Scholarship and public debate about law’s role in protecting health care providers’ conscience rights often focus on who should be protected, what actions should be protected, and when and whether there should be any limitations on conscience rights.
But the how of these legal protections is rarely addressed – that is, when health care providers decline to participate in medical services that violate their deeply-held beliefs, exactly what consequences do state laws protect them from? The new dataset I’ve just released on LawAtlas answers this question in the context of reproductive health conscience laws, and reveals some surprising trends.