In an opinion piece published in The New York Times, Sen. Hillary Clinton again criticizes the Bush administration for what she says is an attempt to “undermine women’s rights and women’s health” by limiting access to birth control.

As NMI reported earlier this summer, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) attempted to revise some rules that would have dramatically increased the ability of health care workers to say they wouldn’t perform certain duties, procedures or services because they object for moral reasons. As Clinton points out in her op-ed, for 30 years we’ve had laws, known as “conscience clauses,” that say doctors who object to abortion don’t have to perform them; the HHS revision would have been a major expansion of current rules.

The issue for women’s rights activists is that with these rules, the Bush administration attempted to expand conscience clauses by re-defining abortion to include birth control (the Pill, IUDs, emergency contraception). Practically speaking, that would have meant that Planned Parenthood could be forced to hire nurses who refused to dispense birth control pills and gynecologists could refuse to even tell their patients about IUDs. In New Mexico, the rules would have been in direct conflict with a law that requires emergency rooms to inform rape victims about emergency contraception and provide it on request.

After an uproar this summer, led in part by Clinton, HHS revised the proposed rules. Leavitt had insisted that the department was not trying to target birth control, and the new draft regulation eliminates the definition of abortion. But by eliminating any definition, the rules are now even more open to interpretation.

According to Clinton:

Health and Human Services estimates that the rule, which would affect nearly 600,000 hospitals, clinics and other health care providers, would cost $44.5 million a year to administer. Astonishingly, the department does not even address the real cost to patients who might be refused access to these critical services. Women patients, who look to their health care providers as an unbiased source of medical information, might not even know they were being deprived of advice about their options or denied access to care.

The 30-day comment period for the proposed rule ends on Sept. 25. You can read the full text of the rule at Regulations.gov. You can submit your comments online here, or send an e-mail to consciencecomment@hhs.gov with “Provider Conscience Regulation” in the subject line.