When regulating abortion is just the beginning, redux

The Human Nature blog over at Slate.com has posted an update to its story of a few weeks ago regarding HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt and his "proposed regulation to protect medical conscience" that, by broadly defining abortion to (perhaps) include birth control, allowed pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control based on their conscience. When I blogged about this issue previously, I expressed a fervent hope that Health and Human Services would come to its (admittedly limited) senses and remove the language that conflated birth control with abortion. Nominally, this is the case - as Human Nature points out, the specific language that defined abortion in a manner that included birth control has been removed. However, because no other definition of abortion is provided, the possiblity is still there for the definitions of abortion and birth control to be conflated. Which means that the definition of abortion (and birth control) might eventually be left up to the courts. All in all, I'm not sure that I feel too warm and fuzzy about that prospect.