The Obama administration’s recent gutting of protective health-care conscience regulations highlights the importance of making proper conscience protections more secure.

On Public Discourse today, law professor Helen Alvaré makes the case for federal statutory protections of the conscience rights of health-care providers opposed to abortion.

And in a lengthy article available here—titled “The Constitutional Right to Refuse: Roe, Casey, and the Fourteenth Amendment Rights of Healthcare Providers”—law professor Mark Rienzi argues that the Court’s 14th Amendment jurisprudence supports recognition of a constitutional right of health-care providers not to participate in abortion.

Lest it be thought that Rienzi’s argument depends on the soundness of the results in Roe and Casey and that recognition of a conscience right of health-care providers would therefore necessarily entrench those illegitimate rulings, I’ll note that Rienzi argues that the conscience right that he advocates “actually better satisfies the required Fourteenth Amendment test than the abortion right itself.” (Emphasis in original.) In other words, under his approach the Court could both overturn Roe and Casey and recognize a conscience right of health-care providers not to take part in abortion.