If A Woman Has Problem Pregnancy Catholic Hospitals Will Just Let Her Die.

[mercuryblues]

90. another one

They are needlessly putting a woman's life at risk. The longer a woman is pregnant with an unviable fetus the more likely she is to develop an infection that could kill her.

http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2011/treatmentdenied.asp

Kathleen Prieskorn gasped in shock as her medical nightmare began. Still reeling from the heartbreak of an earlier miscarriage, Prieskorn was three months pregnant and working as a waitress when she felt a twinge, felt a trickle down her leg and realized she was miscarrying again.

She rushed to her doctor's office, "where I learned my amniotic sac had torn," says Prieskorn, who lives with her husband in Manchester, N.H. "But the nearest hospital had recently merged with a Catholic hospital—and because my doctor could still detect a fetal heartbeat, he wasn't allowed to give me a uterine evacuation that would help me complete my miscarriage."

To get treatment, Prieskorn, who has no car, had to instead travel 80 miles to the nearest hospital that would perform the procedure—expensive to do in an ambulance, because she had no health insurance. Her doctor handed her $400 of his own cash and she bundled into the back of a cab.

"During that trip, which seemed endless, I was not only devastated, but terrified," Prieskorn remembers. "I knew that if there were complications I could lose my uterus—and maybe even my life."

Ordeals like the one Prieskorn suffered are not isolated incidents: They could happen to a woman of any income level, religion or state now that Catholic institutions have become the largest not-for-profit source of health-care in the U.S., treating 1 in 6 hospital patients. And that's because Catholic hospitals are required to adhere to the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services—archconservative restrictions issued by the 258-member U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Because of the directives, doctors and nurses at Catholic-affiliated facilities are not allowed to perform procedures that the Catholic Church deems "intrinsically immoral, such as abortion and direct sterilization." Those medical personnel also cannot give rape survivors drugs to prevent pregnancy unless there is "no evidence that conception has already occurred." The only birth control they can dispense is advice about "natural family planning"— laborious daily charting of a woman's basal temperature and cervical mucus in order to abstain from sex when she is ovulating—which only 0.1 percent of women use.