This is complete bullshit. If you’re going to be a healthcare worker than leave your religion outside of work. If you can’t do that then choose a different profession.
And entire insurance networks sure as hell shouldn’t be under such restrictions.
Hospitals and other medical facilities shouldn’t be allowed to impose religious beliefs on patients. It they don’t want to abide by that, then they should stay out of healthcare. How long would we stand for Jehovah’s Witnesses owning hospitals and denying blood transfusions? How long would we stand for Scientologists owning all of the psychiatric facilities in an insurance network and refusing to prescribe psychiatric medications?
The Catholic Church protects child molesters, but providing necessary medical care? Oh no! Heaven forbid! That would be wrong.
I hope that she and the ACLU sue everyone involved into the ground.
You want a reason to vote for Clinton over Trump? What about preventing the appointment of right-wing judges who will zealously protect religious beliefs over all else?
*In a written statement to Rewire, Mercy said, “Generally, our protocol in caring for a woman with a dislodged or troublesome IUD is to offer to remove it.”
Rhodes said Mercy was reviewing its education process on Catholic directives for physicians and residents.
“That act [of removing an IUD] in itself does not violate the directives,” Marty Folan, Mercy’s director of mission integration, told Rewire.*
That’s really weird. I would have thought a Catholic OB/GYN claiming to follow church doctrine would be more likely to insist on removing an IUD, whether the patient wanted that or not.
Good. So in this case it was a misunderstanding of their own rules. I’m glad to hear it, but the general principle still stands. There have been incidents where providers refused to intervene in cases of miscarriages and dangerous pregnancies.
And the people who made this decision are even more worthy of a pitting for not understanding their own rules.
It is serious concern, Catholic hospitals imposing their doctrine on patients instead of medical care. I don’t understand how the law allows a medical facility to bring theology into a standard of care. Unfortunately the problem seems to be growing. I would never under any circumstances recommend to a women in my family to come anywhere near a Catholic hospital in matters of reproductive health or related issues, such as treatment after a sexual assault or dealing with an ectopic pregnancy.
Well, the ACLU filed a complaint for gender discrimination, but that seems pretty specious. If she suffered any irreparable damage, she should have cause, but the article doesn’t specify.
The former is inconvenient, to be sure, but there doesn’t seem to be any imperative to assure that quality hospital services are within everybody’s reasonable travel radii. (Some people must have no hospitals at all; others, perhaps, only ones deficient for other reasons.)
The latter should be illegal. Does the ACA not have anything to say on this?
Maybe pain and suffering? According to the article she went through a lot of pain before she could get the treatment she needed.
I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know what cause of action she has if any, but if she has none, then maybe we need some changes to the law.
I wonder if a case could be made for violation of her religious freedoms. Having someone else’s religion interfere with your health and well-being would seem to be as much a violation as someone interfering with your own religious beliefs.
Okay, maybe not in her case, since this appears to be a case of some individuals misunderstanding the rules, but in other cases maybe?
If we had lots of hospitals everywhere and freedom to choose regardless of your insurance, then maybe this wouldn’t be a problem, but that’s not the real world.
I would hope that a woman put into such a predicament would receive legal counsel by the ACLU.
I don’t want to second guess the court system. But I would hope that the ACLU would file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights based on Mercy’s discriminatory policies and practices of denying women medical care relating to contraceptive services in violation of Section 1557 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 1557 codifed at 42 USC 18116 (2012) (“Section 1557”) IIRC.
Also, they might consider dropping a line to the Illinois Department of Human Rights with regards to whether Mercy, a place of public accomodation, denied her the full and equal access to its facilitites, goods, and services on the basis of her sex.
Yes, it seems this is the result of a serious misunderstanding of what are the actual policies, but that does not arise out of a vacuum. If the staff believed that the rule was far more rigid than it really is, it’s suggestive a failure of the higher-ups to properly communicate, or having focused a bit too much on the Catholic reproductive-health doctrine and too little on clarifying exigent case situations, thus leaving the wrong impression. Often people don’t want to talk about exceptions and special cases out of a desire to avoid creating the impression that the doctrine is a trifle, but you DO need to bring it up.
There’s also the possibility that there’s some on the staff who *themselves *are inflexible/intolerant on this issue, and heard the rules but interpreted them to support the way they already lean.