Priestly healthcare
It’s not just the Supreme Court ruling though.
Washington is just one of a handful of states in which more than 40% of hospital beds are controlled by Catholic doctrine. This shift became more acute with the 2021 merger of Virginia Mason and CHI Franciscan, creating Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, which operates 11 hospitals and 300 sites of care. With that merger, Virginia Mason said it would “not become Catholic,” according to reporting by The News Tribune, but it also would no longer provide “elective” abortions or participate in the state’s Death with Dignity process.
A distinction without a difference. Nobody gives a shit whether Virginia Mason is playing with rosary beads or not, the point is that it shut down abortions at the behest of a Catholic institution, in a state that has not passed laws forcing women to stay pregnant.
The new entity’s website now reads, “It is the policy of Virginia Mason Franciscan Health that all services rendered in our facilities shall be supportive of life. At no time may direct actions to terminate life be performed or permitted.”
Oh really? So they don’t use antibiotics? They don’t use germicidal cleaning materials?
This latest merger came nearly a decade after secular Swedish merged with Catholic Providence in 2013 and stopped providing most abortion care. Under pressure from reproductive health advocates in 2011 when the merger was being considered, Swedish partnered with Planned Parenthood to underwrite a clinic to provide abortion care near the hospital.
Why are secular hospitals merging with Catholic ones anyway? And why aren’t there laws preventing Catholic hospitals from imposing their religion on patients? Why aren’t all hospitals secular as a matter of course? What does religion have to do with medical care?
A spokesperson for Providence Swedish Puget Sound said in an email, “Elective abortions are not performed in Swedish facilities. However, Swedish does not deny emergency care. When a pregnant patient’s life is at risk, Swedish clinicians provide all necessary medical interventions, including pregnancy terminations, to protect and save the life of the patient.”
How very generous.
I think the government should not provide any funds to hospitals that refuse to deal with reproductive health and end of life care appropriately, according to the law, and according to the best interests of the patient. Since a lot of the money supporting those hospitals comes from the government in one way or another, and not the church, perhaps the government refusing to pay Medicare or Medicaid claims, while holding the patient not liable for those charges, it would help the church suddenly realize they don’t want to be in health care anymore…or at least, they want to follow the laws.
Of course, that won’t happen. If it did, the Supreme Court would reverse it because it is against the Constitution’s mandate to support religion…which seems to be how they read the freedom of religion clause. The establishment clause is just ink on paper to this court, a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Catholic hospitals are the worst, especially given the eagerness they have for swallowing secular hospitals, but they are not the only ones. Protestant hospitals also deny abortion. And abortion is hard to obtain even at secular hospitals.
https://www.ualrpublicradio.org/local-regional-news/2021-12-06/report-highlights-abortion-access-at-southern-hospitals-including-in-arkansas
Sackbut, that’s true, but I’ve been in both kinds of hospitals, and Protestant hospitals never denied me my birth control while I was in there. (Though to be fair, one of the Catholic hospitals I was in allowed me to continue the birth control as long as I provided the pills. They would put it on my schedule of meds, but would not dispense it.)
What’s really sad is that my Catholic friends have no idea most of this is going on. They think the church believes like they do. They think all this craziness is Protestant evangelicals. And they won’t listen to anything about the church unless it is positive, so they never learn differently. I often suspect they know there are problems; they may even know what they are. That’s why they won’t listen, because then they would have a moral obligation to do something about it or leave the church.
Iknklast, your description of your Catholic friends’ attitudes mirrors that of my Catholic family members (my wife and her family). I can’t really have a discussion with them about it beyond recognizing that rank and file Catholics are not really in sync with the Catholic hierarchy (especially the US Conference of Catholic Bishops), but being unwilling to condemn even the USCCB, just complain about them. We have had some discussions about the “faith versus works” concept, via which many Protestant denominations come in for criticism, but that’s about it. (Some of them have advised to avoid Catholic hospitals; I don’t think they’ve really grasped just how much Catholic hospitals are trying to swallow the entire national hospital system.)
I think it’s essentially impossible for many of them to leave the Catholic Church, just as impossible as it is, at least in a personal or emotional sense, for many of us who are furious at the US to leave the US.
Alabama is only eight percent Catholic, a small minority, and the vast majority of the anti-abortion nonsense comes from Protestants. But the local Catholic church has a “God is Pro-Life” sign in the front yard, and does have members who participate in anti-abortion efforts.
I brought the Protestants up I think to make the point that anti-abortion rhetoric is often seen to come from the South, and from the Catholic Church, and the two are not the same thing.
I grew up in Southern Baptist territory; at the time of Roe, the Southern Baptist Convention was in support of it, but leadership changed and…well…
Now I live in territory split nearly evenly between Catholic and Lutheran, I don’t remember which synod, but it is one of the conservative ones that dominates here. The Catholics in my town are mostly with the USCCB, some of them even more conservative. The Catholic school children have had to do anti-abortion posters every year, and participate in anti-abortion protests and stuff. My Catholic friends in Lincoln are more like I hear the rank and file Catholics described, and they are much better than the God they worship.
I remember having a discussion when I was in Texas with a Catholic friend. I was reading The Harlot by the Side of the Road and telling her and another friend about it. My Catholic friend (the other was basically atheist; she said she believed in all of the gods and none of the gods, which is sort of nonsense when you think about it, but I think that was the point) My Catholic friend kept telling me “That isn’t in the Bible”. These were all stories about women, all from the Old Testament (or Jewish Bible), and even when I gave her chapter and verse so she could look it up, she told me she had read the Bible and knew those stories weren’t in there. I also had read the Bible, but perhaps without the blinders of religion, you are able to see warts and all.