Bill Bumpas - OneNewsNow - 8/6/2010 6:00:00 AM
More than 200 military physicians are protesting a Senate bill amendment that would use U.S. military medical facilities as abortion clinics.
The military physicians signed a letter that was organized by the Christian Medical Association (CMA) and sent to senators, urging them to vote “no” on Senator Roland Burris' (D-Illinois) amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would remove restrictions on performing abortions in military facilities.
Dr. Donald Thompson (CMA)Dr. Donald Thompson, a recently retired colonel from the Air Force and director of global health outreach for the CMA, tells OneNewsNow that “this kind of amendment puts a lot of people on a very dicey position because they are required to obey orders of people above them.”
He continues, saying that “when those people above them are giving them an idea that they should be doing something that is now violating their convictions about life, their right of conscious, then they are stuck in either violating their conscious, disobeying the order, or getting out of the military.”
Thompson concludes that given the options, a majority of people will choose the latter.
The Burris Amendment would allow abortion on both domestic and overseas military bases, but Dr. Thompson contends that the military exists to fight the nation's wars, not to be an “ideological playground.”