Freedom of Choice Act

I want to point people's attention to an article that was sent to me today. This caused me to look up the Freedom of Choice Act.

I also found it on Barack Obama's site, you can google it:

When South Dakota passed a law banning all abortions in a direct effort to have Roe overruled, I was the only candidate for President to raise money to help the citizens of South Dakota repeal that law. When anti-choice protesters blocked the opening of an Illinois Planned Parenthood clinic in a community where affordable health care is in short supply, I was the only candidate for President who spoke out against it. And I will continue to defend this right by passing the Freedom of Choice Act as president.

Please read the bill yourself from what I linked to above. Here are some interesting facts that I came across that this bill would impose on the American people:

Michael Moses, legal analyst of the United States Council of Catholic Bishops called it a "radical measure" that will "go way beyond Roe [vs. Wade]." The language is so sweeping that it will wipe out any state's "conscience" clause, which is the law that allows hospitals, doctors and nurses to abstain from taking part in abortion for reasons of conscience. If abortion is a "fundamental right", according to FOCA, then every hospital must provide it.

I've come across more than one article that states that there is no longer room for conscientious objection based on religious belief.

In Maryland, Freedom of Choice-type legislation has been on the books since 1991. Since that time, Maryland law has provided for abortion on demand even late in pregnancy, granted abortionists immunity from legal action, allowed abortionists the discretion to perform abortions on minors without notifying a parent, and denied health care workers the right to refuse to make abortion referrals as a matter of conscience.[13] This has not led to a reduction of abortions in the state, but appears to actually have had the adverse effect of increasing the abortion rate in Maryland.

And there is a question of how many hospitals this will close and also how many quality health care providers will have to choose between their medical license or their faith.

Please think of these things before voting for Obama. For someone like me, this trumps everything. If McCain was a supporter of this bill and I agreed with everything else he supported, I still could not vote for him. The protection of life is of utmost importance.

Finally, this article, which I linked to in the first of the post as well had a quote I think every Catholic and everyone who supports Obama should read:

Pro-life Catholics will face different, if equally grave, dilemmas. The bishops already find themselves defending the Catholic integrity of Catholic hospitals under pressures from state governments; those pressures, as well as pressures on doctors and other Catholic health-care professionals, will increase in an Obama administration, especially if FOCA succeeds in knocking down state conscience-clause protections for Catholic health-care providers and institutions. And should an Obama administration reintroduce large-scale federal funding of abortion, the bishops will have to confront a grave moral question they have managed to avoid for decades, thanks to the Hyde amendment: does the payment of federal taxes that go to support abortion constitute a form of moral complicity in an "intrinsic evil"? And if so, what should the conscientious Catholic citizen do?

Till next time!