In Theory: Should religion hold sway over medical treatments?

Feb. 2, 2016 3:11 PM PT

A San Francisco judge’s recent ruling has led to new discussions about religion’s place in medical treatment.

Earlier this month Superior Court Judge Ernest Goldsmith said Mercy Medical Center — a Catholic hospital in Redding — was not sexually discriminating against Rebecca Chamorro, who had requested a tubal ligation procedure. The judge said Chamorro could get the procedure at another hospital and that Mercy Medical Center’s policy against sterilization also applies to men.

NEWSLETTER: Stay up to date with what’s going on in the 818 >>

After the hospital denied the procedure on religious grounds, the would-be patient filed a lawsuit.

Dignity Health, which operates Mercy Medical, says the woman’s tubal ligation is not medically necessary and would violate the hospital’s right to freedom of religion.

The ACLU is suing on behalf of Chamorro, saying the hospital’s refusal violates California’s sexual discrimination laws.

In an Op-Ed piece for the Los Angeles Times, Charles C. Camosy put it like this:

“If you take a professional view of medicine, the following question must be asked: Is intentionally interfering with someone’s reproductive system (in ways which do not address some injury or disease) an act of healthcare?”

Q. How should healthcare be defined and how should religion factor in to how medical professionals respond to patients?

Healthcare is medical treatment practiced with compassion and integrity. Humanism dictates that we put other’s needs before our own.

Unfortunately, there is a recent trend (at least a more recent visible trend) in religion, to place compassion on a lower rung than religious prejudice. This is evidenced by the treatment of groups designated as “other” including immigrants, people of color, homosexuals, women, atheists and more.

In this case, Catholic institutions are putting their desires before the needs of the patient. They are denying often necessary and preventive care by being self serving.

I understand there is religious freedom in this country, but when dealing with issues of health, life and death, you must draw the line.

The procedure may be elective, but it also provides significant health and other benefits. Doing one surgery rather than two greatly reduces danger and risk of complications. Imposing more expense and forcing the patient to use their time to find another provider and travel to them is also causing the patient undue harm.

Catholic hospitals are well aware the likelihood of the patient getting the procedure anyway is incredibly high. So, they are usually preventing nothing and are complicit in putting the patient in a more dangerous and burdensome situation. If it relieves their conscience, that is all it does and, in my opinion, that does not fit the definition of healthcare.

Does disallowing all abortion get rid of abortion? Absolutely not. It just makes getting one harder and more dangerous.

Does prohibition of certain reproductive care engender healing in society? Absolutely not, it perpetuates cycles of poverty among other adverse consequences. Religious intransigence, as in this instance, may relieve a mental burden (often imposed by religious dictum itself) that weighs heavily on some people, but it blinds them to the often problematic results of their actions (or non-actions) and blinds them to real solutions.

Additionally, prohibitive policies of Catholic hospitals in general can cause obstetric complications and could create the potential for grave harm to a women from a future pregnancy. These policies do not serve their intended purpose of preventing abortion, and they run the risk of harming patients.

How does this fit into any definition of healthcare or, for that matter, align with the values of empathy and compassion that are supposedly the pride of the Catholic church? Further, by denying this procedure for religious reasons, we set a precedent for denial of other, possibly even more vital treatments.

Joshua Lewis Berg
Humanist Celebrant
Glendale

I can respect a completely consistent belief in the “right-to-life,” meaning one which includes opposition to all war, to capital punishment and to economic injustice, and which actively supports caring for the earth and all its creatures. Even so, I reserve for a woman the right to make decisions over her own body.

Sterilization for a woman is not the equivalent of a vasectomy for a man, for obvious physical reasons. I believe that the ACLU was grasping at a straw to base their suit on sex discrimination.

My definition of healthcare for women is broader than Professor Camosy’s. Good healthcare is not merely treating “injury or disease,” as he says, but should support thriving and living life on one’s own terms, certainly in as fundamental a decision as how many children to have.

Unfortunately, hospitals in our system have been allowed the right to make these very personal decisions based on the beliefs of the religious organization owning the hospital, even when the belief or desires of the patient are otherwise. I do not believe that freedom of religion should allow a person or an organization the right to impose their beliefs on another.

Roberta Medford
Atheist
Montrose

Rebecca Chamorro’s health was not in danger. Sexual discrimination is not a factor in this case because of the hospital’s policy against sterilization for men as well. In addition, the procedure was readily available for Chamorro at other area hospitals.

These facts clearly illuminate the spurious nature of her claims against Mercy Medical Center, whether or not the grounds for denying the procedure were based on religious convictions.

Would she sue if they didn’t offer the elective procedures of Botox, liposuction or plastic surgery? Would we even be discussing her case if one of these had been the cause of her grievance? Looking at the details of this case, it appears that an opportunistic person is trying to make a quick buck off of a healthcare organization’s insurance. And that’s nothing but immoral.

Service organizations, businesses, nonprofit groups and even hospitals and medical professionals have the right to determine which services they do or don’t offer. Every person and organization operates on the basis of a set of values whether or not they are based on religion, and they have the right to do so. Up to this point in our country such freedom, including that of religious exercise, has been one of our nation’s proper foundational values.

Virtually no faith-based healthcare organization in our country denies services in a haphazard manner. The issues are clearly defined and usually concern the procedures of abortion or sterilization. Sometimes the issue is blood transfusion, but usually that’s about the conviction of the patient, not the hospital. These are rarely life-or-death situations. In the case of a woman’s pregnancy threatening her life, we can argue that an abortion would be the guaranteed putting to death of the child in her womb. The child’s life is worthy of protection.

Matthew 9:35 says that Jesus Christ “was going through all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness.” Of Jesus Isaiah 53:5 predicted: “He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the chastening for our well-being fell upon him, and by his scourging we are healed.” God told Moses: “I, the Lord, am your healer” (Exodus 15:26). When God’s word and God’s ways are honored people will be healed both physically and spiritually. And that’s the real goal, isn’t it? Religious freedom guarantees and protects people’s healing.

Pastor Jon Barta
Burbank

Every doctor swears some sort of oath when they graduate school to take the reins of their educated profession. In the past, and for much of history, the Hippocratic Oath has been the statement of medicine, and in there is the declaration, “I will willingly refrain from doing any injury…” By the way, it also states, “I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.”

Now this all had to be amended because the oath was made in the name of mythical deities of ancient Greece, but it has been so amended that the modern version actually affirms the reverse; “If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life…” The doctor giveth, and the doctor taketh away!

So there isn’t much medical concern for oaths anymore, really, and today it seems that considerations of health, life and death, holy responsibility, are all up for grabs and convenient reinterpretation.

In the case at hand, it seems that the hospital is taking the medical high road and saying that, in effect, “sterilization is not “healthcare.” It is actually destructive, as the point of having one’s tubes tied is to cause the malfunction of perfectly healthy body parts.

Now, while I am not of the mind that sterilization is any sin against God (especially since the God-given capacity for reproduction had already been exercised) it is the hospital’s religious persuasion that forbids the procedure, and so they should not do it. You’d think that all this should have been gone over long before the plaintiff settled on the facility for childbirth, but hey, with the ACLU involved, she might make some bank now. Nice, lady.

There are myriad hospitals that exist to meet every known procedure, so taking the scrupulous ones to task, is in my mind, just mean-spirited. We need more like Mercy, not less. Healthcare should care for health. It shouldn’t destroy health or life, and if it does optional and unnecessary procedures, it really goes beyond the parameters.

I do think that religion should surely factor into how medical professionals address their patients, and if the establishment cannot countenance “religion,” then swap the term out for “morality,” as that is what religion is, a moral system. Do I think, then, that morals should play a part in all this? Of course.

The Bible says, “If you do anything you believe is not right, you are sinning” (Rom 14:23 NLT). Mercy Medical didn’t think it right, so it did the morally right thing and denied the procedure.

Rev. Bryan A. Griem
Tujunga

If Mercy Medical were the only hospital available to the patient, I would be more sympathetic to the lawsuit, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

While the court’s decision doesn’t not allow Chamorro the convenience of having the procedure at the time of her delivery, she still can have it. The alternative would be to completely disregard the 1st Amendment rights of Mercy Medical to practice according to the precepts of the Catholic Church.

This case is the latest — and certainly won’t be the last — challenge to the place of religion in society. Unfortunately, there is no single solution that will satisfy everyone. There may be circumstances, when there is no alternative, in which church-affiliated hospitals would need to perform a procedure that violates religious principle. But when there are clear alternatives, the critics of religion should have the wisdom to stand down.

Jeffrey R. Holland, a member of the LDS church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, addressed the need for mutual respect and accommodation in remarks earlier this year.

“We must find ways to show respect for others whose beliefs, values and behaviors differ from ours while never being forced to deny or abandon our own beliefs, values and behaviors in the process,” he said. “Every citizen’s rights are best guarded when each person and group guards for others those rights they wish guarded for themselves.”

To approach these issues from a winner-take-all perspective, as the ACLU and other critics of religion seems to be doing, is a mistake. In suing the hospital, the ACLU is saying that church-affiliated hospitals and by extension religious doctors, nurses and other medical professionals, must perform any procedure that a patient requests. As Camosy points out, accepting this argument would abolish freedom of religion, and conscience, to all medical organizations and individual physicians.

I don’t believe the consequences of this would be good.

Michael White
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
La Crescenta