Abortion fight at Catholic hospital pushes ACLU to seek federal help

[The Northerner]

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.

"We continue to applaud St. Joseph's for doing what is right by standing up for women's health and complying with federal law," five ACLU attorneys wrote in a letter to Donald Berwick, the CMS administrator, and his deputy, Marilyn Tavenner.

"But this confrontation never should have happened in the first place, because no hospital - religious or otherwise - should be prohibited from saving women's lives and from following federal law."

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.

"The Bishop's drastic and heavy-handed actions send a chilling message to Catholic hospitals throughout the country, as well as their employees: If hospitals comply with federal law and provide emergency abortion care there will be consequences," the letter states. "The dioceses cannot be permitted to dictate who lives and who dies in Catholic-owned hospitals."

Ellen Griffith, a Medicare spokeswoman, said on Wednesday that the ACLU's original complaint was still pending and that officials had not reviewed the latest letter.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/22/AR2010122206219.html?hpid=sec-religion

[patrice]

1. Do you think pregnant women ever die in our overt and covert holy wars? nt

[Shallah Kali]

2. When There's a Heartbeat: Miscarriage Management in Catholic-Owned Hospitals

http://www.ansirh.org/_documents/library/freedman_ajph10-2008.pdf

or google cache:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9mGDKjAmFycJ:www.ansirh.org/_documents/library/freedman_ajph10-2008.pdf+miscarriage+management+in+catholic+hospitals&hl=en&gl=us

In residency, Dr P and Dr H had been taught to perform uterine evacuation or labor induction on patients during inevitable miscarriage whether fetal heart tones were present or not. In their new Catholic-owned hospital environment, such treatment was considered a prohibited abortion by the governing ethics committee because the fetus is still alive and the patient is not yet experiencing ‘‘a life-threatening pathology’’ such as sepsis. Physicians such as Dr H found that in some cases, transporting the patient to another hospital for dilation and curettage (D&C) was quicker and safer than waiting for the fetal heart-beat to stop while trying to stave off infection and excessive blood loss.

Dr B, an obstetrician–gynecologist working in an academic medical center, described how a Catholic-owned hospital in her western urban area asked her to accept a patient who was already septic. When she received the request, she recommended that the physician from the Catholic-owned hospital perform a uterine aspiration there and not further risk the health of the woman by delaying her care with the transport.

Because the fetus was still alive, they wouldn’t intervene. And she was hemorrhaging, and they called me and wanted to transport her, and I said, ‘‘It sounds like she’s unstable, and it sounds like you need to take care of her there.’’ And I was on a recorded line, I reported them as an EMTALA , ‘‘This isn’t something that we can take care of.’’ And I , ‘‘Well, if I don’t accept her, what are you going to do with her?’’ {He answered}, ‘‘We’ll put her on a floor {i.e., admit her to a bed in the hospital instead of keeping her in the emergency room}; we’ll transfuse her as much as we can, and we’ll just wait till the fetus dies.’’

Ultimately, Dr B chose to accept the patient to spare her unnecessary suffering and harm, but she saw this case as a form of ‘‘patient dumping,’’ because the patient was denied treatment and transported while unstable.

[Shallah Kali]

3. Are Catholic Hospitals Safe for Pregnant Women?

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2010/05/17/when-catholic-care-isnt-care

The author of the study, Dr. Debra Stulberg, has had her own issues with medical directives being overturned by Catholic hospital administrators, and in one case a woman would have been forced to put her life in danger just to avoid abortion.

http://www.self.com/health/2007/05/denial-of-health-care?currentPage=7
Family physician Debra Stulberg, M.D., was completing her residency in 2004 when West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park, Illinois, was acquired by the large Catholic system Resurrection Health Care. "They assured us that patient care would be unaffected," Dr. Stulberg says. "But then I got to see the reality." The doctor was struck by the hoops women had to jump through to get basic care. "One of my patients was a mother of four who had wanted a tubal ligation at delivery but was turned down," she says. "When I saw her not long afterward, she was pregnant with unwanted twins."

And in emergency scenarios, Dr. Stulberg says, the newly merged hospital did not offer standard-of-care treatments. 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," Dr. Stulberg 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.

snip

And truly, many of these are cases of saving a woman's life. Women who are already in danger due to their pre-existing conditions are being told that not only are they so expendable, and that these hospitals will not perform the abortions that would save their lives, but that they should further risk their lives by seeking out some other place that might provide them care, such as Michelle Lee, who had to travel to a different state to have a necessary procedure performed.

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/355/1/1
In 1998, the Louisiana State University Medical Center in Shreveport refused to provide an abortion for Michelle Lee, a woman with cardiomyopathy who was on the waiting list for a heart transplant, despite her cardiologist's warning that the pregnancy might kill her. Hospital policy dictated that to qualify for an abortion, a woman's risk of dying had to be greater than 50 percent if her pregnancy was carried to term; a committee of physicians ruled that Lee did not meet this criterion. Since her cardiomyopathy made an outpatient abortion too dangerous, she traveled 100 miles to Texas by ambulance to have her pregnancy terminated.

The woman's risk of dying has to be greater than 50 percent. And even then, who gets to determine if her risk is above 50 percent, if the doctors are being overruled by the Catholic hospital administrators? As Dr. Debra Stulberg's attending put it to her, "So, it looks like we’re going to be working for the Pope."

[mainer]

4. some of the comments are amazing --defending the bishop!

giving him kudos for trying to save the life of an innocent baby! (Clearly these idiots don't know how long the human gestation period is and think that an 11 week old fetus is the same as a crying, kicking infant)

[lunasun]

5. To them it is !! stay away from Catholic Hospitals if miscarrying (my own experience)

I had a blighted ovum which means a fertilized egg was growing but no embryo was actually inside. I was bleeding and in pain but would not do D&C ...which is basically insane as there was no life (embryo)to save at 7 weeks and never would be - it was a defective egg that attached to my uterus. I could have gotten an infection if I had listened to them,possibly preventing further fertility .
.................................................................................................................
I heard the nun involved on giving the OK at this hospital in the story was removed from chuch duties a couple of days ago but if you are a pedophile priest you are just transfered to carry on = more insanity.

Made sure when I did have a child it was NOT at a catholic hospital,one reason being that someone I know wanted pain meds for cancer and instead the staff came and prayed over her at the C hospital in the area..family had her transferred to a county hospital....only go if you are looking for an exorcism specialist or something like that !

[musette_sf]

7. His Excellency The Bishop Olmstead Himself

in his most recent press release, calls the fetus an "11 week old baby".

Not just once but several times.

I heard this conscienceless pompous @ss on the radio yesterday (EWTN Radio, natch) defending his indefensible stand.

Going on and on about how the hospital doesn't realize what the financial impact of his actions will be to them.

Um, I'm guessing that any sentient Catholic in Phoenix is going to move their weekly parish donations OUT of the collection basket and directly TO St. Joseph's, since money is the only way to get the attention of these amoral prigs. I think the Bishop had better be worrying about the financial impact his actions are going to have on the Diocese of Phoenix.

This could well be a defining moment in American Catholicism. At least, I hope so.

[jwirr]

6. Any hospital that follows that antiquated b-lls--t should have to put a

sign outside their entrance that read "we let mothers die". Truth in packaging.

[Angry Dragon]

8. If the church finds they can not provide ALL medical care

then they need to stay in their churches and rot in their own evil

Meaning the church leaders and not the truly faithful

[LeftishBrit]

9. And just to show that the Christian Right is not totally confined to America...

see this, from the blog of a Catholic priest in Kent, England.

http://the-hermeneutic-of-continuity.blogspot.com/2010/12/backbone-award-bishop-olmstead.html


It horrifies me that even those who are generally anti-abortion would not make an exception when a mother's life is at risk.