Who owns your life?, by Ken Burrows: Freethought Views August 2019

 

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