COMMENTARY: Catholic bishops `playing doctor’ with health care

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Frances Kissling is president of Catholics for a Free Choice, based in Washington, D.C., an independent organization that advocates for women’s reproductive health rights.) UNDATED _ Many people worry about doctors playing God. And so a lot of effort has gone into ensuring physicians do not compromise patients’ integrity, that […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Frances Kissling is president of Catholics for a Free Choice, based in Washington, D.C., an independent organization that advocates for women’s reproductive health rights.)

UNDATED _ Many people worry about doctors playing God. And so a lot of effort has gone into ensuring physicians do not compromise patients’ integrity, that they do not make life and death decisions without patient consultation and permission. Doctors, in the main, are complying.


But now a new danger to health and individual conscience looms large because Roman Catholic bishops are increasingly playing doctor _ not only in their own hospitals, but also in non-Catholic hospitals that have merged with Catholic institutions.

A well-publicized case springs to mind.

Doctors at a Catholic hospital in Ireland, following rules laid out for them by Catholic health care guidelines based on church teaching, refused to treat one woman’s recurring breast cancer because she was pregnant and the life-saving treatments she needed might compromise the fetus.

Sheila Hodgers’ tumors ran rampant on her neck, legs, and spine. Her back pain was so severe she could hardly stand. Her husband remembers her in the hospital screaming with pain because for a long time she was denied even pain killers. She was treated neither as patient nor person but, her husband said,”as an incubator.” When she gave birth at seven months, the baby died immediately. Sheila Hodgers died two days later.”Horrible, but that can’t happen here,”you might say. But Catholic hospitals in the United States are also bound to follow church teaching when approving or disapproving of medical treatment, and the chances of such a medical horror story occurring here are increasing as the boom continues in mergers and affiliations between Catholic and non-Catholic health care institutions.

More and more people are receiving health care services in facilities following Catholic guidelines. And church teachings are on a collision course with services medicine can now provide, especially for women.

The guidelines are spelled out in the”Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services,”written by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

They forbid services contradicting church teachings, thus prohibiting not only abortions, but also, among other things, tubal ligations, vasectomies, in vitro fertilization, and the prescribing or dispensing of contraceptive supplies. And they apply to every patient, regardless of the individual’s own religious beliefs or best medical judgment.

The effects of these rules are real and harmful.

Imagine an infertile couple being denied the most effective methods of enhancing fertility _ in part because Catholic teaching forbids masturbation.


Or imagine a young woman who was raped going to a Catholic hospital or a secular hospital that has merged with a Catholic one. After undergoing a physical examination _ a trying procedure in these circumstances _ she is denied a morning-after pill to prevent pregnancy.

And in a world in which medical advances are made every day, it is not hard to envision the day when, if Catholic teaching continues to be allowed to determine health care services, patients with cancer, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease will be denied life-saving therapies because the treatments involve fetal tissue.

These forbidden practices affect patients’ rights and health; they also deny doctors their ability to exercise their best medical judgment.

A recent case in Manchester, N.H., provides a good example. A gynecologist was forced to send a poor pregnant patient by taxi to a facility 80 miles away after hospital officials said his hospital privileges would be revoked if he went ahead with the medically necessary abortion.

The woman was 14 weeks pregnant _ not long enough for the fetus to be viable _ when her water broke, leaving virtually no chance for the fetus to survive and a strong likelihood a life-threatening infection would develop. She required an immediate abortion, but the hospital where her physician had privileges had merged with a Catholic facility, and abortions are now restricted. The woman had to travel to a hospital in Lebanon, N.H., where second trimester abortions are performed.

Health care decisions require complex moral judgments. When we allow bishops to play doctor, we exclude patients, physicans, and the community as a whole from the decision-making process. As more mergers with Catholic hospitals take place across the country, communities would do well to consider the impact on medical decision-making and health care access before allowing deals to be sealed.


DEA END KISSLING

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