On Wednesday, the House voted to enshrine into law the right of pro-life medical professionals to go to court to stop states from forcing them to insure, fund or provide abortions. Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), a former pastor and current Air Force chaplain reservist, explains why America needs the Conscience Protection Act.

Liberal state governments are now saying “We’re going to force you into believing what we want you to believe in,” he told The Stream. “What’s amazing to me is that sometimes the most ‘tolerant’ people are the most intolerant people — they claim tolerance, but yet, if there’s something they disagree with, they’re pretty much the most intolerant. They’ll go to court to enforce that view.”

For their part, Democrats said during debate in the House yesterday that the CPA codifies discrimination against women and is a misogynist attempt to have employers control women’s bodies.

Correcting the Courts

Collins said conscience protections need to be clarified and protected “because we have found some court decisions saying there is no private right of action, and no recourse, if they were forced to do this.”

“I think this is a good step, I think it’s very measured, I think it provides protection that has long understood to be in the law, but just not practiced,” explained the Congressman.

California, for example, declared abortion a “basic” service in 2014. Combined with another state law, that law forced Catholics and other religious-based individuals and groups to offer insurance to their employees that included coverage for abortion.

Pro-life groups argued that the new law violates the Weldon Amendment, which prevents state agencies that receive federal funding from discriminating against groups involved in health care that will not provide, pay for or referring women for abortions. It is a rider attached to spending bills that has to be approved annually.

The administration disagrees, however. In a June 21 letter, the Department of Health and Human Services ruled that the amendment didn’t apply, because no organization covered by it had objected to the requirement and the insurers previously covered at least some abortions.

“Our legislation will make the Weldon protection permanent law,” House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) told The Stream. It “will add a new private right of action, allowing those employers or others who feel that their conscience rights are not being respected to have access to courts and not be wholly dependent on the whims of HHS bureaucrats.”

The passage of the CPA follows a failed attempt in 2014 to do the same thing through the Abortion Non-Discrimination Act (ANDA) which some pro-life congressmen tried but failed to include in that year’s omnibus spending bill. The CPA “is stand-alone legislation,” Collins said, which is a better way to establish conscience protections.

Not Health Care

“I do not understand how killing a baby is any kind of health care,” Collins told The Stream. “Explain to me where that is in the Hippocratic Oath, [that] to kill babies is health care. Last I hear, it was ‘Do no harm.’ I’m not sure how taking a child from its mother’s womb and dismembering it has anything to do with ‘do no harm.’”

Collins said the CPA is a way for “Republicans and for conservatives to say, ‘We value life.’ That life matters from conception to natural death. This is something that we’re very passionate about going into a fall election season, and frankly, one of the biggest issues of this election season.”

“We need to look ahead to the Supreme Court, and four justices who could be gone within this one first term, and how does that affect the conscience and the moral climate in this country?”