Collective Conscience

Health care workers will soon be deprived of their right to choose when it comes to abortion.  Obama is set to lift the “Conscience Rule,” a Bush regulation which protects health care workers from being discriminated against for refusing to assist in abortions.

According to the National Women’s Law Center, the Conscience Rule is a “targeted attack on women’s health and rights.”  Never mind the rights of the health care workers.  If assisting in an abortion violates an individual’s conscience, he will nonetheless have to comply.

By revoking the Conscience Rule, Democrats have instead enacted a Sacrifice Rule.  Health care workers will be forced to sacrifice their values, to do something that is evil in their eyes and that will degrade them as individuals.

The Sacrifice Rule dictates that if an individual’s values are in conflict with the state’s, he must honor the state’s values rather than his own.  A medical professional’s skills and education are not for his use, but for the use of the state.  His actions are not to be guided by his individual conscience, but by the conscience of the state.

No free society would require such sacrifice.  Once individual rights are replaced by vague, collective rights — “women’s rights,” “minority rights,” “workers’ rights,” “gay rights” — liberty is dead.  Man is a slave and the heads of state his slave masters.

Ayn Rand writes in Atlas Shrugged, ” man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose,” with happiness being “the achievement of one’s values.”  In modern day America, man is the means to the state’s ends.  He exists for the sake of others, and he must sacrifice his values for the achievement of the state’s values.

The Sacrifice Rule applies to all pro-lifers, not just those in the health industry.  Pro-lifers are forced to degrade themselves by funding a practice they regard as evil.  Federal tax dollars go toward abortions at home and abroad.  Even with economic collapse looming, Barack Obama provided for the funding of overseas abortions in the first week of his presidency.  Pro-lifers have no choice but sacrifice.  If they produce in America, the IRS will confiscate their earnings, one way or another, and will use them for immoral purposes like abortion.

The Sacrifice Rule is a heinous assault on the individual.  As Democrats apply it more vigorously, forcing people to act against their values, the illusion of America as a free society should increasingly be dispelled.  It is at the point of a gun they degrade the American people, and only by a return of force may they be repelled.