The Kentucky Senate will get a "rights of conscience" bill that would let medical professionals in Kentucky refuse to perform procedures that violate their religious or moral beliefs.
The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved Senate Bill 83 despite an hour of testimony from health care advocates and civil rights groups that warned the measure could permit discrimination.
Many Kentuckians — Blacks, addicts, rape victims, immigrants, gays and lesbians, transgender people — already feel unwelcome in health care settings because of long histories of neglect or harsh judgments, the critics said. It would send a dangerous message if medical professionals could reject patients because of their prejudices, they said.
"This bill will have real-life consequences," a tearful Laela Kashan, staff attorney for the Kentucky Association of Sexual Assault Programs, told the committee.
"Turning someone away from a service because they are Black, Muslim, gay, white, Christian or heterosexual, because they should have left that abusive relationship or because they should have fought back against their rapist," Kashan said.
Medical ethics require doctors to treat everyone equally regardless of their own personal beliefs, testified Dr. Keisa Fallin-Bennett, a Lexington family medical specialist.
"This bill protects discrimination based on personal identity and threatens the core of the Hippocratic Oath and the health of our citizens," Fallin-Bennett said.
The bill's sponsor, state Sen. Stephen Meredith, R-Leitchfield, said it's not his intention to allow health care discrimination.
"It bothers me to no end for people to suggest that because of the passage of this bill that we're gonna have a bunch of racist, homophobic, bigoted people that are now gonna step forward and deny people care. That's not what health care is about," Meredith said.
Meredith said the bill is based on model legislation brought to him by the Family Foundation, a conservative lobbying group, without consulting health care organizations such as the Kentucky Medical Association or the Kentucky Hospital Association.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services unveiled a similar "rights of conscience" rule in 2019 intended to prevent federally funded health care providers from being forced to participate in abortions and other activities that violate their religious or moral beliefs. However, that rule was struck down in the federal courts.
Health care professionals need protection when they exercise their conscience on the job, Meredith said. Doctors might overrule their patients by refusing to prescribe pain pills or antibiotics or a treatment found on the Internet because the doctors, who have medical education, believe that's not the right course of action, the senator said.
Or a doctor might want to refuse to provide medical treatment to alter the sexual development of a transgender adolescent, Meredith said.
"You have a 12-year-old girl who's a tomboy," Meredith said. "And her parents, who are misguided, think that she's really a girl trapped in a boy's body. And they don't want to see her go through the rest of her life miserable. So they're gonna go and transition her."
"They start that process," he said. "And the first time she meets with the surgeon, he's just in a casual conversation and he says, 'Honey, what do you want to be when you grow up?' 'I want to be a mommy, I want to have kids just like my mama does.' And the parents go, 'No, she — she really, we need to do this for her.'"
"Does the surgeon have the right to say, 'No, I'm not going to do this surgery?" Meredith asked. "So this protects everybody."
Another senator on the committee, Democrat Karen Berg of Louisville, took issue with Meredith's example.
Berg is a doctor and the parent of a transgender child. She said sex reassignment surgery would not be performed on an adolescent. However, if parents and an adolescent child decided together that they wanted puberty blocking drugs, it would not be up to the doctor to decide the right life choices for the child, she said.
"I'm sorry, sir, I think this bill opens up a Pandora's box where I could literally have a surgeon in my hospital say, 'Yeah, I know this guy is shot in the liver, I know he's shot through the bowel, but you know what? He killed three other people that I had to take care of this morning, and I'm not taking him to the O.R.,'" Berg told Meredith.
"No, no, no, we cannot allow that," she said.
The committee voted 6 to 1 for Meredith's bill, with Berg the one dissenting vote.
Committee chairman Whitney Westerfield, R-Crofton, said he supported the bill but understood some of the criticism, so he would consider two Senate floor amendments. One would prevent medical professionals from refusing to treat certain types of people, as compared to refusing to offer certain kinds of treatment. The other would require medical professionals to explain their religious or moral beliefs in advance.
