Catholicism & Catholic Dogma Can Endanger Your Health

How can it be possible that Catholicism and Catholic dogma could endanger the health of non-Catholics? The answer is simple: through hospitals run according to Catholic doctrine. You may not even know if your local hospital is Catholic — many secular hospitals have merged with Catholic hospitals without telling people about what this might mean for the future of quality healthcare.

The basic situation is that the nearly 600 Catholic hospitals in America are governed by rules prescribed by the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. These doctrines are in turn created by religious leaders in the Vatican, far from the immediate needs and situations of the people affected. In other words, the Catholic teachings which Catholics and employees of Catholic organizations normally have to obey now also apply to non-Catholics who weren't given a choice in the matter.

What is affected? The obvious services are usually reproductive in nature: abortion, contraception, sterilization and infertility treatments. Even HIV prevention counseling can be banned. But a lot more which people might not expect are also affected: end-of-life services such as living wills, advance directives, and desires that some treatments be discontinued.

If there's one thing both sides can agree on, it's this: In an emergency, doctors need to put aside personal beliefs to do what's best for the patient. But in a world guided by religious directives, even this can be a slippery proposition.

Ob/gyn Wayne Goldner, M.D., learned this lesson a few years back when a patient named Kathleen Hutchins came to his office in Manchester, New Hampshire. She was only 14 weeks pregnant, but her water had broken. Dr. Goldner delivered the bad news: Because there wasn't enough amniotic fluid left and it was too early for the fetus to survive on its own, the pregnancy was hopeless. Hutchins would likely miscarry in a matter of weeks. But in the meanwhile, she stood at risk for serious infection, which could lead to infertility or death. Dr. Goldner says his devastated patient chose to get an abortion at local Elliot Hospital. But there was a problem. Elliot had recently merged with nearby Catholic Medical Center — and as a result, the hospital forbade abortions.

"I was told I could not admit her unless there was a risk to her life," Dr. Goldner remembers. "They said, 'Why don't you wait until she has an infection or she gets a fever?' They were asking me to do something other than the standard of care. They wanted me to put her health in jeopardy." He tried admitting Hutchins elsewhere, only to discover that the nearest abortion provider was nearly 80 miles away in Lebanon, New Hampshire — and that she had no car. Ultimately, Dr. Goldner paid a taxi to drive her the hour and a half to the procedure. (The hospital merger has since dissolved, and Elliot is secular once again.)

Source: MSNBC

Goldner's efforts to fight the new policies have caused serious personal repercussions. He has been picketed, he has lost his teaching position, and his daughter's school has received a bomb threat. Why? Simply because he wishes to offer legal reproductive services in his community.

Local bishops have the power to go even further than the Directives require. For example, John Cardinal O'Connor of New York proclaimed in 1995 that even collaboration with non-Catholic institutions would be prohibited unless those non-Catholic institutions "...are committed to comply with Catholic medical, moral and ethical principles." This would prevent collaborative efforts on community health services, health education, and more with any hospital and any institution which does not adhere to Vatican dogma.

In one case that made the local paper, a patient came in with an ectopic pregnancy: an embryo had implanted in her fallopian tube. Such an embryo has zero chance of survival and is a serious threat to the mother, as its growth can rupture the tube. The more invasive way to treat an ectopic is to surgically remove the tube. An alternative, generally less risky way is to administer methotrexate, a drug also used for cancer. It dissolves the pregnancy but spares the tube, preserving the women's fertility. "The doctor thought the noninvasive treatment was best," [Family physician Debra Stulberg, M.D.] recounts.

But Catholic directives specify that even in an ectopic pregnancy, doctors cannot perform "a direct abortion" — which, the on-call ob/gyn reasoned, would nix the drug option. (Surgery, on the other hand, could be considered a lifesaving measure that indirectly kills the embryo, and may be permitted.) The doctor didn't wait to take it up with the hospital's ethical committee; she told the patient to check out and head to another ER. (Citing patient confidentiality, West Suburban declined to comment, confirming only that as a Catholic hospital, it adheres to religious directives "in every instance.")

Extrauterine pregnancies can never proceed to viability, so there is no fetus to save. Why, then, is it forbidden to act to save the life of the mother in such situations? This condition absolutely does threaten the life of the mother, but Catholic hospitals do not permit abortions which would possibly save her life and, hopefully, allow her to have future pregnancies. The lives of non-Catholic women are thus supposed to be sacrificed on the altar of Catholic doctrines.

When Elizabeth Dotts walked into her new doctor's office for a gynecologic exam and checkup, she didn't realize she was treading into the front lines of a culture war. "I was just going for my annual visit, nothing out of the ordinary," says the 26-year-old YWCA grant coordinator. Dotts, who was single, had recently moved to Birmingham, Alabama, and was seeing an M.D. recommended by a coworker. The visit was unremarkable until she asked for a refill of her birth control prescription. That's when the doctor informed her that he was Catholic and the pills were against his religion.

"The look he gave me actually made me feel ashamed," Dotts says. "Like I had this wild and crazy sex life. Like he was trying to protect me from myself." Her bewilderment quickly turned to anger — "I thought, 'Wait, what in the world? Where am I?' " — especially when she remembered that her insurance covered only one annual gynecology checkup. Dotts, who'd majored in religion in college, got tough with the doctor.

"I'm glad for you that you're faithful," she told him. "But don't push it on me. I'm here for my treatment, and I expect you to give it to me." Five minutes of verbal sparring later, the doctor relented with a six-month prescription — but only after Dotts told him she had been put on the Pill to relieve menstrual cramping, not to prevent pregnancy. Dotts grabbed the prescription and left, resolving to find herself a new gynecologist. "Before, walking into a doctor's office, I assumed we were on the same side," she says. "I don't make that assumption now. I ask a million questions and advocate for myself."

Attempts to exempt doctors from providing the same basic care to women and gays that they provide to everyone else are usually phrased in a manner that suggests they aren't aimed at women's health or reproductive issues, but when you look more closely you'll see that this is precisely the point. No one is seeking exemptions to provide gays with eyeglasses or women with hip replacements. All the exemptions being sought have to do with trying to avoid giving gays and women basic reproductive health choices.

That they are trying to limit access to basic healthcare for gays and women is the point which we must keep emphasizing over and over. We must not allow religious extremists to pretend that basic reproductive healthcare is anything other than basic healthcare — it's not in some special medical, biological, or moral category that should justify treating it in a very different manner. Women should not have to worry about going to the doctor to talk about reproductive issues and perhaps becoming the object of religious judgement — that's not the doctor's place.

Even worse may be the doctors who don't tell patients that they are withholding basic healthcare information and services. Even if we accept for the sake of argument that withholding basic medical care for women is legitimate, there is no justification for not telling the patient this and also withholding from them information about what their general options are. This, however, is precisely what religious extremists want to do — it's worth remembering that the first steps towards providing legal contraception to women in America were legal challenges to laws that banned sending information about contraception through the mail.

Does any of this matter? Besides the fact that communities are losing important and legal health care options, serious questions about the separation of church and state are raised. These Catholic hospitals might be privately controlled by the Catholic Church, but they also received funding and support from the government. It seems unconscionable that the government would financially support restrictions on people's legal choices.