From the Washington Post:
The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday asked federal health officials to ensure that Catholic hospitals provide emergency reproductive care to pregnant women, saying the refusal by religiously affiliated hospitals to provide abortion and other services was becoming an increasing problem.
In a letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the ACLU cited the case of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, which was stripped of its Catholic status Tuesday because doctors performed an abortion on a woman who had developed a life-threatening complication. […]
The letter was a follow-up to a complaint the ACLU sent to CMS in July asking for a federal investigation of similar problems at Catholic hospitals across the country, including refusals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims or perform abortions on women having miscarriages.
Good for St. Joseph’s! (They’re not actually funded by the diocese, incidentally.)
The Catholic Church should get out of the hospital business. Their religion forbids them from providing necessary care; that means they shouldn’t be involved with running hospitals at all.
Next time you see my wife, run that by her. Should make for an interesting discussion — at least for this fly on the wall.
The recent health care reform act also does not provide necessary care, since abortion is barred. I take it that you also want the Federal government to not be involved in health care? That’s gonna be a lot of infrastructure to tear down or convert into hotels. All those military hospitals, all those government clinics, turned into MM dispensaries and warehouses. I guess the troops can hit Urgent Care instead. Oh wait, they don’t provide abortion services either. An ever-dwindling number of places do. It’s almost as if a lot of health care providers don’t think that terminating babies is really part of their core mission.
(The church was/is a big supporter of the recent bill, btw, so I hope you can live with yourself, being allied to such awful, awful people.)
There are 620 Catholic hospitals in the US, with about 120,000 total beds – about 10% of the total – and, I wager, a larger portion of the charity/free/reduced cost pool. I’m glad that in your view, our health care system is healthy enough that we can afford to dispense with all that unnecessary capacity and unneeded charity. If not, I look forward to the atheist organizations stepping up and building a few hundred billion in infrastructure to replace the tainted Catholic stuff.
Alternatively, we could recognize that there is room for plurality in our society, and that not every single facility has to endorse the most extreme level of ‘abortion rights’ to be deemed morally acceptable. Want hospitals that provide abortions? Build and staff them, if you can.
How is performing abortions on women having miscarriages, or when the woman’s life is endangered considered “the most extreme level of ‘abortion rights’”? It seems to be the least extreme that an abortion can be.
If you don’t run your abortions the way the ACLU wants you to run your abortions, you aren’t providing healthcare. That seems pretty extreme to me, and defining of the totality by one margin.
I think you can provide outstanding healthcare and completely decline to perform any subset of healthcare that your facility doesn’t provide, for whatever reason – be that ethical, moral, practical, or what have you.
Robert,
The Catholic Church wanted St. Joseph’s to let a woman with four kids and a very serious heart condition die rather than perform a life-saving abortion. According to the reports on this from last year, she was so sick she couldn’t be safely transported to another facility. It was hardly the “most extreme level” of abortion rights.
Fortunately, the doctors at St. Joseph’s did the right thing. I hope most doctors would. But the Church has put its medical care providers in a difficult position.
And it is precisely because Catholic hospitals provide so much care in our country that their position scares the shit out of me. I might not have control over whether I end up in one in a true emergency.
For whatever it’s worth, I don’t want them out of business, but I don’t think letting women die when there are safe medical procedures that could save them is a matter on which reasonable people can reasonably disagree. I truly would fear for my life in a Catholic hospital unless they change their position, and I support using all legal means to press them to change it.
Thanks, Chingona, for cutting through the obfuscatory bullshit of Robert’s.
This ‘health care’ organization was willing to let a woman die rather than perform a 100% necessary operation, and they’ve reiterated over and over again that their preferred outcome would have been to avoid the operation at the cost of her life.
They ought to be banned from performing health care for the same reason that a bus driver who swears up and down that he’ll drive off a cliff during the next thunderstorm ought to be banned from driving: no matter how good they are at their job most of the time, it’s irresponsible to give psychopaths like that the authority to nonconsensually destroy people’s lives.
—Myca
I’d like to add that there’s something disconcerting about a religious organization that will excommunicate health officials for saving lives but not priests for sexually molesting children in their care. Talk about mixed messages.
Yes, yes, I’m full of shit.
Where you gonna get 600 hospitals?
I think the Catholic Diocese deserves criticism for taking such a hard line against St. Joseph’s, which was acting in the best interests of the patient, period. And I also share Chingona’s concerns about the increasing role religion plays in determining women’s access to reproductive care. Moreover, the Catholic position on abortion and contraception is simply immoral, IMHO.
But I think Robert is right to take Barry to task for his extreme statement. Sorry, Barry, it’s simply untenable, it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Catholic hospitals serve underserved populations and provide care for people cast aside by the for-profit health care industry. Based on what my wife has told me, her hospital is more ready than Obama Democrats to provide universal health care — care, not “coverage” (load of shit that is) — with universal access being a continuing part of their lobbying efforts.
Let me also say that I agree with Kevin, the diocese is out of line and doing this kind of abortion to save a woman’s life ought to be permitted.
Which is the policy I will implement, at my hospital.
If you read the full piece at the WP, it seems the hospitals mostly want to do the right thing, and there is increasing pressure from local bishops not to do it. St. Joe’s in Phoenix stands by their decision. The local Catholic hospital the Post talked to says it would do the same thing.
And here’s a nun from a Catholic health care organization:
I asked my wife for more information about how her hospital handles cases like abortion. For the most part, they refer to outside parties, providers who are not contracted with the hospital system. Nonetheless, in a case like the one described in the WaPo article, a similar decision would have been reached. Meanwhile, the hospital provides a full range of health care for women — prenatal, mammograms, cervical cancer, etc. — and that includes women who cannot afford those services elsewhere or at all.
Keep in mind most of the Catholic hospitals you see were established by nuns, the women who do most of the Church’s good works in the world. Providence Health Care was founded by American nuns canoeing out to the frontier to provided health care for pioneers and Native Americans. They often go where capitalists see no profit in healing the sick.
An earlier post asked “How does the marriage equality debate end?”
A lot of folks are looking at the heavy-handed “progressive” reaction to situations like this one – and expecting the same self-righteous intolerance on gay-rights issues.
Moral certainty may feel good – but a lack of nuance or tolerance lead inevitably to a loss of goodwill from the rest of us…. preaching to the choir won’t move these issues anywhere.
There’s a difference between refusing to provide elective abortions and refusing to provide abortion when the pregnancy is life-threatening. I don’t like the former but can see how a hospital which provides needed services except for abortion is a useful thing to have, especially in poorer areas. The latter is a danger to the public.
Also, with all due respect to Kevin Moore’s wife’s experience, mine has been quite different. I work in a public hospital in a city with a very high poverty rate. There are several nearby hospitals run by various religions, including Catholics. It’s odd how often patient show up here after being discharged from a (private) religious hospital after being told that that hospital doesn’t provide service X (i.e. chemotherapy, cardiac catheterization, etc.) I make it a practice to look at the web site of the relevant hospital and so far 100% of the time I’ve found that they DO provide the service in question, often as a lead advertising point.
Yes, you might say, but the public hospitals are being paid for taking care of poor people without insurance, private hospitals aren’t. It’s a reasonable sounding argument, but wrong. In NJ, any hospital can apply for money from the state to cover its costs for uninsured patients. Virtually all do. Including the ones that dump here. So I can’t say that I’m impressed with the christian values of the various local (christian) religious hospitals.
Robert, the Affordable Care Act forbids using federal funds to pay for abortion, “except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered.”
I don’t think that Catholic hospitals should even be required to do THAT much; a woman seeking an abortion due to rape or incest is experiencing a tragedy, but not an emergency. They can reasonably be referred to another provider.
But when someone experiencing an emergency — someone whose life is in danger right this moment — is at a hospital, the hospital ought to help them. And if the hospital has religious beliefs that prevent them from providing the “we will do what is necessary to keep this emergency patient from dying” level of care, then they shouldn’t be running a hospital.
Robert and BenDavid, I’m sorry that you find “But when someone experiencing an emergency — someone whose life is in danger right this moment — is at a hospital, the hospital ought to help them” to be too extreme a standard. I think a religion that would rather let a woman die than have a lifesaving abortion is extreme, and my quaint view that hospitals are there to save lives is moderate.
Does anyone have any reliable information on how many Catholic hospitals are financially supported by the Church, and how large that support is? In the one case we know about here — the hospital in the news story — it’s would appear that the Church contributed nothing at all to the material support of the Hospital. The result of the Church and hospital going there separate ways wasn’t that the hospital went out of business; it was that the hospital will now be free to save more lady lives without having to waste time dealing politely with a Bishop who wants them to let more ladies die.
Catholic Charities do a lot of good work. They also do a lot of bad work. I have no influence over what they do. This is why leaving vital things to charity isn’t the best way to do everything.
When Christianity has been discussed in various postings on here it’s very often portrayed as being an evil influence in culture and history. The Crusades, the Inquisition, child abuse scandals, etc. are all brought up. It’s refreshing to see that at least some people understand that there’s some good things it’s done.
In NJ, any hospital can apply for money from the state to cover its costs for uninsured patients.
In Illinois a hospital can very well go bankrupt and dissolve and end up providing services to nobody waiting for the State to actually pay that money. What’s the situation in New Jersey?
Catholic Charities do a lot of good work. They also do a lot of bad work.
That would be a matter of opinion.
I have no influence over what they do.
Sure you do. You can choose to or refuse to give them money.
This is why leaving vital things to charity isn’t the best way to do everything.
Well, I certainly would agree that leaving them to do everything isn’t the best way. But it’s certainly an effective and time-honored way to do a lot of vital things. Tell me – other than your ability to give or not give them money, why should you be able to influence them?
@Robert:
Or it could be other reasons. I’m sure if we declared BMW mechanics to be instruments of satan and got people to bomb their garages, send death threats to their children, and kill them in their church, the number of BMW mechanics would dry up pretty quickly. Not because they didn’t think BMWs ought to get fixed, but because they were afraid of terrorists. (No that word isn’t hyperbole: If threatening to murder someone’s family because you don’t like them isn’t terrorism nothing is.)
@RonF: Well except our tax dollars go to fund them, so we can’t stop giving them money. And that’s *exactly* why we should be able to influence them. If they don’t like it, they can forfeit their tax exemption and stop taking huge amounts of money from the federal government.
JThompson – I am sure that factors into it, to some extent. But places like Britain, for example, do not have our rich resources of murderous pro-lifers, and they see the exact same trend as we see here. So whatever factor it may be, it’s not a decisive one.
(There does not appear to have been any anti-abortion violence at all in the UK, in fact, though there has been a little bit in some commonwealth countries. Nearly all of it is here.)
I think it has a lot more to do with social distaste for abortion (even as demand for the service is high – not really a contradiction, everyone wants garbage service but few people want their children to be garbagemen) and the difficult nuances it takes to reconcile a desire to heal people for a living with ending life. I think there are, and probably will always be, relatively few doctors specializing in euthanasia for similar reasons. One doctor quoted in the Independent article linked above, which seemed pretty balanced to me, basically said “nobody wants to talk to you at parties, there’s nothing challenging or interesting about the medical work, and there’s no feeling of accomplishment, only of relief”.
That’s probably enough for some people, and even rewarding for a few – I am sure that people who choose that career path feel that way, just as there are undoubtedly garbagemen who feel satisfied at the end of a solid day’s work – but in the main, it’s not a compelling career path.
One other factor is, also mentioned in the Independent piece, and unfair as it may often be, is that 50 years ago contraception was unreliable, expensive, and hard to get – even illegal. Today, none of those are true, except for expensive and then only for a relatively small portion of the very poor. There’s a pretty broadly-found opinion among health care people that if you get pregnant today it’s because you wanted to or were careless. (Not defending the perception here, just noting it.) 50 years ago an abortion doctor could conceive (heh) of themself as heroically saving women from a brutal grind of endless unwanted pregnancy; these days they seem more likely to see themselves as cleaning up the messes of irresponsible people. Moral judgment being what it is, and misogyny being what it is, it’s probably pretty easy to let one genuinely irresponsible case color your perception of everyone walking through the door. Again, fair or not fair, the perception exists and doesn’t serve as an attractor to the career path.
My suspicion is, to borrow the “where is this all going” theme of the gay marriage thread, that we’re heading towards abortion being safe, legal, and rare – rare not because there isn’t demand for it but rare because it’s hard to get it done, and it’ll be hard to get it done because very few people will want to do it. The anti-abortion lobby is beginning to realize that they don’t have to convince 150 million American women, they have to convince 2000 abortion doctors to change careers. That’s a heck of a lot more practical.
So we’ll see a lot more drug-based abortions, which (as I understand it) have to come earlier than surgical ones. Because demand, while dwindling, is still pretty high. Drug companies don’t care what people think of them, or at least, care a lot less than individual doctors performing a surgical intervention care.
Ampersand:
Actually, Robert explicitly posted his agreement with the staff’s decision, and indicated that there is support within Catholicism for that decision.
And I am a Jew – so abortion to save the mother is required by Jewish law in such cases.
What both of us are objecting to is the “my way or the highway” approach of progressives to difficult moral questions. All the talk about multivalent opinion, tolerance, diversity of opinion – out the window. All Catholic public works should be trashed. Why? Because *we* don’t like them.
Saber-rattling about how the Catholics should quit the public sphere may steady your nerves after that last election, and confirm your self-image .
But the rest of us – otherwise known as the majority – are drawing our own conclusions from such talk.
Besides Planned Parenthood, how many secular/left organizations are stepping up to provide health care for those they claim to be championing? It’s telling that nobody’s addressed that – confirming the growing suspicions of The Rest of Us that for many progressives, it’s more about (self) perception than real policy solutions.
Part of the problem is that we have “abortion doctors.” It’s been isolated from regular health care. You shouldn’t have to go to an abortion clinic. You should be able to go to an OB or a family practice doc or nurse practitioner. My understanding is that many of the docs who come out med school planning to provide abortions find that any practice they join won’t let them provide abortions and that even some hospitals make not providing abortions a condition of getting hospital privileges.
I mean, if it was just part of a normal OB/GYN or family practice, instead of what you did all day, every day, things would be a lot different. And with the availability of surgical abortion, maybe we’ll get there. I don’t know.
Another factor … the generation that saw the septic wards full of the victims of illegal abortions – the generation that was the most passionate about providing abortion – is passing.
None of which, of course, has much to do with the case at hand. However common or uncommon abortion and abortion providers are, there will always be pregnancies that go south in spectacularly disastrous ways, and women ought to feel confident doctors will do everything they can for them in any hospital they find themselves in.
None of which has anything to do with whether it should be legal for a hospital to let a woman whose pregnancy is going horrifically, disastrously awry die in their facility.
Robert emphasized that if he privately owned a hospital, that’s what he’d decide. But that’s not the issue.
The issue (as I understand it) is, if transferring to another hospital is for some reason not a good idea (no time, patient in too delicate a condition to travel safely, etc), should a hospital have the legal right to let a woman die rather than provide her with a lifesaving abortion.
You and Robert have both said that you, personally, think that women should get abortions rather than be left to die. But what I’m not clear on is, do you think that should be the law?
I don’t think that’s the correct way to frame the question.
The correct way to frame the question is, “who decides the policies of an entity that provides health care”.
I believe that the answer to that is, the entity, its owner, its stakeholders, etc. There is no compelling reason, that I know of, to think that the correct answer should be “the government” – the people bringing us the TSA, corporate welfare for billionaires, and socialized risk/privatized profit – but ymmv.
Are people going to die, avoidably from one point of view, under such decisions? Undoubtedly. The same is true of the converse position – just different people, is all.
So if an owner of a hospital decides that it would be good policy to prescribe marijuana, that’s a-okay whatever the government says. Fuck the law!
Seriously, what? You think dying women shouldn’t be legally protected from people with ‘policies’ that dictate they should die, because that would be too much ‘government interference’?
You’re not going to be successful in trying to force doctors to perform procedures they don’t want to perform. Doctors generally go through a great deal of effort and sacrifice to join a profession that saves lives. Like it or not, an elective abortion (which is not necessarily what this particular procedure was, but I’m talking the general case here) is more likely to be viewed as taking a life, not saving one.
What other procedures are doctors forced to perform even though they don’t want to?
I will say that in this specific case I have a hard time accepting the RCC’s position. This does appear to be one of the rare cases where the choices are either destroy the fetus or watch them both die.
@Thene – The policies do not dictate that anyone dies. That’s why I reject that framing. If I have a policy at my hospital that we don’t do brain surgery, and someone shows up needing emergency brain surgery which we’re not in a position to do, and they die, are we “dictating that they should die”? Should the government require us to add a brain surgery wing? No.
And yes, if the doctors at the hospital think marijuana would cure their patients, and the government says no, then fuck the government. Seriously, what? You think dying people shouldn’t get the medicine their doctors think they should have, because that would go against how noted medical expert John Boehner thinks things should work?
The role for government is not controlling what people should or should not do, the role for government is protecting individual rights and the general welfare of the people. There is no “right” to any particular type of health care, rather, there is a right to make individual choices, not to be defrauded, and so forth.
The remedy for the (almost microscopic) problem of hospitals that won’t do abortions under any circumstances whatsoever – as the instant case demonstrates, there are few such places, as even Catholic hospitals will go against diocesan policies with which they disagree – is not government mandates about what care must or must not be provided. The remedy is information – require such hospitals to make their policy clear to women seeking care.
This is basically a false flag issue for progressives. The problem to progressives isn’t the (sarcastically) vast numbers of women whose therapeutic abortions are being denied by the cruel religious hospitals staffed by doctors and administrators who like seeing women die. The problem is the (really) declining number of doctors and facilities willing to perform volitional abortions, and the desired solution is authoritarian government mandating how health care workers do their jobs.
But “we want our abortions, make them give us our abortions” is a lead albatross of an argument, so thought warriors like Amp are trying to reframe it as “religious fanatics are killing women, we have to stop them”, which – however implausible – is at least much more palatable.
What other procedures are doctors forced to perform even though they don’t want to?
C-sections. Lots of hospitals with VBAC bans will remove privileges from any doctor that allows his patients to attempt a VBAC. There have been cases where all the hospitals in a region will tell a doctor he or she has to stop attending VBACs. Same with vaginal breech and vaginal twin births. That has the effect of forcing the doctor to perform C-sections regardless of their own views on the relative safety of surgical versus vaginal birth for those patients. And while quite safe as far as surgical procedures go, C-sections still carry four times the risk of death as a vaginal birth.
I’m sure it’s sheer coincidence that both of these issues concern women’s bodies and women’s lives.
It seems to me the general trend in this thread is to move away from a criticism of the Catholic Church’s policies to a discussion of whether the government should have a say over what procedures hospitals should perform. I agree with Robert that the question has not been framed properly but I think he also misframes it.
The question is whether the Catholic Church’s religious leaders should be poking their noses into medical procedures, esp. when they offer no material support to the hospitals in question. The hospitals in question have shown that they don’t have a moral objection to the procedures performed. And as they are the medical experts, any interference from the Church itself is inappropriate, regardless of the affiliation.
If I have a policy at my hospital that we don’t do brain surgery, and someone shows up needing emergency brain surgery which we’re not in a position to do, and they die, are we “dictating that they should die”? Should the government require us to add a brain surgery wing? No.
There’s a big difference between “we can’t because we don’t have the ability to” and “we won’t even though we can because we don’t feel like it.”
There is no such thing as a hospital that can’t do a D&C because they’re done all the time for incomplete miscarriage. Whereas lots of hospitals don’t offer X or Y complicated specialty.
The problem to progressives isn’t the (sarcastically) vast numbers of women whose therapeutic abortions are being denied by the cruel religious hospitals staffed by doctors and administrators who like seeing women die. The problem is the (really) declining number of doctors and facilities willing to perform volitional abortions, and the desired solution is authoritarian government mandating how health care workers do their jobs.
I’ve stated and Amp has stated that we have no desire to force doctors to perform or hospitals to offer elective abortions. It’s you who keeps trying to change the subject.
What concerns me is that Catholic Church will, when it can, force its hopsitals to stop saving women’s lives when an abortion is the only way to do that. I don’t really care that this might be an issue for only a small number of women. It is an atrocity that it could happen to any woman. Am I really supposed to believe that you would be okay with this if it happened to your wife or daughter? That you would shrug your shoulders and say the hospital was within its rights? Really? Cause this is not abstract.
What Robert said – false alarmism by progressives – plus this: the abortion issue is a marker of progressive/liberal identity.
It is necessary for progressives to ignore the evidence that even Catholic hospitals operate (and operated in this case) according to guidelines that save women’s lives – necessary to construct that neanderthal Judeo-Christian straw man so as to define oneself in opposition to it.
What I’m about to say is nothing new, but once again we see that the only kind of coercion or authority conservatives care about is that of the government. Coercion by private third parties is a-okay, and we are not allowed to create any sort of mechanism to protect ourselves from that coercion.
Requiring hospitals that have this policy – which nobody has yet shown that n=1, let alone that n=some hugely problematic number – to publish the policy, gives private individuals the information they need to make the appropriate decision for their own care. That is the fix for the “problem” being described.
Fine, you and Amp wouldn’t require hospitals to provide elective abortion. But a government mandate on them replaces private choice and private policy with government policy. Do you not see how that can be problematic for YOUR side?
Do you really want John Boehner to be the one who decides what hospital policies should be?
The question is whether the Catholic Church’s religious leaders should be poking their noses into medical procedures, esp. when they offer no material support to the hospitals in question. The hospitals in question have shown that they don’t have a moral objection to the procedures performed. And as they are the medical experts, any interference from the Church itself is inappropriate, regardless of the affiliation.
The hospitals in question have a simple remedy: don’t affiliate with the Catholic church. That’s the beauty of private organizations – they can affiliate and disaffiliate as they jointly please.
If the Church is paying the bills, then the Church calls the tune. That’s private property 101. They aren’t, in the instant case, and the hospital and the Church in fact pursued the appropriate remedy – mutual disentanglement, since they disagree about a policy issue.
“What concerns me is that Catholic Church will…”
Ah. So other people don’t follow your preferences. Welcome to my world, where very few people do what I think they ought to do. And?
If it bothers you that much, then build your own hospital.
How far do you carry this respect for private property, Robert? Would you be okay with going back to a system of different hospitals for whites and blacks? Just want to be clear.
What I’m about to say is nothing new, but once again we see that the only kind of coercion or authority conservatives care about is that of the government. Coercion by private third parties is a-okay, and we are not allowed to create any sort of mechanism to protect ourselves from that coercion.
We care MOST about government coercion because government is the ones with the guns and the army and the jails. The government can force my wife to bear children to term. The government can force my wife to abort her children. And when they use force and coercion, they aren’t using it in some vague progressive sense of “there aren’t many good choices, so the bad choices I’m left with are cooeeeeeeercive”, they are coercive in the sense of a bullet in your brain if you disobey. Coercion-coercion, to Whoopify it.
Private coercion, when it’s coercion-coercion, is equally repellent to us but in fact the government usually does a good job of performing its legitimate function of dissuading such behavior by private actors. If you try to force a woman to abort, or to bear a child to term, at gunpoint, the government will come by and explain to you why this is wrong. There’s also a social consensus that the government ought to be doing this, so while private coercion is problematic when and where it occurs, it isn’t Job One on the conservative/libertarian worry list.
You are correct that “coercion” in the sense that you use it, in which a third party does not obey the preferences of chingona, does not worry us in the slightest. We do not see it as a problem that private moral beliefs are generally not eligible for government enforcement. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
How far do you carry this respect for private property, Robert? Would you be okay with going back to a system of different hospitals for whites and blacks? Just want to be clear.
When we had that system, it was enforced by law and government, much more than by private choice. So no, I would not be OK with going back to the days when the government mandated segregation.
If private entities want to racially segregate, well, I find that morally reprehensible but am hesitant to enforce my preference for equality at the point of a gun.
Robert, how many people are able to choose which hospital they wind up at in an emergency situation? How does publishing the policy enable a patient to make “an appropriate decision for their own care” if that patient happens to be crashing at the time?
Maybe it’s time to make abortion a procedure that can be performed by nurses, if it’s an uncomplicated early abortion; it’s not so complicated nor so dangerous a procedure that it requires a physician. Abortion is not brain surgery.
How many people in need of a therapeutic abortion discover this only as they happen to be driving past St. Luke’s? None, would be my guess. It either happens with plenty of time (“you have developed pulmonary hypertension, and you cannot carry this child to term”) or it happens as a complication of an ongoing pregnancy, in which case the patient has had plentiful opportunity to understand that “if in the course of your pregnancy it turns out you need a therapeutic abortion, we cannot do that here” and choose another hospital if that is really a major concern for that individual.
Robert, lots of segregation in the South was by the private sector. Probably most of the segregation was by the private sector. We’re talking Rand Paul territory here – the Civil Rights Act was an inappropriate government intrusion. But … if that’s how you feel, that’s how you feel.
… in which case the patient has had plentiful opportunity to understand that “if in the course of your pregnancy it turns out you need a therapeutic abortion, we cannot do that here” and choose another hospital if that is really a major concern for that individual.
Except that’s in direct contradiction of the facts of the case. Sometimes patients are admitted to hospital (the closest one or the one where their doctor normally practices or the one their insurance covers) and are too ill to be moved. That doesn’t happen often, but it happens.
Women with ectopic pregnancies come in through the emergency room of the nearest hospital. Pregnant women who are hemorrhaging uncontrollably for unknown reasons come in through the ER of the nearest hospital. These things happen. The idea that this simply isn’t a real medical issue is the same sort of magical thinking that allows the bishop in Phoenix to insist that St. Joe’s should have saved “both patients.”
I don’t say it isn’t a real medical issue. I simply say that the cure for the issue – you want a service that the hospital doesn’t want to provide (where there are such hospitals – nobody has named one yet) – is information about what services are available. If a hospital really feels that strongly and has a policy that severe, then they need to be required to inform their patients and the emergency medical community of the policy, so that the EMTs know not to drive the hemorrhaging lady to St. Wherever.
Hard cases make bad policy. I don’t know what to do about the case of the person who was able to walk through the door of the ER at St. Wherever’s, but is so fragile that if they’re moved to St. Elsewhere’s they’ll die.
I don’t say it isn’t a real medical issue.
Except one comment before, you said:
How many people in need of a therapeutic abortion discover this only as they happen to be driving past St. Luke’s? None, would be my guess.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you see a government requirement that life-saving treatment that a hospital is equipped to provide cannot be withheld as a step too far, eventually someone will die because of that.
You can define government coercion (gun at my head coercion) as the only real coercion and all other coercion as “coeeeeercion.” But if a hospital won’t perform a life-saving abortion … or if I bleed out while the ethics committee is debating it … I’m JUST AS DEAD.
So go to a different hospital.
Eventually someone will die because of every conceivable cause. I’m not going to endorse a huge government override of the individual conscience of doctors and hospitals on the grounds that someday, eventually, someone may die.
That will suck. Death sucks. But the mitigation for this problem is information, not force. And the real cure is the *persuasion* – not the coercion – of hospitals that they should provide this care when it is warranted. Which 99+% of them already do.
Again, where is all this nonsense discussion of government coercion coming from? Where was there anything at all in the original story about government coercion? Robert has managed to redirect the discussion away from the point of the post to the usual libertarian/conservative dumping of all social ills on the shoulders of the government.
Not every issue is about government interference. Discussing whether the Catholic Church’s stance on medical procedure is fair or unfair, acceptable or objectionable, should be possible without such nonsense.
Thanks, Bear – this reads like one long derail to me too.
Bear – First sentence of the original post.
Discuss whatever you want, but the ACLU is asking the Federal government to force Catholic hospitals to do things the ACLU’s way. That by you isn’t coercion?
The pope does not have an army.
The lady at St. Luke’s had hypertension. She did not urgently need an abortion; carrying her pregnancy to term would have caused her health problems and very likely killed her, but it was not a situation where it was “St. Luke’s give me an abortion right now or I will die.” There was absolutely nothing stopping her from going somewhere else, if it hadn’t been available where she was. Which it was.
You’re entitled to your own view but not to your own facts.
No, Robert, it is not. The ACLU is not the government. Asking the government to do something is not the same as the government doing something. And anybody can appeal to the government regarding any issue they want, including legal remedy. None of that is government coercion either, it’s simply the way we settle disputes.
Further, the ACLU asked for an *investigation* which is certainly not the same as the government coercing anyone to do anything. Should the CMS find that Catholic-affiliated hospitals are breaking the law or acting in a way that contravenes guidelines for medical care, they may make any number of recommendations. And not all or even any of those might rise to coercion levels.
In short, you’ve assumed a lot based upon that “first sentence of the original post”.
What *is* coercion is a group of non-medical religious leaders forcing medical experts to practice in such a way as to endanger lives. Why do you ignore the obvious and direct coercion of the Catholic Church while concerning yourself with the unfounded possibility of government coercion?
How is the Church coercing anyone? Do doctors suddenly have a shortage of employment, such that they’re reliant on the charity of religion for employment, and will starve if they don’t subordinate their own conscience to that of the all-powerful church? No. Catholic dioceses are requiring hospitals that want to identify as Catholic to follow Catholic teaching. That’s not coercion, that’s AFFILIATION.
Private organizations can pressure and they can cajole, but they generally lack the power to coerce. The bishop doesn’t have an army. Ampersand putting “feminist posters only” on a post is not him holding a gun to the head of non-feminists, it is him setting up an affiliational test.
You’re dancing around the coercion issue by saying the ACLU isn’t coercing, just asking the government to “investigate”. But their request for an investigation is just one part of it – “The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday asked federal health officials to ensure that Catholic hospitals provide emergency reproductive care to pregnant women.”
They are asking the government to MAKE Catholic hospitals do things the way the ACLU wants them done.
Words mean things. Coercion has a meaning. One party in this drama is attempting to practice it.
The Catholic Church coercive? Never!
The bishop doesn’t have an army.
The Pope does.
How many people in need of a therapeutic abortion discover this only as they happen to be driving past St. Luke’s? None, would be my guess.
At least one person found herself admitted to St Luke’s and in desperate need of a life saving abortion. There’s no reason to believe her case was unique.
And the real cure is the *persuasion* – not the coercion – of hospitals that they should provide this care when it is warranted.
Hospitals are already required to provide emergency care to all, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc. I expect that, if they had their way entirely, Catholic hospitals would not treat non-Catholics. Or at least poor, uninsured non-Catholics. Certainly quite a number of private hospitals provide care to the uninsured only reluctantly. If this sort of “coercion” is allowed, why worry about an added layer which simply amounts to requiring the hospitals to treat patients competently and according to standard of care? Really, if anything had happened to the original patient her family would have the mother of all malpractice suits at the very least: The doctors knew what was wrong and knew how to cure the problem. Refusing to do so would be gross negligence and malpractice.
Wow – FIFTY TWO POSTS and nobody has come up with a hospital that actually refuses to abort in triage situations.
Because the Catholic hospital in this case – did the abortion, and was backed up by the ethical guidelines framed by Catholic health service organizations.
So when Robert talks about coercion – we’re really talking about a PRE-EMPTIVE smackdown of traditionally religious organizations.
Not because of what they actually did.
Because progressives think they’re smelly and should be run out of the public sphere.
Because chingona and others have defined themselves in terms of a bogeyman of religious imposition that does not exist – and/or they are using it like most good lefties, to practice their own ideological imposition.
Amazing.
Ben David, if you can’t manage to keep your tone of contempt for those of us who disagree with you in check, you’ll be asked to leave the blog (again), and this time I won’t let you back in.
Robert,
Do you have a link to that version of events? Cause your set of facts is different than every other article I’ve read about this case.
Here’s what I’m using for the facts of the case:
No, Robert, we are not entitled to our own facts. If you think these facts are wrong, please provide some source material.
I really like how you keep changing the terms of this discussion. First, it’s that government shouldn’t require hospitals to save women’s lives. Then, it’s that no hospital would really let a woman die anyway. Now, it’s that her life wasn’t really in danger anyway.
I’d also like to see someone address Dianne’s point: Hospitals already are required to treat anyone who has a life-threatening emergency who shows up in the ER. When that treatment involves abortion, why is it suddenly a different case?
And because I’ve been accused of being a big meanie, I’d like to point out that is was me who brought over the evidence that most Catholic hospitals have given the Church the finger on this one. Obviously, the Church is doing whatever it can to change that. I don’t want them to succeed. That’s all.
Because the Catholic hospital in this case – did the abortion, and was backed up by the ethical guidelines framed by Catholic health service organizations.
Just want to direct your attention to this article from Catholic News Agency.
In it, Church officials push back against the Catholic health association I quoted above, reiterate that the abortion in question was wrong and should not have been performed under any circumstances and that the Catholic health association doesn’t speak for the Church.
I was mistaken about the urgency of her condition.
I expect that, if they had their way entirely, Catholic hospitals would not treat non-Catholics. Or at least poor, uninsured non-Catholics.
Dianne, that shows ignorance of the entire history of the RCC’s involvement in health care. It’s an entirely unwarranted statement.
Out of deference to the concerns raised by Robert and Ben David in regards to the rarity of this problem and the unlikelihood that any hospital, no matter how infected by woman-hating religious claptrap, would make the decision to simply watch a woman die, I’ve changed my position.
Rather than requiring these hospitals, legally, to provide these services, or forcing the Catholic Church out of the health care business, I’d be okay if, in the case a hospital/church does decide to watch a woman die rather than perform a common procedure she’s agreed to, they’re charged criminally, with manslaughter at the very least.
Of course, if there has been an entire network, an organization persuading them to allow her to die, the responsible members of that organization ought to be charged as a criminal conspiracy to commit murder.
Since this problem is so unlikely, I’m sure you both agree, right?
—Myca
Robert, your “information to the consumers so they can decide” line makes no sense.
That’s not an anti-Catholic stance; it’s a economic-benefit one. Either hospitals/government have to filter admittees, or each person has to make the decision on their own. Obviously, the hospitals/government should make the triage, because there are fewer of them and they are more knowledgeable. It makes no sense to put the burden of decision (or mistake) on each of the millions of potential ER patients for each hospital–including residents and travelers alike.
If you’re going to get public benefits (tax breaks, etc) and if you’re going to make use of public zoning dedicated to hospitals and if you’re going to get various other things which make it easier and cheaper to start a hospital…. well, it’s perfectly reasonable to condition the receipt of those benefits on serving the public. And the most basic way for a hospital to serve the public is through the availability of all reasonably feasible medical procedures at the hospital. Or lose the authorization to accept ER patients.
Emergency abortion is common enough and dangerous enough that it would properly be on a list of “required services which all ER-containing hospitals must be equipped and willing to provide.” that’s a public health stance.
If Catholics are already doing that, then they won’t care. If they’re not, then it may be a lot harder for Catholics to start/maintain their own hospitals. But that’s not my problem. And it’s not coercive, at least not by your definition.
that shows ignorance of the entire history of the RCC’s involvement in health care.
Could be. Modern Catholic hospitals do seem to take patients (and at least some employees) of all religions. But it’s hard to believe that the religion that gave us the Crusades did that without some level of coercion or influence, if only the risk of losing patients to the Lutheran hospital next door. Be that as it may, all hospitals are “forced” (i.e. legally required) to care for people needing emergency care regardless of whether or not they approve of the person or the person’s decisions. Why should this change just because the life saving procedure needed is an abortion?
Ben David, if you can’t manage to keep your tone of contempt
– – – – – – – – – – –
Oh, I know many people who disagree with me in this way, and I am certain that they have the finest motives.
I just can’t figure it out the thought/emotional process used to justify some of the statements.
And yes – I do think there is a hard-left core in the progressive/liberal movements that really is not interested in dialogue or democratic process, and just wants to impose their will.
And yes there is an equal and opposite hard core of Christian crazies on the far right, and I feel just as uncomfortable with their line – as a Jew, American, and Westerner… we just have not yet found any of them running hospitals despite progressive rhetoric.
I’d add that the fact that we’re talking about emergency medicine makes this doubly so; people whose lives can only be saved by an emergency abortion are very unlikely to know this until they’ve reached the nearest hospital and seen a doctor.
Ben David, most of your argument has involved speculation about what liberals/progressives “really” think. It might help if you could actually quote someone saying what you say we’re saying.
If I understand the right wing definition of “progressive rhetoric” and “progressive” correctly, we certainly have found progressives running hospitals. The VA (government run) is just the most obvious example.
Going down the road of vague claims what the opposition says, any hospital forced by government regulations to serve those they don’t wish to serve or perform procedures they don’t wish to perform would, according to conservative and libertarian rhetoric, be run by progressives.
Ben-David,
Stay on topic. Stay civil. Use sources.
–Mod
But it’s hard to believe that the religion that gave us the Crusades did that without some level of coercion or influence,
Then perhaps you ought to do some actual study of the situation before using a serious debate regarding healthcare to make gratuitious and off-topic anti-Catholic comments.
There’s a bit of disagreement above about whether or not the Catholic policy is even a societal problem at all (nm whether the gov’t has the authority to get involved). It seems that it breaks down to the percentage of hospitals under this policy, and the likelihood that these service are actually needed.
How many hospital beds, then? Robert says about 10% in post no.2, I’ve seen that number at about 15% from journal articles, Robert says in post no.44 that “99+%” of hospitals would provide the required emergency service. I dunno where that puts us at, maybe 10% of hospitals refuse to provide a service required to save the life of an ER patient?
Second, how many times does this happen? the ACLU’s letter to the government included a link to this survey of doctors in Catholic hospitals: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8dm907hm#page-1
OK, so it comes from San Francisco State University and is cited by the ACLU, but it tells genuine-sounding stories from lots of doctors in Catholic hospitals who were told to NOT provide the standard level of care for a woman, in order to continue the beating of a fetal heart – even when that fetus had absolutely no chance of surviving (as in a partial miscarriage) and it was causing grave and permanent harm to the woman or putting her at serious risk of death. This happens. To real women and the people who love them.
If you had appendicitis and had a 10-15% chance of being admitted to a hospital with a policy of refusing standard medical care for appendicitis because of a dogma against surgery (but instead required its doctors to just monitor and hope you survive), wouldn’t that trouble you? Appendicitis is very rare. And you’d have a 85-90% chance of being admitted to a hospital that would do the surgery and save your life. Or, you might like society (in the form of laws, that’s how we do these things) to require that buildings that say “ER” on their doors (and get social benefits associated with that) have policies that ensure they use the best available science to care for their patients, without letting sectarian dogma get in the way.
Oh, and who owns that hospital? The hospital is not owned by the Catholic church. It is owned by the financial entity Catholic Healthcare West, so presumably it’s owned by shareholders who want to buy into “Catholic” hospitals, or just want to make a good return on their investment dollars. The hospital bore an endorsement from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix but, because of this incident, the Diocese told the hospital that it can no longer celebrate Mass in the hospital chapel and cannot claim affiliation with the church.
marmalade @70:
Wrong on both counts, if Wikipedia is to be believed:
The owners are seven different Catholic religous orders of nuns.