U.S. Government on a Collision Course with Science, Law, and the Church
Life Legal Defense Foundation Files to Stop the HHS Abortion Mandate
Contact: Tom Ciesielka, 312-422-1333, tc@tcpr.net
NAPA, Calif., / SCOTTSDALE, Az., June 19, 2012 /Christian Newswire/ -- Last week, the Life Legal Defense Foundation (LLDF) and Bioethics Defense Fund filed a comment to the Department of Health and Human Services to protest the government mandate that forces private employers and their insurers to provide free access to contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs.
The comment was filed on behalf of Rev. Thomas V. Berg, PhD, Chair of Moral Theology at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, New York; James C. Capretta, a public policy expert and Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.; and Maureen L. Condic, PhD, a research scientist and professor of human embryology at the University of Utah.
"The mandate is unworkable and unlawful," said Dana Cody, Executive Director of the Life Legal Defense Foundation. "As Independence Day is approaching, our government should take a look at the Constitution, because it's clear that they don't care about the rights of individuals and employers to hold sacred their respect for life and religious liberty."
The filing deems "wholly unacceptable" the HHS mandate and its purported "compromise," pointing out that it unavoidably compels Catholic and other religiously observant employers to engage in what the Western moral tradition understands as "unjustified material cooperation with evil." The document then presents the biological facts that undergird one of the specific evils that objecting employers would be forced to materially cooperate with, namely that some of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approved drugs required to be covered are capable of intentionally terminating the life of a human being at the embryonic stage of development by various modes of action.
The complete filing is available here.
About the Life Legal Defense Foundation
Life Legal Defense Foundation is a non-profit organization composed of attorneys and other concerned citizens, committed to giving helpless and innocent human beings of any age, and their advocates, a trained and committed voice in the courtrooms of our nation. For more information, go to www.lldf.org.
