Stopping Sterilizations in Catholic Hospitals

Sandra Hapenney, a new contributor to the Catholic Thing , has a very useful essay showing that many Catholic hospitals perform sterilizations counter to Catholic teaching as laid out in the Ethical and Religious Directives (ERD) of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops:

My study involved obtaining hospital inpatient data from the departments of health of seven states dispersed geographically (CA, IL, IN, NJ, NY, TX, WA), abstracting records for Catholic hospitals from over 47 million patient records, and comparing sterilization practices at the hospitals from 2007 to 2009.

For the institutions I studied, 48 percent of the 176 Catholic hospitals with obstetric services performed direct sterilizations in clear violation of the ERD. The findings were independently reviewed by the Computer Science Department of Baylor University. Interactive data tables and the dissertation itself are viewable  here .

Her solution, which strikes me as sensible, is to more rigorously define unacceptable procedures and enact tighter reporting requirements:

A major difficulty in achieving a uniform application of the ERD is, unfortunately, that the directives make no reference to clinical diagnostic and procedure codes and do not mandate transparent reporting or oversight of a hospital’s actual policies and practices. Nor does the ERD mandate reporting violations within the hospital settings.

The result is that subjective judgments of hospital personnel and ethics committees can readily prevail over the objective clinical situation and the teaching of the Church. Best practices for oversight, such as used in the protection of minors, could be included in future editions of the ERD. Important elements of best practices would include an independent review board, mandatory reporting of violations, objective clinical criteria for defining violations, and authoritative presentations to doctors and staff regarding the requirements of the norms.

This also, she points out, has an indirect bearing on current debates over religious liberty:

Current practice is perilous not only to those sterilized in Catholic hospitals, but poses juridical and legal risks to all Catholic personnel and facilities. Individual Catholics or hospitals objecting to these procedures could find themselves isolated and more easily compelled by the courts or legislation to provide direct sterilizations.

The lack of agreement among the Catholic hospitals also undermines any cohesive defense of religious liberty in this matter by the bishops and the hospitals. Uniform application of the ERD at every Catholic hospital is therefore crucial to the protection of the conscience rights of every Catholic medical professional and of all Catholic health care facilities.

Catholic christians reject sterilizations, of course, for the same reason they reject other forms of contraception like prophylactics and the Pill: it closes off a union of two spouses to new life.