The XX Factor: What women really think.

Hospital Corners

As Jessica just noted, the Obama administration has announced it’s moving to rescind one of the most troubling of President Bush’s “midnight regulations”—a vague and subjective “conscience” rule that allows seemingly everyone with an opinion about abortion and a job connected to health care, the right to make on-the-spot decisions about when and how to do their jobs. We’ve written about this issue here before, both pro and con. But the one thing nobody can claim about the "right of conscience” protected by the new HHS rules was that it afforded any legal clarity to a very rancorous and emotional issue. The Post story today suggests that the move to lift the conscience clause represents “the latest challenge to the Obama administration's attempt to find more of a middle ground on issues related to abortion.” But that strikes me as oversimplification. The decision to craft what an unnamed HHS official characterizes as “a tightly written conscience clause” (er, they already exist ...) isn’t really a capitulation to the abortion lobby. It’s simply a way of saying that health care workers, like everyone else, can’t make up the rules as they go along. Efforts to rewrite fuzzy laws with precision and clarity shouldn't be derided as partisan. Clarity benefits everyone I think.