Outlawing Conscience
Why We Need a Conscience Clause
March 20, 2006

Heather Williams spent five years working as a pharmacist at a Target store in St. Louis. During that time, Target accommodated Williams’s desire not to take part in dispensing the morning-after pill—the drug that causes the abortion of an embryonic human being. But then Planned Parenthood threatened to boycott the Target chain over Williams’s employment—so Target fired her.

Now, there are more than three hundred other pharmacies in St. Louis. So this was not a matter of great public concern. Pharmacists are not the only health-care providers under attack for obeying the demands of their conscience. Catholic hospitals are pressured to offer abortion services. And at some medical schools, students are told it’s not enough to learn how to remove a deceased fetus from a patient: They must also take part in the abortion of live fetuses—even though they are learning nothing new, because the procedure is identical. The reason? It’s indoctrination.

Now, here’s the great irony: These attacks on pharmacists are coming at the very time that the California Medical Association is attempting to bar doctors from getting involved in death-row executions—even if the doctors have no objections to taking part. You can’t kill murderers, but you must kill babies. Health-care providers, it appears, are allowed to have a conscience, so long as those consciences object only to politically correct moral evils. The rest