Do you believe that your ability to access health care services has been restricted based on religion or pseudoscience? Are you aware of any attempts to inject religious dogma or beliefs unsupported by evidence into health care debates and policies? Do you have an idea for a social and/or political action that could be taken locally to promote and defend access to health care?

Please tell us about it! We advocate in a variety of ways to protect individuals’ right to access safe and secular health care, but without reports from people like you, many important cases and opportunities for action can slip through the cracks. We need to hear from you!

Examples of violations:

• A lawmaker or government body attempts to change or restrict available health care services – from vaccinations to end of life care – based on religion or pseudoscience.
• A hospital that receives government funds refuses to provide legal and safe health care for religious reasons.
• The criminal justice system offers access to only religious-based addiction recovery systems.
• A false prophet or quack peddles unproven and ineffective treatments to patients in need.

To report an issue, please provide the following information and press “Send.” We will respond to your message as soon as possible.

Thank you for helping the campaign to keep health care safe and secular!

We at the Center for Inquiry are doing all we can to educate the public, policy makers, and the media about the importance of safe and secular health care and the threats we face, but we can only do so much. It’s crucial that you take part, and act to promote and defend safe and evidence-based health care.

On this page you will find a collection of different ways that you can take action on each of this campaign’s issues—from contacting political leaders to helping raise public awareness. In order to show that we are a unified and strong constituency, make sure you mention the Center for Inquiry and the Keep Health Care Safe and Secular campaign in all of your communications!

How to Track State and Federal Bills

The first step toward getting involved in and affecting the policymaking process is to know about proposed legislation. Here’s how you can track bills proposed at the state and federal levels.

We recommend that you check the Center for Inquiry’s Bills We’re Tracking page. Our Office of Public Policy will send an action alert on each measure if and when it comes up for a vote.

For tracking state-level legislation, we recommend using Open States. Users can search both pending and recently voted on legislation in their respective states based on keywords, lawmakers, and a number of other functions. Users can also register and receive email updates legislation, as well as committee and individual official actions.

For tracking federal-level legislation (in the U.S. House and Senate), we recommend GovTrack. As with Open States, users can search both pending and recently voted on legislation based on keywords, lawmakers, and a number of other functions. Users can also register and receive email updates on legislation, as well as committee and individual official actions.

On both state and federal issues, we also recommend users sign up for email alerts from their elected officials, as well as follow them on Facebook on Twitter. This is a good way to learn which specific issues your elected officials care about.

How to Speak out on State and Federal Bills

Now that you know the kind of legislation proposed in your state or in Congress, it’s time to let your elected officials know what you think. Here’s how to best contact them about political issues.

The easiest way to take action is through action alerts. Action alerts allow you to quickly fill out a pre-written form letter that is sent directly to your state or federal official. You can sign up to receive action alerts from CFI here. We also recommend that you sign up for action alerts from organizations such as Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and other groups that advocate for safe and secular health care.

When your state lawmakers or Congress is set to vote on a bill, one of the most effective ways to voice your opinion is tocall them on the phone. You can find both your local and federal elected officials’ phone numbers by visiting Common Cause. Here’s a handy tip sheet on how to call your elected officials.

Another easy and effective way to share your opinion, whether in regards to a specific vote or a broader issue, is to send your elected officials an email. Your message doesn’t need to be long; in fact, a few sentences are more than enough. The longer the email, the better the chances most of it will be ignored. Here’s a tip sheet on how to send an email to your elected officials.

Request a Meeting With Your Elected Officials

For most legislative issues, action alerts, phone calls, and emails will suffice. However, in-person meetings can have a powerful impact. This section will help you figure out how and when to try to schedule an in-person meeting.

Generally, in-person meetings are best suited for having broader, larger, and longer discussions with the elected official’s staff regarding either basic introductions, or the complexities of a specific legislative issue.

We recommend that people try to arrange a small group of 3-5 people who care about health care issues to schedule an in-person meeting with their elected official’s staff to introduce themselves, and their reasons for concern on any number of health care issues. Here’s a tip sheet on how to request and carry out meetings with your elected officials.

Spread Social Awareness

Many of the issues and stories in this campaign have not garnered local, national, or international media attention. We need to change that. How? Here are a couple of ideas:

• Post about the Campaign on Twitter with the hashtag #safeandsecular
• Share news articles, videos, and other materials regarding the Campaign on Facebook.
• Write posts about the Campaign on your blog or website.
• Write a letter to the editor in your local newspaper.
• Organize an event in your community.

The interests who want health care decided by religious belief and pseudoscience aren’t waiting. It’s going to take all of us to keep health care safe and secular. Get active today!

Need assistance? Email us at opp@centerforinquiry.net.

Health care is critical for leading a productive, fulfilling life. There are various barriers to receiving appropriate health care, some of them economic in nature. But even when these economic barriers are overcome, the delivery of appropriate health care is too often obstructed or denied by policies, practices, and beliefs that incorporate religious doctrines or pseudoscience.

The harmful influence of religion and pseudoscience on our health care is manifested in many different areas, affecting individuals in every age group. Commonplace and proven medical procedures and treatments are being withheld, and dangerous alternative medicines pushed onto patients without restrictions. Individuals are being denied the right to control what happens to their bodies, whether it’s in the context of decisions about reproduction or end-of-life care. That’s why we at the Center for Inquiry are launching Keep Health Care Safe And Secular, a campaign to fight on every necessary level to ensure that health care decisions are made on scientific grounds, and not based on religion, mere “tradition,” or magical thinking.

The attacks on our basic health care rights are diverse, relentless, and growing. Here are just some of the areas of our lives being adversely affected:

• Reproductive Health: Religious interests are trying to limit access to and information about contraception. From abstinence-only education, to laws allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions based on their religion, to corporations imposing their religious beliefs on employees, access to contraception is in danger of growing ever more restricted. Meanwhile, state governments are passing law after law attacking the right to choose, goaded and supported by the religious right. States’ sole abortion service providers are being regulated out of business, leaving women with no options.
• Vaccinations: Despite the thorough debunking of the wholly-invented linking of vaccines to autism, the rate of vaccination against several fatal and disabling childhood diseases continues to fall in many areas, leading to outbreaks of diseases long considered rare or defeated, potentially presaging the end of the “herd immunity” that keeps all of us safe. The problem isn’t limited to parents basing important decisions about their child’s future on pseudoscience peddled on TV talk shows. Organized religion is also seeking to extend religious exemptions to compulsory vaccination laws.
• Hospital ownership: Religiously controlled hospital groups are spreading throughout the country, buying up once-secular hospitals. Many areas now have no emergency care outside of religiously run facilities, where doctors are forbidden from even discussing a full range of treatment options with their patients if that treatment goes against some religious dictate.
• Alternative Medicine: While real medicine must endure an extensive and expensive government controlled testing process to insure safety, ‘alternative remedies’ can be put on the shelf alongside proven treatments without any real protections for consumers. Homeopathic medicine, concoctions that are either composed of worthless water, or worse, tainted with toxins, is sold in our pharmacies and retail outlets as though it were real medicine.
• Addiction Recovery: The most common forms of addiction recovery involve religion and spirituality, and often these are the only means of support available to those trying to rid themselves of a threat to their health and their family. Secular alternatives are few and far between. Worse, convicted drug offenders are often forced by law to enter religiously infused recovery programs, regardless of their own beliefs or lack thereof.
• Faith-Healing: In a misguided effort to respect religious beliefs, parents who insist on keeping their sick or injured children from receiving badly needed medical care are too often given a free pass. It is one thing for an adult to choose prayer over medicine for themselves, but their children are given no choice, and suffer immeasurably as a result.
• End of Life: All of us should have the right to hasten our deaths, in consultation with our physicians, when medical remedies are exhausted and the alternative is a painful or degrading existence. Yet adamant opposition to physician-assisted dying based on religious notions regarding the “sanctity of life” has continued to block legislation that would give people at the end of their lives control over their destiny, allowing them to die with dignity.

What can be done in the face of this assault? The Center for Inquiry believes that these impediments to essential health care services must be challenged at every turn. That is the purpose of the campaign – to Keep Health Care Safe and Secular.

With the support of people like you, CFI has already covered an enormous amount of ground, and we will continue and expand our efforts.

• We have filed an amicus brief on behalf of a group of concerned, secular organizations supporting the government in the Hobby Lobby case before the Supreme Court, and created a resource page devoted to explaining what the case is about and why it’s so important.
• We will continue to pursue opportunities to litigate in areas where litigation is the best avenue for progress, by filing briefs in existing cases, or bringing cases to court where religion or pseudoscience threaten people’s health or basic rights. We will also press the government to act to protect the interests of people.
• We will continue to seek to have alternative medicines properly regulated, in particular homeopathy. Our petition to the Food and Drug Administration requesting testing of homeopathic remedies was just a start.
• We will seek to roll back the spread of exemptions to vaccination laws.
• We will continue our advocacy efforts before both the federal government and state governments to protect abortion rights and to prevent religious groups monopolizing an area’s medical care.
• We will continue to challenge pseudoscience head on, as we always have. A recent issue of Skeptical Inquirer included a crushing expose of the bogus claims of self proclaimed cancer healer Stanislaw Burzynski. Our writers and investigators will continue to bring you the evidence-backed truth on all medical matters.

What can you do? Get involved. Explore the campaign’s web page, and contact us to see how you can help us make a difference. Tell us stories of how religious extremism or pseudoscience has impacted health care for you and your family. And please give generously to help fund this campaign. Together we can stand up to these attacks on health care, and together we can win. We can succeed in keeping health care safe and secular.