Who owns your life?
By Ken Burrows
At your next hospitalization or medical appointment, will your health care be dictated by religious beliefs you do not hold? In a growing number of cases, the answer could be “Yes.”
This is due to the increasing number of non-Catholic hospitals and clinics that are merging with Catholic health care entities and to the growing ecclesiastical pressure on these merged entities to strictly adhere to Catholic moral guidelines in delivering health care.
Although this issue is not new, it is once again gaining attention because the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2018 updated its Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERDs). These ERDs prohibit health care actions deemed to be “intrinsically immoral” as defined by the church. High on the list of such actions are birth control, sterilization, abortion, infertility treatments, and some miscarriage management techniques. These are prohibited even if—as is the norm—the majority of admitted patients are themselves not Catholic and do not see these health care interventions as “immoral.”
The potential impact on patients is huge. Catholic health systems control approximately 16% of hospital beds in the U.S., with even higher percentages in close to half the states. In many instances, a Catholic facility is the only one proximately serving a given geographic area.
In some locations in the past, when a non-Catholic or secular health care entity merged with a Catholic one, flexibilities allowed for creating a “hospital within a hospital”—a separate unit or floor where health services the church disapproves of could still be provided to patients. The new ERDs strive to severely restrict, or effectively eliminate, that option after a merger, forcing previously non-Catholic facilities to adhere fully to Catholic dictates. The ERDs additionally prohibit health care staff in a merged entity from making referrals to other facilities for patients needing care that goes against Catholic teaching.
The National Health Law Program (NHLP), which litigates to protect access to health care when it sees it being unjustly withheld, states that the number of U.S. hospitals with a Catholic affiliation has increased 22% since 2001. The NHLP believes the Catholic ERDs “substitute religious doctrine for the standard of care” by “placing religious beliefs ahead of patients’ health and lives.”
Autonomy is another pivotal concern. The ERDs literally state: “We are not the owners of our lives.” Rather, God is. So the ERDs dictate that a Catholic facility will not honor even a patient’s advance health care directives if they are “contrary to Catholic teaching.” Which calls into question the Directives’ professed commitment to respecting a patient’s “free and informed conscience” and protecting the inherent dignity of every person. Health care choices made by an adult patient should be respected, the ERDs state, “unless it is contrary to Catholic moral teaching.”
Finally, in violation of the medical ethic of informed consent, patients are often not clearly apprised of how Catholic teaching may override medical decision-making in their health care. The online site Rewire.News, which focuses on reproductive rights, has noted that less than a third of Catholic hospital websites nationwide mention how the facility’s religious affiliation may affect reproductive health care.
So, will mandated adherence to Catholic teaching put YOUR health care and autonomy at risk one day? With inadequate upfront disclosure on an institution’s health care policies, will you even know?
Published August 7, 2019 in the Freethinkers of Colorado Springs Freethought Views column with the quotation below.
There is no place for dogma in science. --- J. Robert Oppenheimer
Slow Operations
By Groff Schroeder
Late in the age of enlightenment, brave and brilliant citizens of the “new world” created a constitutional democratic republic called the United States of America. While waging a difficult “Revolutionary War” between 1775 and 1783, America's founders adopted three documents, a “Declaration of Independence” (July 4, 1776), a Constitution (September 17, 1787), and a Bill of Rights (August 21, 1789). Together with a series of elegant symbols such as E Pluribus Unum (the motto “from many one”), these documents founded a “federalist” nation, a democratic republic whose government is the functional aspect – the working reality – of the United States of America.
This new national government, which Abraham Lincoln would call “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” at Gettysburg in 1863, implemented important, radical, and historic new ideas, granting the people not only democratic rights (political power), but also equal civil rights (right to free speech and free assembly) and human rights (right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness).
Despite the incalculable value of these rights, and even as American soldiers sacrifice life and limb defending them, many churches, corporations, individuals, and organizations strongly oppose paying taxes to support them. Furthermore, despite the founders' documented attempts to prevent concentrations of wealth and power, Thomas Jefferson correctly observed in the Diffusion of Knowledge Bill of 1779 that "even under the best forms [of government], those entrusted with power have, in time and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”
The Corrupt Foreign Practices Act makes it illegal for American companies to provide foreign officials with anything of value to influence any act of that official, yet corporate “slow operations” led to the Supreme Court's decision equating “campaign donations” (which are neither free nor speech) with free speech. Similarly, apparent politico-legal trickery led to the recent “Citizen's United” decision.
Such “deregulation” (making illegal things legal) means any corporation, organization, individual – even foreign governments - may now secretly provide officials of the United States government with almost any/every thing of virtually value imaginable to influence virtually any/every act imaginable by the official. These decisions appear to thwart the intentions of America's Founders, granting those with vast wealth virtually unlimited power to influence not only American elections, but also the votes of representatives once they take office.
Meanwhile, churches and religious organizations such as the “Moral Majority” and the self-described “Christian Mafia” (no kidding) have also gained vast political power, apparently through inter-generational pulpit politics. Even as they sometimes oppose compliance with public policy mandates, religious organizations increasingly insist that their “freedoms” override the civil and human rights of actual human beings. The “Fortnight of Freedom” project advances the Catholic Church's (Rome, Italy) “religious freedom” to use health insurance policy to force its American employees comply with its religious teachings.
On the Fourth of July, many will celebrate Independence Day and the principles of American freedom with libations, food, and fireworks. At least some Americans will wonder how long We the (little) People will be able to exercise our democratic, civil, and human rights, which increasingly appear to belong to mega-churches, multinational corporations, and individuals with enough money to purchase them outright on America's “free” market of political power.