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Spring 2011

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DENIED K TREATMENT The opinions that count most at Catholic hospitals are those of bishops, not doctors. Are they whom women want to entrust with their reproductive health care? ATHLEEN PRIESKORN GASPED IN SHOCK as her medical nightmare began. Still reeling from the heartbreak of an earlier miscarriage, Prieskorn was three months preg- nant and working as a waitress when she felt a twinge, felt a trickle down her leg and realized she was miscarrying again. She rushed to her doctor’s office, “where I learned my am- niotic sac had torn,” says Prieskorn, who lives with her hus- band in Manchester, N.H. “But the nearest hospital had recently merged with a Catholic hospital—and because my doctor could still detect a fetal heartbeat, he wasn’t allowed to give me a uterine evacuation that would help me complete my miscarriage.” To get treatment, Prieskorn, who has no car, had to instead travel 80 miles to the nearest hospital that would perform the procedure—expensive to do in an ambulance, because she had no health insurance. Her doctor handed her $400 of his own cash and she bundled into the back of a cab. “During that trip, which seemed endless, I was not only dev- astated, but terrified,” Prieskorn remembers. “I knew that if there were complications I could lose my uterus—and maybe even my life.” O RDEALS LIKE THE ONE PRIESKORN SUFFERED are not isolated incidents: They could happen to a woman of any income level, religion or state now that Catholic institutions have become the largest not-for- profit source of health-care in the U.S., treating 1 in 6 hospital patients. And that’s because Catholic hospitals are required to adhere to the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services—archconservative restric- tions issued by the 258-member U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Because of the directives, doctors and nurses at Catholic-affiliated facilities are not allowed to perform 32 | SPRING 2011 BY MOLLY M. GINTY procedures that the Catholic Church deems “intrinsically immoral, such as abortion and direct sterilization.” Those medical personnel also cannot give rape survivors drugs to prevent pregnancy unless there is “no evidence that con- ception has already occurred.” The only birth control they can dispense is advice about “natural family planning”— laborious daily charting of a woman’s basal temperature and cervical mucus in order to abstain from sex when she is ovulating—which only 0.1 percent of women use. The Catholic directives involve not just abortion and birth control but ectopic pregnancies, embryonic stem cell research, in-vitro fertilization, sterilizations and more (see sidebar, p. 34). “The problem with [the directives],” says Susan Berke Fogel, an attorney at the National Health Law Program in Los Angeles, “…is about substan- dard care becoming rampant in the U.S., threatening women’s health and women’s lives.” W HEN THE CATHOLIC DIRECTIVES CLASH WITH the realities of modern-day life—in which about three-quarters of Americans believe abortion should be permitted, half of pregnancies are unplanned, 40 percent of unplanned pregnancies end in abortion, 15 to 20 per- cent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, 27 percent of women have their tubes tied, 10 percent of men have vasectomies and 99 percent of sexually active women have tried some form of contraception—catastrophe can result. Catastrophe was only narrowly averted in 2009 when a 27-year-old, 11-weeks-pregnant patient in Arizona stag- gered into the emergency room of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix with such severe pulmonary hy- pertension that her doctors determined she would die with- out an immediate abortion. The ethics committee voted to break hospital policy and advise the woman of her option of www.feminist.org

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