three Jewish women argues that the state’s near-total abortion ban violates their religious beliefs about when life begins and protecting a mother’s life. In Indiana, a suit brought by Hoosier Jews for Choice and four women who represent a variety of faiths demands exemptions from the state’s abortion ban for people whose religions support abortion rights.

Continued: https://www.jta.org/2023/07/09/ideas/a-legal-scholar-sizes-up-the-religious-argument-against-abortion-bans

USA – The sleeper legal strategy that could topple abortion bans

Jews, Episcopalians, Unitarians, Satanists and other people of faith say the laws infringe on their religious rights.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
06/21/2023

WEBSTER GROVES, Mo. — Revs. Jan Barnes and Krista Taves have logged hundreds of hours standing outside abortion clinics across Missouri and Illinois, going back to the mid-1980s. But unlike other clergy members around the country, they never pleaded with patients to turn back.

The sight of the two women in clerical collars holding up messages of love and support for people terminating a pregnancy “so infuriated the anti-abortion protesters that they would heap abuse on us and it drew the abuse away from the women,” recalled Taves, a minister at Eliot Unitarian Chapel in Kirkwood, Missouri, as she sat on a couch at Barnes’ stately church in this quiet suburb of St. Louis.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/21/legal-strategy-that-could-topple-abortion-bans-00102468

State lawsuits defend abortion access with religious freedom

Critics of religious freedom laws often argue they are used to discriminate against LGBTQ people and only protect a conservative Christian worldview

By ARLEIGH RODGERS Associated Press/Report for America
December 27, 2022

INDIANAPOLIS -- Cara Berg Raunick watched with bafflement as Indiana's Republican legislators took less than two weeks to debate and pass an abortion ban that the governor signed quickly into law.

The women’s health nurse practitioner from Indianapolis was struck by just how frequently faith was cited in the arguments as reason to ban the medical practice. But Berg Raunick, who is Jewish, said those views go against her beliefs.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/state-lawsuits-defend-abortion-access-religious-freedom-95854873

‘Theocratic’ US abortion bans will violate religious liberty, faith leaders say

The anti-abortion side has monopolized arguments based on religion. But some say their faith supports the right to choose

Melody Schreiber
Thu 2 Jun 2022

Misha Sanders was starting over. She had just left an abusive relationship, and she was in her first semester of seminary, all while caring for her child, a teenager with a pressing health problem.

That’s when she found out she was pregnant. Sanders took misoprostol and mifepristone, the two drugs known collectively as the abortion pill, to end the pregnancy.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/02/abortion-bans-violate-religious-liberty