Religious relativity victimizes Christian health-care workers

Should Christian health-care workers be required to aid abortions? Help gay couples procreate via artificial insemination? Aid a doctor-assisted suicide?

No, no, and for pity’s sake, the correct answer is no.

Yet, for the crime of answering correctly, medical workers are joining the ranks of Christians persecuted for their faith.

Sadly, we must look well past common sense to see the latest tidal wave of angst in the medical community these days. Health workers are refusing to give care in ways that violate their personal beliefs. Specifically, Christian health-care providers are being reprimanded, or even fired, after rejecting requests for procedures that are clearly against biblical teaching.

Christians who rightly refuse to prescribe or dispense a morning-after abortion pill, or perform some other immoral procedure, are themselves becoming victims. It seems the culture will tolerate everything except intolerance to sin.

A solution doesn’t seem all that elusive. But more on that later.

First, consider the story of Stephanie Adamson. She lost her job as an emergency medical technician because she refused to transport a young patient to a hospital for an abortion.

Adamson was featured in a Washington Post article that appeared across the country earlier this month, including in this newspaper. For one day, she was the face of a nasty culture war pitting religious freedom against patients’ rights.

But something was missing. The Post, as with other media outlets chasing this “medical crisis of conscience,” gave scant attention to the obvious: Most patients can readily go someplace else for treatment.

For the most part, the media have wrongly portrayed this issue as a choice between patients’ treatment and the rights of Christian doctors, nurses, EMTs and others to do their jobs without violating sacred beliefs. It is largely a false tension, as Adamson’s story illustrates.

Unfortunately, that woman seeking an elective abortion was not denied her “rights” simply because Adamson refused to shuttle her to an abortion hospital. In fact, the request was scarcely delayed; another medic with a less precise moral compass took the wheel and off she went to have her baby killed.

As that baby’s life ended, its young mother’s nightmare of regret, guilt, and unrequited love for her child began. She, too, is a victim – of misguided choice.

Adamson’s trouble merely continued. She’s still seeking justice after suing her former employer back in 2004.

There is great danger in drawing a line in the sand and making this an “either-or” proposition. It isn’t. Christian health-care workers can do their jobs, honor their biblical beliefs, and patients refused treatment can go across the street to another provider. Is that so complicated?

I applaud Congressional and state-level efforts to write laws shielding health-care workers from discrimination based on their beliefs. Oregon has already charted a course through these unwanted waters, allowing doctors and nurses to refuse to participate in physician-assisted suicide, which was inexplicably legalized in that state two years ago. It makes sense to ease this nonsense by allowing all health-care workers similar protections.

Of course, patients’ rights advocates cry foul, pointing to the worst-case scenario in which a patient’s life is endangered when a Christian health-care worker refuses to provide treatment. It is interesting to me, however, that most newspaper and TV reports on the issue fail to uncover such a scenario.

Here’s why: Most of the disputed procedures are elective. Abortions, doctor-assisted suicides and morning-after pills are overwhelmingly treatments of choice, not imperative.

This ethical storm front in the world of medicine is merely the latest result of mankind’s reckless dive into moral relativity. We’re suffering the very headache the Scriptures warn of when we replace God’s truth with man’s reason: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; Who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20 – NKJV).

The real issue here seems to be the offense that Christianity in its practical expressions presents to those going their own way. Let us pray that common sense, and biblical truth, prevail in this latest attack on people of faith.