A group of nurses have sued for their right to refuse to participate in abortions, citing their anti-choice stance as reason enough to decline to care for women who have elected to terminate a pregnancy. From the way the complaint describes it, you’d think they were being ordered to line babies up and shoot them with a crossbow in front of their children. But they’re not being forced to help out with the procedure at all — nope, these nurses are citing their moral beliefs as justification for refusing to care for women before or after having abortions.
The Washington Post reports that in September, The University of Medicine & Dentistry’s New Jersey hospital changed its longstanding policy that allowed nurses to opt out of participating in any step of a medical procedure based on their religious or cultural beliefs. While medical professionals employed by the hospital would still be allowed to perform specific procedures with which they disagreed, they’d no longer be allowed to excuse themselves from all steps of the procedure; that is, nurses who objected to abortions would now be required to provide pre- or post-surgical care. At the end of October, a group of nurses filed suit against University Hospital, claiming religious discrimination.
A lawyer for the hospital says that the procedures utilized in prepping patients for abortions or assisting their recovery was fairly run-of-the-mill; nurses weren’t going to be required to say a Black Mass and then laugh gleefully while chanting “Huzzah for sluttery!” over the woman’s fetal remains. No matter! Abortion is wrong, and thus the women receiving them don’t deserve any sort of medical treatment. Twelve of the sixteen nurses who work in the hospital’s same-day surgery unit have refused to participate in any stage of care for a woman terminating her pregnancy.
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