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Today, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced the Defense of Conscience in Healthcare Act, a bill that would restore one of President Trump’s first-term policies and direct the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to firmly protect the conscience rights of healthcare providers.
“Our constitutional and God-given right to religious freedom isn’t nullified when someone puts on scrubs or a white coat,” Senator Hawley said. “The Biden Administration has spent the past four years waging war on people of faith, often forcing them to choose between their jobs and their sense of right and wrong. I am proud to help reverse the damage by introducing legislation protecting healthcare providers’ right to live out their faith.”
The bill would reinstitute the conscience protections for doctors, nurses, and allied health workers that the Trump Administration established in 2019. President Biden’s HHS gutted the substantive provisions of the Trump rules in 2024, leaving healthcare providers with moral and religious objections to abortion procedures without legal clarity concerning their rights.
The Defense of Conscience in Healthcare Act would:
- Direct HHS to expeditiously develop rules and regulations identical to the Trump Administration’s 2019 conscience protection rule.
- Provide necessary legal clarity and guidance to healthcare providers to ensure that federal conscience protection laws are properly enforced.
Read the bill text here.