The Conscience and Religious Freedom Division in the Office for Civil Rights at HHS encourages health care providers to refuse “to perform, accommodate or assist with certain health care services on religious or moral grounds.” Under this division’s policy, medical professionals — nurses, doctors and pharmacists — may refuse to treat transgender or other individual patients or take part in abortions, voluntary sterilizations or any health care they otherwise claim a religious or “moral” objection to.

“Once again we see this administration using the guise of ‘religious freedom’ to deny civil liberties and impose religious beliefs on others,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor said of the new division when it was announced earlier this year.

H.R. 5123 to remove this dangerous and unnecessary division of HHS was introduced this week by Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.) FFRF encourages other lawmakers to support this move to provide common sense health care protection and to push back on yet another attempt to exempt religious adherents from essential laws.

“Denying care is no better than inflicting harm when you are a medical professional,” argues FFRF Co-President Dan Barker, “and Health and Human Services should be urging medical professionals to adhere to the Hippocratic oath, not a bronze-age book of ignorance, superstition, and bigotry.”

Please use our new automated system to contact your representatives and urge them to support this bill in order to stop government-sanctioned religious bigotry against U.S. citizens at their most vulnerable and helpless moments.