Conscience clauses are important legal protections for medical professionals. They should be protected.
These rights shield individuals who oppose certain medical procedures, such as abortion, from being forced to provide them. But the American Cancer Society’s political arm thinks they must be eliminated to address cancer rates among gay and transgender individuals.
ACS Cancer Action Network “opposes legislation and regulations that include ‘conscience clauses,’” according to a 2024 report.
It also lobbied against the Department of Health and Human Services’s conscience rights laws. “Individuals in the LGBTQ+ community face serious challenges and barriers to health care resulting in a higher cancer burden,” the ACS has previously claimed. “For example, gay and bisexual men have a higher risk for anal cancer (particularly if they are HIV+).”
In the context of individuals who have gender dysphoria, conscience rights can include refusing to provide surgeries or drugs to alter someone’s appearance to look like the opposite sex. This has nothing to do with cancer.
The legal protections do not allow medical professionals to refuse wholesale to provide medical care to someone simply because they are in a same-sex relationship. Rather, they protect someone’s individual conscience rights.
Eliminating them would not improve healthcare for anyone — it might make it worse.
Consider a bright, young evangelical student who is considering a career in medicine. He wants to go into medicine out of a desire to help others, as he sees this as part of his responsibility as a Christian.
But if the legal landscape is such that he might be forced to assist with an abortion or inject a female with male hormones, he might pick another field.
Why rack up hundreds of thousands in student loan debt, go through medical school, and work 90-hour rounds just to lose his livelihood because he believes sex is immutable and that all human life is worth protecting?
This hypothetical doctor can address some of the contributors to cancer rates cited by the ACS report: high smoking rates, drinking, and obesity. There are no conscience clauses that would allow a doctor to refuse to help someone quit smoking just because that person identifies as bisexual.
It is no surprise people of faith are the target, given the ACS’s warped view of the world that sounds more like a college lecture than a medical paper.
“Similar to alcohol use and cigarette smoking, illicit injection drug use may serve as a coping mechanism for unique minority stressors experienced by gay and bisexual men,” the report states.
Lesbian women who decline “oncologist-recommended treatment” may do so because of “patient distrust of the health care system due to discrimination, as well as failure on the part of health care professionals to fully evaluate symptoms in LGBTQ+ individuals,” according to the report.
“Minority stressors faced by LGBTQ+ individuals can be individual or structural and include overt prejudice, rejection, discrimination, and internalized homophobia,” the report’s “intersectionality” section explains.
This is not medicine — this is a gender studies term paper.
Cancer is a terrible disease for anyone to have. Treatments, such as chemotherapy, can be almost as painful as the disease itself. But the medical community and policymakers should not trample on conscience rights in a misguided attempt to treat all patients.
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The ACS report is correct when it identifies risk factors such as smoking and obesity. It never hurts to get to a healthier weight and put down the cigarettes.
That is true for everyone. Prevention, screening, and treatment options are the ways to combat cancer. Ostracizing medical professionals with sincerely held objections to abortion and gender ideology is not the way.
Matt Lamb is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an associate editor for the College Fix and has previously worked for Students for Life of America and Turning Point USA.