The goddy veto on health care
The Times reports on the recurring issue of the Catholic takeover of hospitals in the US and the fact that Catholic hospitals both refuse to perform procedures they have a goddy objection to and conceal this fact up front. This by the way is yet another reason to prefer a national health service: the fact that it’s national as opposed to Catholic.
The opening personal story:
After experiencing life-threatening pre-eclampsia during her first two pregnancies, Jennafer Norris decided she could not risk getting pregnant again. But several years later, suffering debilitating headaches and soaring blood pressure, she realized her I.U.D. had failed. She was pregnant, and the condition had returned.
At 30 weeks, with her health deteriorating, she was admitted to her local hospital in Rogers, Ark., for an emergency cesarean section. To ensure that she would never again be at risk, she asked her obstetrician to tie her tubes immediately following the delivery.
The doctor’s response stunned her. “She said she’d love to but couldn’t because it was a Catholic hospital,” Ms. Norris, 38, recalled in an interview.
So they – the bishops – forbid an operation that would protect her against another life-threatening pregnancy. They endanger her life for the sake of their fucking church.
Experiences like hers are becoming more common, as a wave of mergers widens the reach of Catholic medical facilities across the United States, and the Trump administration finalizes regulations to further expand the ability of health care workers and institutions to decline to provide specific medical procedures for moral or religious reasons.
Even, apparently, ones that are medically necessary.
The Catholic takeover eats up more hospitals all the time.
Most facilities provide little or no information up front about procedures they won’t perform. The New York Times analyzed 652 websites of Catholic hospitals in the United States, using a list maintained by the Catholic Health Association. On nearly two-thirds of them, it took more than three clicks from the home page to determine that the hospital was Catholic.
And why is that? Because they don’t want you to know. They want to hide the fact that they’re Catholic and that they will refuse to perform some procedures, yes, even if you’re bleeding to death in front of them.
Only 17 individual Catholic hospital websites, fewer than 3 percent, contained an easily found list of services not offered for religious reasons, and all of them were in Washington State, which requires that such information be published on a hospital’s site. In the rest of the country, such lists, if available, were posted only on the corporate parent’s site, and they were often difficult to find.
Devils. Fiends. Murderers.
“I think that any business is not going to lead off with what they don’t do,” Charles Bouchard, senior director of theology and ethics at The Catholic Health Association, said in response to the Times analysis. “They are always going to talk about what they do do. And that goes for contractors and car salesmen. They are not going to start off by saying, ‘We don’t sell this model,’ or ‘We don’t do this kind of work.’”
That’s Catholic “ethics” for you. “We’re just a business, so we don’t feel like telling you what we refuse to do based on our perverted male-centric ideas of what our fictional god wants, so hahaha sucks to be you.”
Responding to a growing number of mergers and affiliations with secular institutions, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops updated its instructions to Catholic hospitals in June, ordering them to continue to provide care consistent with church teaching when entering into such business arrangements, including prohibiting procedures that are “intrinsically immoral, such as abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and direct sterilization.”
…and direct sterilization even when a pregnancy could kill the woman and the woman requests the sterilization. Doesn’t matter; not her decision; church’s decision; bishops’ decision; she’s just some slag.
Patients interviewed for this article said that even when they knew they were at a Catholic hospital, they were only aware that Catholic health facilities did not perform abortions, and were taken aback to learn of other services that were off limits.
“People have told me I was incredibly naïve for never having considered it, but I was completely surprised that there was any difference in the level of care that would be provided to someone in a Catholic hospital,” said Angela Valavanis, 45, who was denied a tubal ligation following an emergency cesarean section at a Catholic hospital in Evanston, Ill.
Even some procedures that might appear to be necessary safeguards against medical complications are prohibited by the E.R.D.s. For instance, if a fetus is no longer viable after a woman’s water breaks early in her pregnancy, most Catholic hospitals will not perform an abortion until after a fetal heartbeat is no longer detected, or the pregnant woman’s life is in imminent danger.
In other words they will risk killing the pregnant woman the way University Hospital Galway killed Savita Halappanavar.
Devils. Fiends. Murderers.
This isn’t new, though. My mother went through this in 1967…at a naval hospital, which would perform the procedure but the doctor was Catholic. Her next pregnancy was a problem, with diabetic symptoms of the pregnancy, and left her in bed for most of her pregnancy, threatening her life. Five children would have been left without a mother. I was very young, and found myself part of a rotating care team consisting of myself and my two sisters (my brother was exempted because, well, woman’s work. My other brother was only 3). We provided the round the clock care she needed, and she pulled through, no thanks to her doctor.
My mother was 31 years old and a fully functional adult when she first requested her tubes tied. She was treated like a child because her doctor felt that he knew more about what she was entitled to than she did, and he nearly killed her…because if he had done what she wanted, she might have had sex without the risk of pregnancy and death. Must punish women for having sex, even married women. I have often wished I was a fly on the wall when that doctor scolded my mother for getting pregnant again after he refused to tie her tubes or prescribe birth control!
No, I know it’s not new, but it’s spreading. The church is deliberately swallowing up as many hospitals as it can.
Yes, but they’re so charitable!
Oh, wait, they’re not. They provide slightly less charity care than the average American hospital (about half as much as public hospitals do, and not that much better than private for-profit ones), and take the fewest Medicaid patients of any type of hospital (yep, worse than the for-profit ones!)
Yeah, I expected you knew it wasn’t new. But it’s astonishing how many people I talk to who think this just came up because of all the “hatred of the Catholic Church” and because of Obamacare. They are sympathetic to the church because the all-powerful secularists are forcing them not to be able to follow their beliefs even in private.
Yeah, nonsense, I know.
Meanwhile, I have a Catholic friend who argues with me that the church doesn’t believe this, isn’t doing this, and refuses to read anything that she deems as critical of the church. If I lived that way, I would never have become a reasonably happy atheist, but would have remained a deeply miserable Christian. And if I followed that now, I would not find the atheist movement so deeply disturbing that I have pulled back substantially from public involvement in it. It requires a lot of ostrich-ing to maintain a worldview so far from reality.
Iknklast@4
I’m not sure how many Christians or other religiots are ‘deeply miserable’. Some appear to be completely barking mad, however in their own bizarre way they’re probably happy, particularly when the alternative is to face an uncaring Universe.There’s a deity in the sky that has a plan for them and all they need is to follow the rules and never, never, contemplate the meaning of life. Proselytising prevents self reflection.
I can’t remember ever, as an adult, of being a believer, that’s despite an education at a Christian school. Luckily I avoided the Catholic system of brain-washing.
I describe myself as an unhappy atheist, I can’t see the point of life, particularly after my wife’s death. However as the Buddhist expression states ‘Tired of life?’ ‘Wait and it will go away’. Soon, in my case.
Once atheists develop a doctrine and start arguing amongst themselves it’s time to keep a low profile. I’ve spent many fruitless hours trying to convince believers that atheism is not a belief system. The gnu/new atheists did much to undermine that with their ego tripping ‘debates’.
I wasn’t actually talking about Christians in general, only about myself. And I was. Ten years of intensive therapy miserable. Ready to kill myself miserable. Whether a lot of Christians are deeply miserable is not something I can speak to; my entire family was miserable, and took it out in hating each other and everyone else, especially me. They will never get therapy, nor lose their religion, nor be nice people. I got out of that world, and moved on. I consider myself reasonably happy in contrast to my previous life, but I suppose most people would consider me basically not happy because I am cynical and sarcastic and still have issues with anxiety. So…anyway, not trying to make a generalization about a large and diverse group of people.
Iknklast @6
Understood.
I’ve certainly encountered miserable Christians, who are, I’m sure, miserable because of their religion. An example, my former neighbors, a young couple were certainly in that category. The young woman was the daughter of Christian parents who disowned her because she ‘married out’, ie a Christian from a different sect. She required psychological counselling, regrettably the counsellor was more of a sexual predator than a therapist. I have no idea what state her mental health is in now.