The Well-Timed Period quotes the definition of “conscience” from the Illinois “conscience clause” statute:

(e) “Conscience” means a sincerely held set of moral convictions arising from belief in and relation to God, or which, though not so derived, arises from a place in the life of its possessor parallel to that filled by God among adherents to religious faiths;

This is fascinating. Not only have they written religious beliefs explicitly into law as a defining factor in healthcare practice, but they’ve added a backdoor inclusion for non-religious meddlers that is as inane as it is intrusive. “The place in one’s life parallel to that filled by God among religious adherents”? Aside from figuring out what a “place in one’s life” is such that it is “filled” by a belief (a place in the brain?; some particular brain state?), or how two such “places” can be “parallel” between different people (note: not “analogous” or “corresponding to”, but apparently defined by lines that do not touch in some sort of inter-personal moral geometry), the statute apparently equates the religion-inspired beliefs of religious persons with the beliefs of non-religious persons that arise from a “parallel place”. What beliefs would those be? That there is no god? But what moral convictions arise from the lack of belief in a god?

You can see what the dimwit legislator who drafted this mess was trying to do: define “conscience” as religiously-inspired moral beliefs or moral beliefs of non-religious persons that are inspired by what they take to be their personal source of moral guidance (and since it goes to such lengths to negate the role of religion as a source, it could much more simply just have said “moral beliefs”). But the language use betrays such desperate confusion that the thing cannot be intrepreted without simply rewriting it. (For one thing, “conscience” does not mean “a sincerely held set of moral convictions”. The statute begins by defining its central term so bizarrely that it has no relation to the actual meaning of that term – or to the moral concept that motivated these statutes in the first place.) For that matter, it appears to be so slapdash that it was never edited before being enacted – nor apparently was that any barrier to its being accepted by the Legislature.

The unnecessary – and in fact gratuitous – inclusion, then negation, of the role of religion also betrays the origin and intention of these statutes. They perform two functions: placating religious extremists who want to impose their views on others, and serving as a barrier to reproductive healthcare services. That the language of the statute first explicitly cites religion as a justification for refusal of services testifies to how clearly that issue was in mind when the statute was drafted; that it negates this motivation in the succeeding clause broadens the statute (and seeks to avoid certain Constitutional challenges) to allow for even more challenges to patient care from more sources. (Oddly, by mentioning these motivations at all, the statute hampers itself. If this language is to be taken seriously, refusersmust have a religious motivation [or its "parallel" equivalent] for their refusal – for instance, they cannot just happen to think birth control is immoral but for reasons not “arising from belief in and relation to God” [or a "parallel" thereto].)

I suspect, however, that this gibberish-level language will not be taken seriously. No challenge to a (non-religious) refuser to prove that their beliefs are “parallel” to a belief in God will be accepted (though, to be fair, there are unlikely to be any non-religious refusers). The tangled prose above will not be questioned; the “implicit intent” of any statute that imposes barriers on women’s sexual autonomy will be regarded as self-justifying. But it is worth nothing just how bad the thinking is that goes into these laws, and how low a standard – in terms of reasonability, or even comprehensibility – proponents of such intrusive restrictions on women’s autonomy set for themselves. The people who wrote, and voted in, this mindless blather are the people who will be judging and constraining women’s decisions and women’s (and men’s) liberty under the new reproductive legislative regime currently building.