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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Catholic Hospitals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Catholic Hospitals. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Catholic Hospital Group Grants Euthanasia to Mentally Ill, Defying Vatican

Francis X. Rocca
The Wall Street Journal
Originally posted October 27, 2017

A chain of Catholic psychiatric hospitals in Belgium is granting euthanasia to non-terminal patients, defying the Vatican and deepening a challenge to the church’s commitment to a constant moral code.

The board of the Brothers of Charity, Belgium’s largest single provider of psychiatric care, said the decision no longer belongs to Rome.

Truly Christian values, the board argued in September, should privilege a “person’s choice of conscience” over a “strict ethic of rules.”

The policy change is highly symbolic, said Didier Pollefeyt, a theologian and vice rector of the Catholic University of Leuven.

“The Brothers of Charity have been seen as a beacon of hope and resistance” to euthanasia, he said. “Now that the most Catholic institution gives up resistance, it looks like the most normal thing in the world.”

Belgium legalized euthanasia in 2002, the first country with a majority Catholic population to do so. Belgian bishops opposed the legislation, in line with the church’s catechism, which states that causing the death of the handicapped, sick or dying to eliminate their suffering is murder.

The article is here.

Friday, February 15, 2013

Clergy are not doctors — and the U.S. has its own Savita Halappanavars

By Irin Carmon
Salon.com
Originally published February 7, 2013

The death of Savita Halappanavar — the woman who died of sepsis in Ireland after being denied her request for termination of a nonviable pregnancy — drew outrage and attention in the United States late last fall, but one crucial point was often missed. Even in America, where abortion is mostly legal, cases like Halappanavar’s are a known reality in Catholic hospitals.

Take one case detailed to medical sociologist Lori Freedman by the doctor involved. A woman 16 weeks pregnant with twins was diagnosed with a molar pregnancy, which can lead to cancer, and “didn’t want to carry the pregnancy further.” She went to the hospital with vaginal bleeding, but unluckily for her, it was a Catholic one. There, the ethics committee decided that a uterine evacuation was tantamount to abortion, because there was a slim chance one of the fetuses would survive.

According to another doctor who witnessed the situation, “The clergy who made the decision Googled molar pregnancy.”

The woman was transferred out, Freedman wrote in a recent study published in the American Journal of Bioethics Primary Research, “despite the fact that terminating a bleeding molar pregnancy is safer in the hospital setting due to a high risk of hemorrhage.” What Freedman learned tracked closely with her previous studies focused on doctors’ concerns about miscarriage care in Catholic hospitals in situations very much like Halappanavar’s. Many doctors told her they preferred to send patients elsewhere rather than navigate the ethics committee.

The tension between religious beliefs and denial of medical care is currently playing out in the courtroom battles over the contraceptive coverage requirements under Obamacare, and for years, in legislative battles over “conscience clauses” that allow medical providers to opt out of some procedures. But some doctors’ consciences are being violated in the opposite fashion: Their recommendations for what is best for the women’s health and life, and often the wishes of the women themselves, are being circumvented by ethics committees at ever-expanding Catholic hospitals.

The entire story is here.

Thanks to Gary Schoener for this article.