Law, Religion, and Health in the United States

This rich, diverse essay collection arose from a conference The Petrie-Flom Center for Bioethics at Harvard Law School. The essays address some of the major issues that have gone to the courts about the role of religious belief in health care, and provide a snapshot of a rapidly changing legal landscape that has shifted rules and regulations around religious belief and medical practice. The book's introduction indicates current social realities, new legal guidelines, and political mobilization, as factors that, especially since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, have been particularly salient. The introduction also explores the changing political and social realities around issues of the freedom of religious expression, the passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and new health care laws make these issues at the intersection of medicine and religion especially salient. 

As with any collection of essays, this book is diverse. It is divided into nine subdivisions treating a wide variety of topics in religion and healthcare law, including sections on “Testing the Scope of Legal Protection in the Heath Care Context,” “Law, Religion, and Health Insurance,” and “Religion and LGBT Concerns.” Given the diversity and complexity of topics, the book defies a summary review. However, the book's introduction is a particularly helpful overview of the field as the whole at the present time, especially for non-legal specialists. It notes that there is an unchanging nature to some major issues including “balancing religious liberty against equality, health needs against spiritual commitments, oversight against autonomy, collective against individual” (17). 

What this convincingly reveals is the complexity of the issues around religion and health in changing healthcare and legal landscapes. For instance, how to balance the conscience rights of providers who see “abortion” or “assisted suicide” as “not healthcare” and immoral, with a patient's right to access these legal procedures if they deem them ethical and appropriate? What rights do religious organizations have to shape the insurance policies that they offer employees? What rights do religious organizations who run health care organizations have to use their religious beliefs to shape what services they offer? 

This book also reveals the importance of the Supreme Court's ideological composition when deciding cases, since there is a lack of clear constitutional rules for balancing the free exercise of religion and access to legal medical procedures for individuals in a pluralistic society who may or may not share the values of their providers. “Liberal” and “conservative” legal scholars view boundaries between freedom and exercise differently when it comes to applying them to health care providers and insurance policies. What rights do closely held family corporations have in providing healthcare insurance that violates their own religious beliefs? How do we balance religious objections to vaccines with the right to public health? 

This book is first and foremost of interest to students of law, lawyers, and those working at the intersection of law and religion. At the same time, its arguments are clear enough that those who are not lawyers—such as students of bioethics and theological ethics—will find this an enlightening contemporary survey of a complex legal landscape.

Aaron Klink is Chaplain at Pruitt Hospice in Durham, North Carolina.

Aaron Klink

Date Of Review:

April 27, 2018