Catholic Doctrine & Your Health

Dateline: May 24, 2000

Does your community hospital provide services like abortion, birth control counseling, or even emergency contraception after rape? How about voluntary sterilization or infertility treatments? Will your hospital honor the wishes of yourself or your spouse to have recussitation efforts stopped or life support withdrawn? Even if you have a legally valid living will?

Probably not, if the hospital is Catholic. But what you might not realize is that even if your community hospital is nonsectarian, it still won't provide those services if it is in any way affiliated or has merged with any Catholic organization. What exactly does this mean for you and your family?

Introduction/Abstract

Across the country we hear about various crises in health care. Poor people are without insurance. HMO bureaucrats seek to impose limits on what services physicians can prescribe and patients can receive. Hospitals are understaffed and overburdened

But there is one slowly growing crisis which we don't hear much about - not nearly enough. All over the country nonsectarian hospitals with financial difficulties are merging with hospitals sponsored by Roman Catholic, Baptist, Adventist, and other religious denominations. Part of the price of these mergers and hence financial solvency is that the nonsectarian hospitals are obligated to adopt and enforce the moral codes of the denominations involved. Decisions about patient treatment are thus made based upon religious edict, not medical fact.

Although the mergers occur with more than just Catholic hospitals, the fact of the matter is that hospitals operated by denominations like the Methodists, Baptists and even Jews are not nearly so pervasive as those operated by the Roman Catholic Church. In addition, most of the hospitals operated by other religious groups are administered in a largely secular manner - meaning that they don't generally try to impose their religious ideals upon the local community. Thus, Catholic polices are the focus here.

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.

Who is affected? Anyone who works for these institutions or who comes in as a patient, regardless of religion. As Rev. Tom Davis, a United Church of Christ minister observed, this means that people of all faiths - or no faith at all - have the "ethical and religious directives of one church" imposed upon them.

Doctors, nurses, administrators and all other staff are also affected, because they are forced to abide by the religious codes. This means that they not only cannot provide certain services, but they cannot even discuss those services and recommend other facilities. This results in an erosion of legal health services in local communities - often among the poor who can least afford such a limitation on their choices.

How does this happen? It all occurs in private negotiations without consultation with the patients, the doctors, or local community leaders. Very often, people don't find out until much, much later what has happened.

Does it 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.

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