In what may be an important precedent, a California court ruled against a woman who sued a Catholic hospital for not performing a sterilization procedure that she requested, arguing that since the hospital took federal funds it could not discriminate against her. (This is also the argument being used to force religious hospitals to commit abortion.)
The judge ruled that there was no discrimination, since the hospital wouldn’t sterilize men either, which would also violate Catholic teaching; and, more importantly, that the government should not interfere with religious hospitals acting on their religious beliefs.
From Jim McDerott, Catholic Hospitals Win an Important Decision in California | America Magazine:
On Thursday the Catholic Church in California scored a significant legal victory regarding the right of Catholic hospitals to refuse certain medical procedures. Rebecca Chamorro, a 33-year-old mother of two expecting her third child at the end of the month, asked Mercy Medical Center—a Catholic hospital in Redding, Calif.—to perform a tubal ligation after her upcoming delivery.
According to the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Conference Ethical and Religious Directives for Health Care Services (ERD), “Direct sterilization of either men or women, whether permanent or temporary, is not permitted in a Catholic health care institution” other than as a “cure or alleviation of a present and serious pathology and a simpler treatment is not available.” The ERD goes on to group voluntary sterilization alongside abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide as both “intrinsically immoral” and “intrinsically evil.”
Ms. Chamorro’s legal team reasoned that given that the hospital accepts state and federal funds, it must follow state and federal anti-discrimination law, an argument the state itself made just one year ago in demanding that Catholic universities include abortion services in their health care coverage. But Superior Court Judge Ernest Goldsmith said this could not be construed as a case of “women’s health” or sex-based discrimination, as the hospital also refuses male sterilization.
“Religious-based hospitals have an enshrined place in American history and its communities,” Goldsmith stated, “and the religious beliefs reflected in their operation are not to be interfered with by courts at this moment in history.”
[Keep reading. . .]
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