CompassCare and other ethical pregnancy resource centers in NY are being jeopardized by radical legislation that the super majority of New Yorker’s reject—Cuomo’s Reproductive Health Act.
By making abortion a fundamental right, physicians and organizations like medical pregnancy resource centers are put in danger of discrimination lawsuits. There is some limited protection in the RHA for those private doctors who refuse to provide abortions, but refusal to refer for abortion and abortion-causing contraception becomes an act of discrimination, the violation of a human right.
CompassCare has served and has helped other pregnancy centers serve tens of thousands of women in the last 33 years. When a woman faces unplanned pregnancy she is most often coerced and feeling unable to refuse abortion. This is not freedom; this is not choice. Making abortion a fundamental human right would force organizations like CompassCare and ethical physicians to further undermine a woman’s already compromised autonomy.
If abortion and contraception are bonafide medical treatments, then that’s all they are, not human rights. It is the physician’s job to manage treatment options for their patients. A 
government can never know enough about a particular patient to know what treatments should be administered, let alone artificially declared fundamental rights. Making abortion a fundamental right tramples the physician’s ability to serve each woman by considering her circumstances as unique. Any self-respecting physician, no matter where they stand on the issue of abortion, should reject this legislative intrusion into their profession.
Women don’t need to know that they can get an abortion. They need to know that they can have their baby. That’s where true support comes in. That’s where real medicine meets real people.
Doctors and Medical Clinicians – sign this statement of ethics protesting the RHA.