Women Increasingly Denied Medical Treatment Due to Hospital Ideology

According to a report by the National Health Law Program (NHeLP), an increasing number of American women are being refused medical care due to hospital ideology. In other words, women are receiving care based not on what is best for them, but on the personal feelings of the hospital staff.

By now, I think most people have heard of the most recent shocking example of this: Sister Margaret McBride, a nun and administrator at a Catholic hospital in Phoenix, AZ, who approved a life-saving abortion for a woman who was 11 weeks pregnant. Had she not approved the procedure, both the fetus and the woman would have died. Yet, unbelievably, Sister McBride was excommunicated for her actions because they violated church canon. The church actually thinks that it would have been better for the woman to die.

Catholic hospitals not only forbid abortion (even in the case of extrauterine pregnancy), they also refuse to provide birth control, refer patients to infertility specialists, and even, in many cases, to dispense emergency contraception to rape victims. It may be your womb, but they are in charge.

Women aren't only at risk at explicitly religious hospitals, however. Buckling to pressure from the Catholic Church, the American Medical Association passed a resolution that no doctor or hospital should have to go against their personal morality when treating a patient. Maybe it is just me, but that seems in direct violation of the second tenet of the modern Hippocratic Oath: "I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk." It is science and health that doctors are supposed to honor, not just personal religious choice.

Nurses, too, are exempt from providing comprehensive care to their female patients. The American Nurses Association Code of Ethics for Nurses allows them to refuse services if they find them personally objectionable. Pharmacists are free to let their personal biases interfere with patient care, by opting-out of filling prescriptions they don't like.

It seems that most of the objections to providing care concern women's reproductive choices. In theory, medical professionals can object over any issue. In practice, what we're really talking about is abortion care and contraception. With one in six Americans treated annually in hospitals with ideological restrictions, that's a lot of women whose health is in danger.

Susan Berke Fogel, the lead author of the NHeLP report, said, "We found a disturbing number of case studies where patients ended up far worse off either because their healthcare providers refused care or because their hospitals prohibited the care they needed for ideological or religious reasons." This is unacceptable. Everyone is entitled to their personal religious beliefs, but not at the expense of women's lives. In what other profession are you allowed to get away with not performing basic job-related duties because you don't like them? Especially if, by not doing so, you put someone's health and life in danger?

Perhaps a patient could choose to avoid a religious hospital (though in emergency situations this might not be possible). Yet how can a woman avoid every single medical practitioner who might refuse to give her the care she needs and wants? How is she to know that her doctor or nurse won't put her in harm's way until it is too late? Or what form of care will be deemed unacceptable? Remember, the woman in the Phoenix case was herself religious and probably had no idea that if the hospital followed Church policy, she'd be dead now.

Personal feelings should not be allowed to override evidence-based medicine that is in the best interests of the patient. Period. If you have religious objections to women having bodily autonomy, then you, at the very least, shouldn't be working in emergency medicine. If you want to honor faith, honor that which female patients place in you to first do no harm.

Photo credit: SarahMcD