Specifically, the Weldon Amendment enforces its "conscience clause" objections by cutting off funding for state or local governments that require their hospitals to provide a set of basic reproductive health services as a condition of receiving financial aid.

Just weeks after the passage of this 2004 bill, vilified by abortion-rights advocates across the board as a vastly misleading evocation of religious repression, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer and Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell filed a lawsuit to block the amendment, which they described as "a federal spending restriction that could deny $49 billion in federal funds to California if the state enforces women's constitutional right to emergency abortion care."

"The Weldon amendment tramples on women's constitutional rights, state sovereignty and the interests of California taxpayers," said Lockyer. "Equality for women is illusory unless they remain free to make their own health care decisions. With the Weldon amendment, President Bush and Congress are denying women that freedom. And the danger doesn't end there. The funding restrictions could damage the state's ability to improve our schools, make our children safer, aid jobless workers, collect child support from deadbeat parents, and provide child care to poor people trying to get on their feet."

Said O'Connell: "The Weldon amendment threatens to hold funding for schools and other important government services hostage in an effort to force states to restrict women's reproductive health options. This unfair provision of federal law must not be allowed to stand. California law rightly protects women's reproductive freedom. Our schools and our students should not be penalized because of it."

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The spending restriction at issue resides deep inside an appropriations act that provides states at least $143 billion in federal funds for labor, health and human services, education and related programs. California state agencies, including the Department of Education, expect to receive about $49 billion in federal dollars under the act, according to the complaint. The Weldon amendment jeopardizes California 's receipt of all these funds.

The amendment prohibits disbursement of any funds made available under the act to any state or local government that "subjects any institutional or individual health care (provider) to discrimination on the basis that the health care (provider) does not provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions."

"Congress cannot constitutionally circumvent a woman's fundamental right to reproductive freedom through the Weldon amendment's draconian funding restrictions," the complaint states. "Because this coercive federal statute is wholly inconsistent with our federal system of government, this court should strike it down."

But such a rebuttal to the Weldon Amendment's misleading rhetoric of "rights," "freedom" and "conscientious objection" does not prevent its advocates from continuing to employ such defenses. Today, the CMA's press release called Attorney General Lockyer's challenge to the amendment "reverse discrimination," and reinforced the notion of the oppression inherent in upholding universal standards of patients' access to reproductive healthcare:

CMA CEO Dr. David Stevens noted, "The Attorney General's attack on conscience protections is essentially an attack on the First Amendment freedoms of healthcare providers who wish to act consistently with their religious or ethical standards. Our country was founded by individuals who had personally experienced the pain of overreaching governments that tried to force them to deny their religious beliefs. That's why the United States has historically prevented governments from tramping over the religious freedom of expression in the form of conscientious objection.

"The state Attorney General's opposition to these freedoms specifically targets and threatens faith-based hospitals, clinics and providers who provide irreplaceable services to underprivileged patients who otherwise would have nowhere to turn for help. These institutions and individuals will not compromise their conviction that abortion immorally ends a human life. Is the state of California prepared to shut down these vitally needed faith-based hospitals and clinics?"

Senior Vice President and OB/GYN Dr. Gene Rudd added, "Hopefully the court will recognize not only the constitutional freedoms for healthcare providers with deeply held convictions, but also recognize the political motivation behind this attack on conscience protections. If fewer physicians objected to abortion as immoral and unethical, pro-abortion forces would not have to be attempting to force physicians to perform abortions. It is sadly ironic that those who march under the banner of choice are trying to force others to conform to their beliefs.

"It is imperative that we protect the ethical integrity of physicians and the medical profession by allowing them to act on their ethical convictions. We do not want a nation of doctors without conscience."

At the time the Weldon Amendment was passed, I studied the different ways that such religious and individual "freedom" language was being used by anti-abortion activists to subvert individual, and especially low-income, women's access to abortion in the name of "protecting" large corporations from acting against their "consciences." I found that not only were the "health care providers" in question far from the besieged individual doctors supporters made them out to be, but that the "right of refusal" was being turned on its head in conservative communities, where hospitals and doctors that wished to provide abortion and contraception services were being intimidated or coerced into not providing them:

Who were these besieged health care workers being forced to violate their consciences? In New Jersey, it was a public clinic that merged with a Catholic hospital and agreed to stop providing abortions. How was it oppressed? By a New Jersey court ruling that public hospitals bought out or merged with Catholic hospitals should establish a trust fund for patients who sought sterilizations, abortions or related referrals for services that would no longer be available from the clinic. In Palmer, Alaska, it was a group of religious conservatives elected to a local hospital board who voted to end abortion services at a local hospital, charging that abortion was "out of step with community norms." Their evidence of discrimination? A lawsuit filed by an obstetrician-gynecologist who performed abortions at the hospital, and sued for the right to continue following the dictates of his conscience. In New Mexico, it was a county commissioner, Paul Curry, who inserted language into a public hospital's long-term lease agreement, requiring limits on abortion "as a method of birth control," with the accusation that the non-profit hospital might someday market abortion as a money-making scheme. Curry's oppressor? A state finance board which ruled his arbitraty insertion of the anti-abortion clause into the lease terms unconstitutional.

These three examples of non-religious hospitals suffering "discrimination" for their anti-abortion policies were cited as proof of the necessity of the Weldon Amendment, and continue to be referenced by Weldon Amendment supporters like CMA as evidence of religious discrimination against defenseless pro-life doctors. But compared to the merging hospitals and activist hospital board members, we should keep in mind the actually defenseless players in this scenario: poor or rural women with limited health care options who may be restricted to faith-based hospitals because of their circumstances, or women locked into anti-abortion and anti-contraception insurance and health plans. These are the people who are protected by state regulations, such as the ones California is fighting to maintain, that attempt to ensure equal access to services for all patients. And that notion of patients' rights is something that must be remembered and repeated when discussing cases such as Lockyer v. United States, where double-speaking defendants assume the mantle of oppression in order that they might legally discriminate against others, or in any other instances of media-spun claims that the rights of HMOs' "consciences" are of more importance than patients' rights to the care they provide.