Law, Religion, and Health in the United States

While the law can create conflict between religion and health, it can also facilitate religious accommodation and protection of conscience. Finding this balance is critical to addressing the most pressing questions at the intersection of law, religion, and health in the United States: should physicians be required to disclose their religious beliefs to patients? How should we think about institutional conscience in the health care setting? How should health care providers deal with families with religious objections to withdrawing treatment? In this timely book, experts from a variety of perspectives and disciplines offer insight on these and other pressing questions, describing what the public discourse gets right and wrong, how policymakers might respond, and what potential conflicts may arise in the future. It should be read by academics, policymakers, and anyone else - patient or physician, secular or devout - interested in how US law interacts with health care and religion.

Part I. Testing the Scope of Legal Protections for Religion in the Health Care Context: 1. Religious liberty, health care, and the culture wars Douglas Laycock; 2. From Smith to Hobby Lobby: the transformation of the religious freedom restoration act Diane L. Moore and Eric M. Stephen; 3. The HHS Mandate Litigation and religious health care providers Adèle Keim; 4. Not your father's religious exemptions: the contraceptive-coverage litigation and the rights of others Gregory M. Lipper; 5. Recent applications of the Supreme Court's hands-off approach to religious doctrine: from Hosanna-Tabor and Holt to Hobby Lobby and Zubik Samuel J. Levine; Part II. Law, Religion, and Health Care Institutions: Introduction Christine Mitchell; 6. A corporation's exercise of religion: a practitioner's experience Melanie Di Pietro; 7. The natural person as the limiting principle for conscience: can a corporation have a conscience if it doesn't have an intellect and will? Ryan Meade; 8. Contracting religion Elizabeth Sepper; 9. Mission integrity matters: balancing catholic health care values and public mandates David M. Craig; Part III. Law, Religion, and Health Insurance: Introduction Marc A. Rodwin; 10. Religious exemptions to the individual mandate: health care sharing miniseries and the Affordable Care Act Rachel E. Sachs; 11. Bosses in the bedroom: religious employers and the future of employer-sponsored health care Holly Fernandez Lynch and Gregory Curfman; Part IV. Professional Responsibilities, Religion, and Health Care: Introduction Holly Fernandez Lynch; 12. Religious outliers: professional knowledge communities, individual conscience claims, and the availability of professional services to the public Claudia E. Haupt; 13. A common law duty to disclose conscience-based limitations on medical practice Nadia N. Sawicki; Part V. The Impact of Religious Objections on the Health and Health Care of Others: Introduction Richard H. Fallon Jr; 14. Conscientious objection, complicity, and accommodation Amy J. Sepinwall; 15. How much may religious accommodations burden others? Nelson Tebbe, Micah Schwatzman and Richard Schragger; 16. 'A patchwork array of theocratic fiefdoms?' RFRA claims against ACA's contraception mandate Mary Anne Case; 17. Unpacking the relationship between conscience and access Robin Fretwell Wilson; Part VI. A Case Study – Religious Beliefs and the Health of the LGBT Community: Introduction Noa Ben-Asher; 18. Religious convictions about homosexuality and the training of counseling professionals: how should we treat religious-based opposition to counseling about same-sex relationships? Susan Stabile; 19. Reclaiming biopolitics: religion and psychiatry in the sexual orientation change therapy cases and the establishment clause defense Craig Konnoth; Part VII. Accounting for Patients' Religious Beliefs: Introduction Robert D. Truog; 20. Brain death rejected: expanding legal duties to accommodate religious objections Thaddeus Mason Pope; 21. Accommodating miracles: medical futility and religious free exercise Teneille R. Brown; 22. Putting the insanity defense on trial: understanding criminality in the context of religion and mental illness Abbas Rattani and Jemen Amin Derbali; 23. Religion as a controlling interference in medical decision-making by minors Jonathan F. Will; Part VIII. Religion and Reproductive Health Care: Introduction Mindy Jane Roseman; 24. Regulating reasons: governmental regulation of private deliberation in reproductive decision-making B. Jessie Hill; 25. Religion and reproductive technology I. Glenn Cohen; 26. Religion and the unborn under the first amendment Dov Fox.

Holly Fernandez Lynch is Executive Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, Massachusetts and a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics. She is the author of Conflicts of Conscience in Health Care: An Institutional Compromise (2008) and co-editor of Nudging Health: Health Law and Behavioral Economics (2016), FDA in the Twenty-First Century: The Challenges of Regulating Drugs and New Technologies (2015), and Human Subjects Research Regulation: Perspectives on the Future (2014).
I. Glenn Cohen is a Professor at Harvard Law School, Massachusetts and Faculty Director of the Petrie-Flom Center. He is one of the world's leading experts on the intersection of bioethics and the law, as well as health law. He has authored or co-edited eight books and has published more than eighty articles in venues like The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, Nature, and the Harvard Law Review.
Elizabeth Sepper is an Associate Professor at Washington University School of Law. She is an expert in health law and religious liberty law. She has written extensively on conscientious refusals to provide reproductive and end-of-life care, and conflicts between religion and antidiscrimination laws with articles in top law journals, including the Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Indiana Law Journal.