Religion Trumps The Law and the Will of the People

In this week's Stranger there's an article by Cienna Madrid on how the Catholic Church has been buying up Washington State hospitals and elder care facilities, and then imposing *their* morality on the patients.

This in a state that legalized abortion three years before Roe v. Wade, and had legalized Death With Dignity, and is an avid supporter of conception rights.

No more, under the new church-imposed rules.

What they can't get through the ballot box they will achieve through financial might -- helped in part by generous tax-exempt status.

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Catholic institutions across the nation are merging with secular hospitals, clinics, and even small private practices at an unprecedented rate. Optimists explain that the consolidation and shared infrastructure help reduce costs. Pessimists point out that the aggressive mergers come at a time when Catholic bishops are exerting and expanding their authority. "I see it as a conscious effort to achieve through the private market what they failed to achieve through the courts or at the ballot box," says Monica Harrington, a San Juan Island resident who's spent the last year fighting a Catholic hospital in her town.

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When you enter a hospital seeking care, you carry with you a set of assumptions: You trust your doctors will explain all of your medical options to you after a thorough examination. You trust your doctors will recommend a treatment based on those options. You trust that they will help you make an informed decision about your treatment. You trust that they will treat you.

But what happens when religious restrictions interfere with that trust? To understand Catholic health care, it's important to know the rules that guide Catholic hospitals, otherwise known as Ethical and Religious Directives (ERDs). These directives are drafted and tweaked by the rotating cast of mostly white, mostly celibate bishops couch-surfing at the Vatican. ERDs operate like a code of conduct that medical staff in Catholic hospitals agree to abide by, regardless of whether or not a particular staffer is Catholic. For the most part, the directives aren't suggestions—they're prescriptive.

"Any partnership... must respect church teaching and discipline," one directive states. The church monitors the implementation of these directives through hospital ethic committees overseen by regional bishops like our very own Archbishop Peter Sartain.

Sure, in 43 pages of Ethical and Religious Directives, there's some common-sense guidance to be found. But they're also flush with horrifying detail. As you'd expect, the directives pertaining to women's fertility read like a misogynist romance novel or found art from the Middle Ages: "Catholic health institutions may not promote or condone contraceptive practices." Emergency contraception can only be given to rape victims, and even then only "if, after appropriate testing, there is no evidence that conception has occurred already." Vasectomies and tubal ligations are also prohibited. Egg and sperm donors are deemed "contrary to the covenant of marriage," surrogate motherhood is prohibited because it denigrates "the dignity of the child and marriage," and doctors at Catholic hospitals can't help infertile couples conceive artificially—using their own eggs and sperm—because test-tube babies "separate procreation from the marital act in its unitive significance."

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Vasectomies, sperm donation, abortions, surrogacy—these are all perfectly legal, mundane procedures that married couples and single people of all faiths utilize (as recent statistics show, even 98 percent of Catholic women admit to using birth control). And yet, according to the Catholic institutions conquering our medical ones, these are options patients should not have.

This is why I say it's not enough to tell people to move. People have to be protected from the church where they are.