Sterilization Ban at Hospitals

Re “Bishops Ban Sterilization Services at All Catholic-Affiliated Hospitals,” June 16: American society is now at the beck and call of Catholic bishops. Our government has allowed the Catholic Church to get control of 11% of the hospitals in this country, and now we must all adhere to the moralistic dictates of Catholic bishops on reproductive matters. These men, who would try to convince impressionable young men that a life without a sexual love relationship is a healthy choice, are now trying to tell American women that they cannot have tubal ligation surgery (female sterilization), let alone abortions, in their own community hospitals.

Of course these bishops are backed up by the infallible Catholic pope, who, despite his frequent proclamations that contraception is a sin, can’t seem to stop American Catholics from using it. Since he can’t get Catholics to follow one Catholic law, he has apparently decided to try to force non-Catholics to adhere to another Catholic law. This is the height of hypocrisy and an unacceptable imposition on non-Catholics. Hospitals constitute an essential service to American society. Our government should disallow their control by religious groups and their dogmas.

Robert Porter

Irvine

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If the anti-life (as opposed to pro-life) forces don’t like the way Catholics run their hospitals, let them start their own. We’ll forgo government money if they do. After all, don’t Catholics have as much right to protest the use of their taxes for supporting the culture of death as so-called pro-choice people have to protest the use of their taxes to preserve life?

Rosemary J. Dunham Stoltz

Duarte

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If we agree that drug and alcohol abuse are wrong, why is it so difficult to understand the Catholic Church’s opposition to sterilization for purposes of contraception? Fundamentally, they all do injury to the human body. Likewise, as regards abortion. The church believes the mother exists for the child and not the child for the mother. Everything derives from that simple principle and the law: “Thou shalt not kill.”

Ralph Bak

Palm Desert

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I fail to understand how the Catholic bishops can claim that it is immoral to offer sterilization by tubal ligation to some poor woman with six, eight or 10 children whom she cannot feed or support, when they themselves condoned and practiced sterilization by castration of pre-pubertal young boys over many centuries for the sole purpose of preserving the boys’ soprano voices to sing in choirs.

Castrati lived well into the 20th century, and gramophone records of their voices can still be obtained. The only “good” to come out of this practice was to avoid the horror of having real sopranos, i.e., women, defile the holy choir lofts.

Joseph McEvoy

San Clemente