Teepen: 'Conscience' bills in state legislatures are unconscionable

Several years ago, our neighborhood framer told my wife and I that he wouldn't frame any more nudes for us like the one we were picking up. He made it clear that he considered us simply dirty-minded, which is more or less true but not on the basis of the print we had brought in.

Little matter. It was money out of his pocket if he wanted to run a print and framing shop that shunned one of the major streams of western art. We just took up with another framer, and the guy who ran us off is still in business. No harm done.

It would have been a different matter if something really serious — like, oh, life or death — had been riding on the rejection.

That's the case with the "conscience" bills that are new fad in state legislatures.

What started as statutes to protect assorted health workers from retaliation if they refused to perform abortions has evolved into laws setting up pharmacists and pharmacies to be bullied out of filling prescriptions that abortion opponents disapprove of.

And as The Washington Post has reported, even broader measures are in the works that might shelter health care workers who object to in-vitro fertilization, treatment for gays and lesbians, even smallpox vaccinations because they were first produced from fetal cell cultures.

Some 36 conscience bills are pending in at least 18 states so far, and it's early in the legislative season. The larger number focus on shielding pharmacists who refuse to honor prescriptions for the "morning after" pill or for birth control pills that anti-abortion absolutists consider abortifacients, although medicine itself does not.

The laws hand the anti-abortion tough guys a legal and economic club with which to threaten pharmacies that decline to exercise the conscience option. Rather than parry with counter-threats, most women using birth control pills would just go elsewhere and write off the bother.

The stakes become rather higher when a morning-after prescription is refused and there is no compliant pharmacy near enough for the medicine to be taken in time.

And the stakes become enormous if health care workers, taking their clues from the Terry Shiavo grotesquery, refuse to honor a patient's end-of-life request not to be resuscitated or kept (technically) alive by feeding tubes or other artificial means.

This is conservatism's very own political correctness but this time with legal teeth. The premise quickly reaches its own logical absurdity. Couldn't animal-rights pharmacists refuse to fill prescriptions for animal-derived medicines? Already, The Post reports that five pending bills would allow insurers to deny coverage for services to which they have religious objections, and considering how many religions are going around, that could be anything. Scientology health care, anyone?

There are legitimate issues lost in this circus of political grandstanding, but they can't be refined enough even for serious discussion, much less addressed, by turning the American medical system — already a muddled hodge-podge — into a patchwork of personal righteousness and sectarian one-upmanship.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta. E-mail: teepencolumn@coxnews.com.