by Wesley J. Smith | LifeNews.com | 2/20/15 5:13 PM

My First Things column this week warns against the coming ”medical martyrdom,” by which I mean that the minions of

the culture of death intend to require doctors, nurses, and facilities to either kill (abortion, assisted suicide, etc.) or get out of medicine.

As if to prove my thesis, the ACLU in Washington has sued a health care system for not performing enough abortions. From the Reuters story: The

lawsuit alleges that Skagit Regional Health, which operates a large hospital and several clinics in Skagit County about 100 miles north of Seattle, is not following the state’s

1991 Reproductive Privacy Act. That law requires that any state medical facility that provides maternity care must also provide abortion care, and it prohibits the state from

interfering with or denying a woman’s right to an abortion. “The right of women to choose or to refuse to have an abortion is fundamental and has long been recognized under

Washington law,” Kathleen Taylor, executive director of the ACLU of Washington, said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. The ACLU action accuses Skagit Regional Health of providing

a wide array of maternity care services while not offering pharmaceutical abortions and rarely providing surgical abortions. Instead, the lawsuit said Skagit Regional routinely referred women

seeking abortions to off­site facilities, like Planned Parenthood, rather than performing them at its hospitals and clinics. In other words, women are not denied a “right” to an abortion, they just

are referred elsewhere. Moreover, the defendant claims their hospitals DO SO perform all kinds of abortions–apparently just not enough to satisfy the ACLU. In his

great Cooper Union speech, Abraham Lincoln said of slavers: What will convince them [that we mean them no harm]? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.

And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them… We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with

greedy pleasure…The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us. Ditto culture of death authoritarians.

It’s the nature of the beast.