They did it. They really did it. They found the downside to the Church providing hospitals in areas that otherwise would likely go without them.
The main thrust of their article is to complain that Catholic hospitals, under the guidance of men and, ugh, religion, deny their patients “standard medical service.” And by “standard medical service,” the two FiveThirtyEight writers mean abortion, transgender surgery, and euthanasia.
You know, the usual.
Enjoy these select paragraphs. Remember, the chief aim of this FiveThirtyEight article is to attack an organization for providing hospitals in impoverished areas where other medical organizations don’t or can’t operate:
The changes are all designed to ensure that employers, health care institutions and providers don’t have to participate in health care practices they object to for ethical or moral reasons. But even
decades before the Trump administration moved to roll back Obamacare policies, some religious hospitals — in particular, Catholic hospitals — already had the green light from the government to deny certain treatment options to their patients. These hospitals’ right to refuse care is generally unquestioned, creating a dilemma for the people who walk in the door: What happens when you need or want a standard medical service, but the hospital won’t provide it?
In a growing number of communities around the country, especially in rural areas, patients and physicians have access to just one hospital. And in more and more places, that hospital is Catholic. That sounds innocuous — a hospital is a hospital, after all. But Catholic hospitals are bound by a range of restrictions on care that are determined by religious authorities, with very little input from
medical staff. Increasingly, where a patient lives can determine whether Catholic doctrine, and how the local bishop interprets that doctrine, will decide what kind of care she can get.
Damn the patriarchy. Now for the fun part. This is the part where the authors reveal what they mean by “standard care”:
It’s difficult to know what services are and are not available at each of these facilities because interpretation of Catholic doctrine is done locally by individual bishops and decisions are often made on a case-by-case basis. But abortion, birth control, vasectomies, tubal ligations, some types of end-of-life care, emergency contraception and procedures related to
gender transition can all be off-limits if your local hospital happens to be Catholic.
It’s funny, you know. The FiveThirtyEight article goes out of its way to tie some of its worries about Catholic hospitals to the Trump administration. But rather than say anything particularly meaningful about the White House, this works mostly to remind readers that the U.S. has long struggled with deeply rooted bigotries, including the kind that would attack Catholic hospitals for daring to be Catholic.
