Reproductive Freedom Project
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| Wednesday, July 20, 2011, 11:54 am | |
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This letter to the editor appeared in the July 20th edition of the Courier-Journal. In a June 7 Op-Ed in The Courier-Journal, leaders of University Hospital, Jewish/St. Mary's Hospitals and St. Joseph Health System declared that the merger of their institutions would aid the community and would not result in a “reduction in services available to the community ... includ[ing] family planning and reproductive health services.” But they failed to identify how the newly merged entity would ensure the continued availability of such services, particularly in light of the Catholic Ethical Directives (ERDs) — the religious-based directives largely banning those services in Catholic-owned hospitals. We raised this question, and others, in a June 16 letter to the editor and called upon University Hospital officials to be more transparent about the effects on reproductive health services that will result from the merger and what plans, if any, they have to maintain the current level of health services to Louisville's poor. Sadly, Sunday's article in The Courier-Journal confirmed that those services will be discontinued at University Hospital — a state-created hospital funded by state and local tax dollars — which will, as a result of the merger, effectively operate as a Catholic, not public, institution. As was highlighted in the article, University Hospital will no longer offer tubal ligations to women due to the ERDs. Thus, after merger, a woman who requires a C-section at University Hospital cannot elect to receive a tubal ligation as part of a single procedure. Rather, she must choose to either receive her C-section/tubal at another facility (a prospect that is unattainable for many of the indigent patients served by University Hospital), or undergo two separate procedures and incur additional risks to her health and expense for doing so. But despite University Hospital's claim that no reduction of health care services will result from the merger, it still has not clarified how it intends to follow through on that promise in light of the reality that the merged entity will be bound by the Catholic directives.Our calls for greater transparency are not made in a vacuum. If other communities' experiences are any indication, the merger will create a Catholic-owned entity that is bound by the decisions of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops concerning the delivery of certain health care services and will, as a result, effectively create both physical and financial barriers to those services in our community. While we fully support the rights of every individual to pursue his/her chosen faith, religious theology is not a sound basis upon which to deliver health care options in a publicly funded hospital. Moreover, there remain serious questions about whether using tax dollars to fund what will be a Catholic-owned entity whose health care decisions are based, in part, on religious ideology rather than individual patient needs violates both the state and federal constitutions. Given the serious implications for reproductive health care and the significant investment of public resources into this venture, our community deserves specific answers from University Hospital to these, and other questions before the merger is finalized because those who seek medical care at publicly funded hospitals deserve to be treated as patients and not parishioners. DEREK SELZNICK Reproductive Freedom Project Director American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky Louisville 40202 |
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