Running Right

by digby

There's a lot of despair over the decision by the Catholic Church to drop all coverage for spouses in Washington DC because one of the spouses somewhere might be gay. They've been doing this all over the country wherever LGBT Americans have been able to secure equality. Evidently, the Church is so adamant about gay people not receiving health care that they re willing to deny it to the families of all their workers. It's hard for me to imagine that Jesus would approve, but then I've long felt that his teachings don't have a whole lot to do with much of Christianity anymore.

In researching this issue I came across this story as well, which also illustrates how deeply conservative the Catholic hierarchy has become:


It might be the tip of an iceberg. Repeated ethical violations at an Oregon hospital led its bishop to revoke the hospital’s privilege to call itself “Catholic” and to warn that the same moral error could already have infected Catholic health-care systems nationwide.

St. Charles Medical Center in Bend lost the title “Catholic” on Feb. 15 due to its refusal to stop doing tubal ligations to sterilize women. Founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph in 1918 but no longer run by them, St. Charles is Oregon’s only Level II trauma center in the central and eastern part of the state.

“The crux of the conflict was the hospital and ethics board’s intentional misinterpretation of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ sterilizations,” said Diocese of Baker Bishop Robert Vasa. After several years of negotiations with St. Charles, Bishop Vasa made the difficult decision to strip the hospital of its “Catholic” status.

Tubal ligation, informally known as “getting one’s tubes tied,” is always a direct form of female sterilization not permitted in Catholic health-care institutions. But, based on the Catholic principle of double effect, other procedures that indirectly induce sterility — the removal of cancerous fallopian tubes or ovaries, for example — are permitted in situations where no simpler remedy is available.

“The heart of my conflict here is that the hospital and the ethics board identified all of these 200 to 250 sterilizations they do a year as indirect,” Bishop Vasa said.

A typical case at issue would be that of a mother with three children. A doctor may decide it could be “dangerous” for her to get pregnant again. In such a circumstance, St. Charles’ hospital and ethics board claimed it was permissible under the directives for a surgeon to sterilize the mother with the “indirect” intention of keeping her healthy.

“Clearly, that’s a direct sterilization with the secondary hope of preserving her health,” Bishop Vasa said. “So it was in my mind an intentional misrepresentation and misinterpretation of that teaching.”


Right. A celibate man who doesn't even know any of the people involved is the best person to make that sort of decision.

I have found it quite odd that the Bishops have been so reluctant to enthusiastically sign on to health insurance reform, particularly when they got their way on abortion. After all, the Catholic Church has long been deeply involved in the American health care system, still owns many hospitals and has a mission to cater to the poor. From their perspective, what's not to like about a big expansion of Medicaid or insurance reforms that allow people to keep their coverage?

I'm guessing it's this sort of thing. Abortion, after all, is far from their only beef. It's really about women's reproductive freedom in general and if the government is funding health care for more people, they will come increasingly under fire --- not to mention lose market share -- if they refuse to provide these services. (They would be legally allowed to refuse under the conscience clause.)

As they have shown in the decisions around gay marriage, they are perfectly willing to let people go uncovered rather than even take a chance that they might have to provide services they have determined are religiously improper. That's the moral deal they make. So, it's not surprising in the least that they would be willing to continue the uninsured status quo for similar reasons. (And needless to say, they may want to keep the competition to a minimum. They aren't financially naive.)

I suspect that's really why Bart Stupak will vote against health care reform even if they adopt his abortion amendment. The Bishops and the forced childbirth lobby are his masters and their agenda stretches far beyond abortion.


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