Saturday, March 10, 2018

Unintended Consequences Alert

Breitbart reports Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) is pushing an amendment to the Omnibus spending bill. Its purpose:
To protect healthcare workers who refuse to participate in abortions due to their faith beliefs or moral convictions.
One wonders, will it also protect the right of employers to determine, before making a job offer, if the person will refuse to participate in abortions - procedures which remain legal nationwide? Will it protect the employers' right to reassign existing employees to jobs where their objection to abortion is not an issue, for example moving an OR nurse to Pediatrics or Orthopedics?

In the absence of such protections, imagine a hospital where all operating room personnel have anti-abortion scruples. It will have to turn away such procedures for lack of qualified and willing personnel to perform them. One would be naive to think this wasn't exactly what Rep. Black has in mind.

Hospitals will become quite clever about ferreting out which applicants have such objections and hiring others who don't object. You could think of her amendment as the "don't hire pro-life employees" act.

The article, by the way, infers the existence of a pro-life majority in the U.S. electorate which I don't believe can be substantiated via survey data.