Applicants to its Nurse Residency Program in Women’s Health (including obstetrics, gynecology, labor and delivery, etc.) must provide an “acknowledgment” that, if admitted, they will be expected to assist in abortions.

The Alliance Defense Fund has filed a formal complaint with the Department of Health & Human Services, asking it to enforce federal law and prohibit Vanderbilt from illegally discriminating against a client, a well qualified nursing student who happens also to be pro-life and unwilling to violate her conscience by assisting in abortions.

Applicants to its Nurse Residency Program in Women’s Health (including obstetrics, gynecology, labor and delivery, etc.) must provide an “acknowledgment” that, if admitted, they will be expected to assist in abortions.

Applications that do not include this acknowledgment “will not be considered.” Instead of ushering Christian and pro-life students out the back door, Vandy just doesn’t let them in the front door in the first place.

ADF attorneys filed the complaint on behalf of a fourth-year nursing student at another university who wishes to apply to Vanderbilt’s nurse residency program but is unable to do so because the admission forms require her to promise to participate in abortions.

“Christians and other pro-life members of the medical community shouldn’t be forced to participate in abortions to pursue their profession,” said ADF Legal Counsel Matt Bowman. “People enter the medical profession to protect and heal the helpless. Federal law protects them from being required to kill the helpless. The law clearly states that grant recipients cannot accept taxpayer dollars and require health care workers to participate in abortions, which is precisely what Vanderbilt is doing.”

“Because the deadline for Vanderbilt’s nurse residency applications is January 28, 2011, it is imperative that HHS immediately act to prohibit Vanderbilt from rejecting or discriminating against nurse residency applicants…who do not wish to promise that they will assist abortions,” the ADF letter accompanying the complaint states, noting that the student filing the complaint “can and is prepared to submit all that the application requires and to fulfill all of the program’s requirements, except only that she has a religious objection to participating in abortions and to promising to do so by signing the Application’s letter.”

“We repeatedly see universities and other users of taxpayer dollars tell students and staff that they must submit to the institution’s preferred ideology or take a hike,” said ADF Senior Counsel David French. “What many of these institutions truly want–besides money–are people who share their leftist political and social views.”

As another of ADF’s clients, Cathy Cenzon-DeCarlo can attest, Vanderbilt’s requirement could mean that a nursing resident must assist in preparing the woman and the implements for the abortion, assisting the physician through the abortion, and even handling and disposing of body parts of the dismembered child.

One may think that, as awful as Vanderbilt’s policy is, the First Amendment has no application here. And they’d be right. Vanderbilt is a private university unconstrained by the First Amendment.

However, in the most recent year for which information is available, FY2008, Vanderbilt also received over three hundred million dollars ($300,000,000) in discretionary funding from the Department of Health & Human Services, making it the 15th most funded HHS grantee. And this doesn’t even include millions in nondiscretionary appropriations that come from HHS.

And when Vanderbilt accepted those federal taxpayer dollars it agreed to comply with federal law, including the Church Amendments. Part (e) of the Church Amendments, passed by an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress and signed into law by President Carter, is particularly applicable here:

No entity which receives, … any grant, contract, loan, loan guarantee, or interest subsidy under the Public Health Service Act [and additional other HHS administered laws] may deny admission or otherwise discriminate against any applicant (including applicants for internships and residencies) for training or study because of the applicant’s reluctance, or willingness, to counsel, suggest, recommend, assist, or in any way participate in the performance of abortions or sterilizations contrary to or consistent with the applicant’s religious beliefs or moral convictions. 42 U.S.C. §300a-7(e).

Vanderbilt pledges to comply with this federal law when it takes hundreds of millions of dollars in federal taxpayer dollars. Vanderbilt would undoubtedly hold its applicants to their “acknowledgment” that they will be expected to perform abortions even while it expects the federal government (and federal taxpayers) to ignore Vanderbilt’s own promises.

Sadly, this controversy comes at a time when it is suddenly highly controversial for a medical professional to refuse to perform or assist in abortions. This is a very recent phenomenon. While the phrase is often excised by modern medical schools, physicians taking the Hippocratic Oath for millennia promised, “I will not give a woman an abortive remedy.” [Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]

And as detailed more thoroughly here, the conscience of pro-life medical professionals was near universally respected even a generation ago.

The Church Amendments were adopted in the wake of Roe v. Wade as the ACLU and pro-abortion groups were filing lawsuits to try to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions. They did this even though Roe and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, both cited favorably (perhaps even relied upon) the protection of rights of conscience by the AMA and others.

Congress responded with virtual unanimity, passing the original portions of the Church Amendments with only a single no vote in each chamber: 372 to 1 in the House and 92 to 1 in the Senate. One Senator took the floor to defend the protection of medical professionals from being compelled to assist in abortions, saying that if it were challenged by pro-abortion forces:

I believe that the Court will sustain the judgment to protect individual rights and liberties. I believe that the Court will sustain the judgment of Congress that, in order to give full protection to the religious freedom of physicians and others, it is necessary to extend the exemption … to the facilities where they practice their profession and livelihood.” Cong. Rec. 9602 (March 27,1973).

That stalwart defender of the rights of conscience of pro-life healthcare workers was Senator Edward Kennedy. And the later addition of part (e) of the Church Amendments during one of the more lopsided (for Democrats) congresses in decades was hardly any more controversial. As much as some would like to pretend that the assertion of rights of conscience by healthcare workers is some recent trend, the fact is that it is the recent reluctance to accommodate conscience that is unique. And at a time when we are suffering from a shortage of nurses, it is nonsensical to bar the door altogether to persons ready and willing to serve just because they will not compromise their conscience and assist in the killing of an unborn child.

Vanderbilt promised to comply with the Church Amendments, but it is blatantly breaking that promise. ADF’s complaint asks HHS if it will enforce the law and defend the ADF client’s rights of conscience or permit Vanderbilt to violate federal law and its agreement with the taxpayers by barring the door to pro-life applicants.

[Editor’s note: The original source URL for this article is invalid and has been removed. Also, one or more original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]