Former President Bush enacted regulations that allowed health-care workers to refuse to perform procedures they found morally objectionable, without consequences from their employers. These regulations were justified with the lame contention that “beliefs” and “conscience” are privileged excuses for the plain refusal to do work.

Sometimes it takes a Democratic president to stand up for capitalist principles. Employees contract to perform certain tasks, of which they are informed before they sign the papers. People with puritanical sexual ethics shouldn’t work in sex shops, pacifists shouldn’t join the army, and people with serious objections to the activities of the medical industry shouldn’t work in hospitals.

A patient in a hospital should not have to worry about her caretakers having spontaneous moral crises. Employers have the right to fire or discipline employees who do not perform their jobs. The “right of conscience” has no place in the day-to-day operations of voluntarily chosen occupations.

A firefight in Fallujah is not the proper setting for considering the relative merits of the moral justifications of the Iraq war. An operation room is not the proper setting for problematizing the morality of medical procedures.

The regulations haven’t been rescinded yet, and the anonymous Health and Human Services (HHS) official quoted by the Washington Post suggested that the regulations protecting on-the-job qualms about abortion will remain effective. The Obama HHS should have the courage to repeal these as well. Abortion, although morally controversial, is a medical procedure requiring the full cooperation of hospital staff. To allow even this “conscience” objection is to cede ground to the political voice of irrational insubordination.

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