In the wake of the Dobbs’ decision permitting restrictions on abortion, pro-choice advocates and their allies have launched a series of legislative, administrative and media attacks on Catholic healthcare, calling for laws that would make it impossible for Catholic healthcare to continue.
In New York, the state senate passed a bill requiring hospitals to publish which procedures they refuse to perform. In Worcester, Massachusetts, the city council voted to investigate pro-life crisis pregnancy centres to determine if they provide false information to clients. In Oregon, a new law forbids hospital mergers that would result in restricted access to reproductive services.
At the federal level, the Biden administration has proposed new regulations that would require all hospitals to perform gender transition surgeries. Failure to do so, according to the regulation, would constitute illegal discrimination.
And op-eds in mainstream newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post advocate these and other policies that would force Catholic hospitals to perform tubal ligations, vasectomies, and other services that contradict the Ethical and Religious Directives issued by the US bishops’ conference in consultation with the Catholic Health Association.
Catholic healthcare has experienced a boon since the adoption of the Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare, in 2010. Because Medicaid, the joint state-federal program to provide health insurance to the indigent, was greatly expanded, Catholic hospitals who had always provided services to the poor regardless of their ability to pay, now received compensation for that care.
One in every seven patients in hospital in the US are now in a Catholic facility, that is approximately 115 million patients per year. And, as the industry experiences consolidation, Catholic hospital networks, like other such networks, have expanded their reach through mergers.
Writing in the Jesuit weekly America, the Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Blase Cupich, and the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, took aim at the Biden administration's proposed rule on gender transition surgery.
“This is government coercion that intrudes on the religious freedom of faith-based health care facilities,” the cardinals wrote.
“Such a mandate threatens the conscience rights of all health care providers and workers who have discerned that participating in, or facilitating, gender transition procedures is contrary to their own beliefs.”
Loading ...
