A new conscience and religious-freedom division within the Health and Human Services Department is being launched to aid doctors, nurses and other medical professionals in refusing to provide services that violate their moral or religious beliefs.

The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration intends the new division to protect health care workers who claim moral or religious beliefs as their reason to refuse to take part in abortions, treat transgender patients or participate in other types of care.

While conservative groups have applauded the action, a number of groups, including those that defend women’s and LGBT rights, as well as physician groups, are instead concerned that the new policy will increase discrimination against vulnerable populations and worsen inequities within health care. Many also view it as a major civil rights rollback, rather than a protection of such rights, according to the report.

“This will impose a broad religious refusal policy that will allow individuals and institutions to deny basic care for women and transgender people,” Dana Singiser, vice president of government affairs for Planned Parenthood, is quoted saying in the report. Singiser adds, “We know from experience that denial of care compromises care.”

The enforcement authority of the new division bolsters and expands so-called “conscience protections” that were initially put in place by George W. Bush but ended by the Obama administration. The new division, the report says, will be part of the HHS Office for Civil Rights. It will not only accept complaints from health care professionals but also ensure that hospitals, clinics and other institutions nationwide are accommodating their beliefs.

An outgrowth of the expansion of “religious liberty” in a Trump executive order last year, which led to substantial religious and moral exemptions to the Affordable Care Act mandate that employers provide no-cost contraception coverage, the new department focuses HHS’s position in implementing “conscience protections.”

While such “protections” have been in existence for decades, the report says, some health care providers have said they didn’t go far enough; the administration’s actions push the envelope—farther than what Harper Jean Tobin, the National Center for Transgender Equality’s director of policy, said in the report were “reasonable accommodations.”

Tobin adds, “The vast majority of the medical community is against any form of license to discriminate. That the administration is rushing out such a momentous rule in secret, hiding behind a vague description and potentially circumventing normal procedures, just underscores how far they have been straying from established law in this area.”

Sarah Warbelow, legal director for the Human Rights Campaign, says in the report that the policy seeks to “devalue the humanity of LGBTQ people.”

Warbelow is quoted saying, “Every American deserves access to medically necessary health care, and that health care should not be determined by the personal opinions of individual health care providers or administrative staff.”

Ben Brown, a gynecologist-obstetrician in Chicago and a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, says in the report that the administration’s new rule seems to contravene the oaths taken by health care providers on entry into the profession, as well as ethics policies at many hospitals and state statutes in many parts of the country that require basic care be delivered to those who need it. He’s quoted saying, “Imposing their values on a patient is not in consort with our professional job as doctors.”

And Louise Melling, deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, is cited in the report saying that federal employment law does allow workplaces to accommodate individuals’ beliefs—as long as those accommodations don’t impose undue hardship.

Says Melling, “Religious liberty gives you a right to your beliefs, but it doesn’t give you the right to impose your beliefs on others or harm others, including to discriminate against others.”

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