Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/30780
abortions, silently and assertively guiding patients through the gauntlet of anti-choice protesters. B ISHOPS TODAY NOT ONLY SIT IN CONGRESSION- al offices discussing upcoming legislation, but for all intents and purposes sit in the administrative chairs of our doctors’ offices and hospitals. A round of hospital mergers in the 1990s started giving the Catholic Church an even larger stake in U.S. health care than it already had. Between 1995 and 2010, more than 150 such mergers involving Catholic-administered health-care providers occurred. “Anytime a Catholic institution merges with or takes over a non-Catholic one, some or all reproductive services can be threatened,” says Lois Uttley, the director of MergerWatch, a New York-based group that has fought religious hospital takeovers (it has defeated the mergers or saved reproductive care in 50 percent of the cases it has taken on since 1997). “Hospitals are suffering in this re- cession and need capital,” says Uttley. “Small systems are joining bigger, sometimes Catholic, systems so they can stay afloat.” Catholic hospitals are merging with public as well as private institutions, and in these cases bishops often de- mand that once-public facilities restrict reproductive care—shortchanging patients who mistakenly think they are at a non-Catholic hospital. Today, 636 Catholic hospi- tals can be found in all 50 states, comprising 13 percent of all U.S. hospitals and 15 percent of hospital beds. They treat more than 80 million patients per year. In some- places, Catholic-run hospitals are the only ones in town, so patients don’t even have a choice. Given this reality, what’s a woman in need of reproduc- tive health care—or a man seeking a vasectomy, or ill elders who want their end-of-life wishes to be honored—to do? Here’s a start, on a policy level: • Support Merger Watch in their work to fight Catholic hospital mergers, and contact them if you are facing a merger in your area (www.mergerwatch.org). • Join the million activists who are flooding Congress with pro-choice messages (www.feminist.org; www.pro choiceamerica.org; www.plannedparenthoodaction.org; www.now.org). On a personal level: • If you’re a woman of reproductive age, ask your health- care providers if they are subject to the Catholic direc- tives or are not permitted to discuss or provide certain reproductive services www.msmagazine.com Sister Margaret McBride, the hospital administrator who approved a lifesaving abortion, for which a bishop declared her excommunicated • Find out in advance where you can go for comprehen- sive emergency reproductive health care and, in a re- productive health emergency, have the ambulance send you there if EMTs determine that this is safe • Use other than a Catholic health-care provider if you’re concerned (rightfully so) that end-of-life directives may not be honored at a Catholic institution W HY SHOULD CERTAIN CATHOLIC HOSPITALS continue to receive public funding if they don’t comply with the standard of care required by federal law? This and other queries are being raised by the Washington, D.C.-based National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), which has registered a complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, charging that some Catholic hospitals violate federal laws by neglecting to get patients’ informed consent; delaying emergency treatments; and denying standard-of-care treatments such as methotrexate, a drug used to treat non- viable ectopic pregnancies. You don’t have to be a Catholic to end up at a Catholic hospital that refuses you lifesaving care. A Catholic facility might be the only one in your area, and when you expect treatment you may get dogma instead. “Religion in America should mean that the church runs the church,” says Barry Lynn, the executive director of Washington, D.C.-based Americans United for Separa- tion of Church and State. “It shouldn’t mean the bishops are running your reproductive life.” n MOLLY M. GINTY is an award-winning health reporter who has written for Ms., On the Issues Magazine, Women’s eNews, PBS.org, Planned Parenthood and RHRealityCheck.org. SPRING 2011 | 35 JOSH HANER/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX