RH Reality Check - Lawsuit: Michigan Catholic Hospitals Denying Care to Pregnant Patients
The story was posted almost a week ago on RH Reality Check, I meant to post this a couple days ago, but I wasn’t able to around to it. Anyone who doesn’t understand the danger of allowing people, especially medical personnel the “religious freedom” to deny women access to things like birth control and abortion, needs to read this story by Jessica Mason Pieklo.
In the span of one year, at just one of the defendant’s hospitals, several patients with pregnancy complications were denied the care they needed and to which they were entitled under federal law, the complaint states. (Shutterstock)
The American Civil Liberties Union and the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against Trinity Health Corporation, one of the country’s largest Catholic health-care systems, for what the complaint alleges is a repeated and systematic failure to provide patients experiencing pregnancy complications with appropriate emergency reproductive health care.
Failing to do so is a violation of federal law.
Trinity Health Corporation, headquartered in Michigan, owns and operates more than 80 hospitals around the country. Trinity Health Corporation requires that all of its facilities abide by ethical and religious directives, according to the complaint. These are guidelines developed and distributed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The directives prohibit a doctor working at a Catholic hospital from terminating a patient’s pregnancy even when failure to do so puts the patient’s health or life at risk.