Tag: Separation of church and healthcare

  • The only hospital in Muskegon County

    Let’s take a look at Tamesha Means v United States Conference of Catholic Bishops [pdf].

    Plaintiff Tamesha Means brings this negligence action against the United States Conference for Catholic Bishops and others for promulgating and implementing directives that cause pregnant women who are suffering from a miscarriage to be denied appropriate medical care, including information about their condition and treatment options. These mandates, known as the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (“Directives”), do not merely set forth the opinions of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (“USCCB”) on certain health care issues. Rather, the Directives require Catholic hospitals to abide by their terms, even when doing so places a woman’s health or life at risk.

    There you go. That’s the first three sentences and it sums up all we need to know right there – a much too obscure and little-noticed fact about health care in these here United States – the fact that the conference of Catholic bishops orders Catholic hospitals to refuse to perform even life-saving abortions. If you tell people this they don’t believe you. They may even call you a liar. And yet it’s true.

    This urgently needs to be fixed. The federal government needs to tell the USCCB that it may not interfere with medical care, period. The feds need to tell Catholic hospitals that they have to do whatever is best for the patient, in consultation with the patient, period. No bishops.

    Here’s an interesting detail:

    Defendant Stanley Urban is a resident and citizen of the State of Pennsylvania. Urban is the Chair of Catholic Health Ministries, an unincorporated foreign entity that is the religious sponsor of MHP.

    MHP is Mercy Health Partners, which is the hospital that gave Tamesha Means such terrible faith-based treatment. Why do we even have “religious sponsors” for hospitals? Why aren’t hospitals secular as a matter of course? They should be welcome to have all sorts of religious services available for people who want them, of course, because hospitals are obviously top of the list of places where religious people are going to want religious company and help. But that should be strictly separate from medical treatment. It’s deranged that it’s not.

    Another important detail:

    MHP is the only hospital in Muskegon County, Michigan.

    A Catholic monopoly on hospital care in a whole county.

    17. Plaintiff’s ultrasound report indicates Plaintiff had an amniotic fluid index of only 3.4 and a condition called oligohydramnios, which refers to a decreased volume of amniotic fluid due to the premature rupture of membranes.

    18. MHP also diagnosed Plaintiff with preterm premature rupture of membrane, a condition in which a woman’s amniotic sac ruptures with a gestation less than 37 weeks.

    19. MHP informed Plaintiff that the fetus was not yet viable.

    20. MHP did not inform Plaintiff that in most cases, an amniotic fluid index of 3.4 at 18 weeks of pregnancy, in the context of premature rupture of membranes, means that the fetus will either not be born alive or will be born alive and die very shortly thereafter.

    21. MHP did not inform Plaintiff about the serious risks to her health if she attempted to continue the pregnancy.

    It’s medical malpractice, at the behest of Catholic bishops. At the only hospital in Muskegon County, Michigan.

    We live in a fucking theocracy here.

  • “So long as it does not contradict Catholic principles”

    Ok new item to contemplate in slack-jawed horror and then shout the place down about. A Twitter friend alerted me to the fact that the University of Texas at Austin medical school recently partnered with a Catholic hospital group, Seton, and the students were told they have to comply with the ERD.

    I can barely get my head around it. It’s a state school. And the ERD tells hospital and medical staff that they may not perform abortions ever.

    A publicly funded university is ordering its med students to comply with church rules. In the United States, in 2013.

    From the Austin Statesman a year ago, December 2012.

    Plans to establish a medical school at the University of Texas and train its students at a Catholic-owned teaching hospital have rekindled debate over public health care services for women and the impact of Vatican rules against birth control.

    Local health and university officials said they don’t see a problem with a partnership between UT, the Seton Healthcare Family and Central Health, Travis County’s hospital district. Services for women will continue to be offered in the same way they are being provided now, officials said.

    Except for the Catholic part. This was a year ago, so it was weeks after the news about Savita Halappanavar came out. You would think health officials would be paying attention.

    More recently here is Catholic Watch this past August.

    Below is a message sent out by the University of Texas at Austin that contains a line of such unadulterated BS that it’s making CatholicWatch’s head spin.  For those in the know, the University of Texas is trying to justify its partnership with Seton Health Care Family (which requires compliance with the ERDs) to train future physicians.  You can read more about ithere.

    Here’s what Executive Vice President and Provost Steven Leslie had to say about the deal that is so mind-boggling:  ”It is true that the doctors employed by Seton must abide by Catholic directives while practicing medicine in those facilities, including rules on birth control, abortion and end-of-life care. However, those same directives also require that patients are fully informed so they can give free consent, which requires doctors to share the full range of information about medications and procedures, including contraception.”

    Now it’s clear that Leslie has either never read the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care or he read them but didn’t comprehend what they actually say.

    Here’s what the ERDs say on this point, starting with an excerpt from Directive 27:  ”Free and informed consent requires that the person or the person’s surrogate receive all reasonable information about the essential nature of the proposed treatment and its benefits; its risks, side-effects, consequences, and cost and any reasonable and MORALLY LEGITIMATE alternatives, including no treatment at all…..The free and informed health care decision of the person or the person’s surrogate is to be followed so long as it does not contradict Catholic principles.”

    Which means a person who enters into a Catholic hospital automatically is deprived of THE RIGHT TO FREE AND INFORMED CONSENT because no procedure can be done that violates Catholic principles and no information about alternatives that are not deemed “morally legitimate” in the eyes of the Catholic Church need be discussed either.

    This is such an outrage.