New Victories for Freedom of Conscience and Parental Rights
“The citizen is obliged in conscience not to follow the directives of civil authorities when they are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons or the teachings of the Gospel.”
― Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2242
For the past several years, thanks to the Biden administration, a Catholic nurse in the U.S. who refused to assist at an abortion could not count on the federal government to exert itself to defend her conscience. Neither could the pharmacist who would not dispense drugs meant to end a life, nor the surgeon who declined to perform a sterilization.
On May 18, thankfully, that began to change.
Two weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that it was restoring, within its Office for Civil Rights, the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division (CRFD).
The task of this office is to enforce the federal laws that shield doctors, nurses, and other health care workers from being forced to take part in procedures they hold to be gravely wrong, e.g. abortion, sterilization, IVF, assisted suicide, gender mutilation surgeries.
The CRFD division was created in 2018, during President Trump’s first term. In 2023, however, the Biden administration quietly dissolved it, folding its work into a larger office, where it was left to wither. Now it has been brought back, with its own leadership and its own mandate.
“This reorganization reinstitutes a structure that rightly prioritizes civil rights and conscience and religious freedom alongside health information privacy and security,” said HHS Office for Civil Rights Director Paula M. Stannard.
The PROTECT Kids Act and Parental Rights
The decision by HHS to prioritize protecting conscience rights came just two days before another major victory for conscience rights, as well as the rights of parents.
On May 20, the U.S. House of Representatives passed, by a vote of 217 to 198, the Parental Rights Over the Education and Care of Their Kids Act, commonly known as the PROTECT Kids Act.
The bill, which now moves to the Senate, would require public elementary and middle schools that receive federal funds to obtain parental consent before changing a child’s gender markers, pronouns, or name on any school form.
Similarly, they could not alter “sex-based accommodations” such as the use of locker rooms and bathrooms. Interestingly, eight Democrats joined the Republican majority.
Parents Are the First Educators of Their Children
While I am delighted to see the bill moving forward in this way, I also can’t but feel outrage that such a piece of legislation is required in the first place, and that so many legislators voted against such a commonsense bill.
Consider what it means: It means that, in some schools today, a child can be socially “transitioned” to a new identity, addressed by a new name and new pronouns, and given access to the opposite sex’s facilities, all without his or her mother or father ever being told.
Imagine being a parent who discovers that the very people to whom you entrust your child for six or seven hours a day have been keeping such a secret from you and justifying it in the name of “care.” It makes the blood boil.
The Church has always taught that the rights of parents are not a gift of the state and therefore cannot be revoked by it. As Pope St. John Paul II wrote in Familiaris Consortio, parents “must be acknowledged as the first and foremost educators of their children.” This right, he continued, is “irreplaceable and inalienable, incapable of being entirely delegated to others or usurped by others” (no. 36).
Our bishops have echoed the same teaching, insisting that society must “uphold parents’ rights and responsibilities to care for their children, including the right to choose their children’s education” (Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, no. 46). And Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2011 World Day of Peace message, called the family “the first school” of freedom and insisted that parents “must be always free to transmit to their children, responsibly and without constraints, their heritage of faith, values and culture” (no. 4).
while respecting the rights of parents as first educators.
A school that hides a child’s “transition” from his parents has done more than keep a secret. It has taken to itself a responsibility that was never the state’s to take. And it has trampled the conscience rights of parents, who as the first educators of their children, have the right to decide how their children are educated.
Attacks on Religious Freedom and Parental Rights
In the bleak examples of fascism and communism from the 20th century we have the strongest evidence of what happens when conscience and parental rights are subordinated to the interests of the state.
However, we shouldn’t be naïve in thinking that these abuses are things of the past. As I have documented in so many recent columns, the same patterns are repeating themselves in the U.S. and all across the West right now.
The same administration that dissolved the Office for Civil Rights in 2023 spent four years undermining conscience and parental rights every chance that it got.
In April 2024, for example, the Department of Education rewrote the meaning of Title IX, the federal law that bars sex discrimination in schools, to fold in “gender identity.” As a consequence, every school receiving federal money had to treat a claim of gender identity as a protected category, with the predictable consequences for pronouns, bathrooms, and locker rooms. A federal court struck the rule down nationwide in January 2025, but only after a year of confusion and coercion.
Also in 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services rewrote the Affordable Care Act’s non-discrimination rule to fold “gender identity” into the meaning of “sex,” and refused to carry over the religious and abortion-related protections that had long shielded objecting providers. The signal to the Catholic hospital and the pro-life physician was clear: the refusal to perform a “gender transition” would now be treated as a kind of discrimination.
The attack on conscience rights under the Biden administration sometimes took on an overtly totalitarian flavor. In September 2022, the administration sent armed FBI agents to the home of Mark Houck, a Catholic father of seven, and arrested him in front of his children over a sidewalk confrontation outside an abortion facility. A jury later acquitted him. Other pro-life men and women who had done nothing more than sing and pray were convicted and sent to prison, some facing more than a decade, until they were pardoned in early 2025. The process, as so often, was the punishment.
The Growing Global Threat to Conscience Rights
Similar attacks on conscience rights are proliferating across the West.
In Finland, Päivi Räsänen, a member of parliament, former interior minister, physician, and grandmother of twelve, has spent nearly seven years being on trial or under accusation for an alleged crime or wrongdoing for stating Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality. In March, by a single vote, her country’s Supreme Court convicted her over a pamphlet she wrote more than twenty years ago, and ordered the offending text removed and destroyed. She is now appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.
In Brazil, Isadora Borges, a veterinary student, faces up to ten years in prison for two social-media posts stating the biological facts of sex. Unfortunately, she is not the only one but one of several individuals in Brazil facing a similarly dystopian assault on their basic conscience rights.
And in the United Kingdom, the government has drawn “buffer zones” around abortion facilities and made it a crime to “influence” anyone inside them. As but one example of the madness this has produced, Adam Smith-Connor, a military veteran, was convicted for silently praying near a clinic for the son he lost to abortion, in what Alliance Defending Freedom called the first known conviction for a “thoughtcrime” in modern British history.
I could easily multiply the examples far beyond what a single column like this can hold.
The Catholic Church’s Defense of Freedom of Conscience
What unites these cases, across continents and political systems, is that in each instance the state has reached into the sacred realm of conscience. Against these abuses, in every age, stands the rich teachings of the Catholic Church on conscience.
“Deep within his conscience,” wrote the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, “man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey.” This law is not his own invention, for “man has in his heart a law inscribed by God.” Conscience, in other words, is “man’s most secret core and his sanctuary,” where “he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths” (cf. Gaudium et Spes, no. 16; CCC, no. 1776).
From this follows the inviolability of conscience. “Man,” the Catechism teaches, “has the right to act in conscience and in freedom so as personally to make moral decisions. He must not be forced to act contrary to his conscience” (CCC, no. 1782).
Pope St. John Paul II was a particularly passionate defender of conscience rights, in no small measure because he saw firsthand, living under two different totalitarian regimes, what happens when such rights are trampled upon.
“The root of modern totalitarianism,” he wrote, “is to be found in the denial of the transcendent dignity of the human person.” When a society stops believing in a truth above itself, “the force of power takes over,” and people “are then respected only to the extent that they can be exploited” (Centesimus Annus, no. 44).
In the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, he lamented,
Man was compelled to submit to a conception of reality imposed on him by coercion, and not reached by virtue of his own reason and the exercise of his own freedom. This principle must be overturned and total recognition must be given to the rights of the human conscience, which is bound only to the truth, both natural and revealed. The recognition of these rights represents the primary foundation of every authentically free political order (no. 29).
However, as he observed, this principle is not only pertinent to overtly totalitarian regimes. Elsewhere he warned that even a supposed free democracy which cuts itself off from objective truth, “contradicting its own principles, effectively moves towards a form of totalitarianism,” until the State “is transformed into a tyrant State” (Evangelium Vitae, no. 20).
Safeguarding the Rights of Conscience
The grandmother prosecuted in Finland, the student threatened with prison in Brazil, the veteran convicted in England: these are not the work of jackboots and secret police. They are the work of modern, democratic states that have forgotten the limits of their own authority.
“We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29), the apostles answered when they were ordered to be silent. This is the same phrase spoken, whether explicitly or implicitly, by the nurse who will not assist at an abortion, by the parents who will not surrender their child, by the pharmacists who will not distribute contraceptives or the abortion pill, by every man and woman who remembers that the human person is made “in the image of God,” “male and female” (Gen 1:26-27), and bears a dignity the state did not confer and cannot erase.
This is, fortunately, the voice that is protected by the new Conscience and Religious Freedom Division, and the PROTECT Kids Act. While the attacks on conscience rights are myriad, it is encouraging to see some significant movement in the opposite direction.
In closing, please join me in this prayer promoting the protection of conscience rights:
Father, we praise you and thank you for your most precious gifts of human life and human freedom. Touch the hearts of our lawmakers with the wisdom and courage to uphold conscience rights and religious liberty for all. Protect all people from being forced to violate their moral and religious convictions. In your goodness, guard our freedom to live out our faith and to follow you in all that we do. Give us strength to be bold and joyful witnesses. We ask this through Christ, our Lord. Amen.
Human Life International
As president of Human Life International, Fr. Boquet is a leading expert on the international pro-life and family movement, having journeyed to nearly 90 countries on pro-life missions over the last decade. Father Boquet works with pro-life and family leaders in 116 counties that partner with HLI to proclaim and advance the Gospel of Life. Read his full bio here.
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