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Doctors at Catholic Hospital Refuse to Treat Woman w/dislodged IUD


Cleopatra7

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Melanie Jones arrived for her doctor’s appointment bleeding and in pain. Jones, 28, who lives in the Chicago area, had slipped in her bathroom, and suspected the fall had dislodged her copper intrauterine device (IUD).

Her doctor confirmed the IUD was dislodged and had to be removed. But the doctor said she would be unable to remove the IUD, citing Catholic restrictions followed by Mercy Hospital and Medical Center and providers within its system.

https://rewire.news/article/2016/08/23/complaint-citing-catholic-rules-doctor-turns-away-bleeding-woman-dislodged-iud/

Conservative Catholics would say that if you don't like the rules of a Catholic hospital you can always go somewhere else, but many people don't have this option. This is why we need secular health care. One's life should not be in jeopardy because of Dogma.

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This is confusing. I can see them refusing to insert an IUD--not saying I'd agree with that, but given their rules that would at least make 'sense'--but refusing to remove one? You would think that they'd be more than happy to remove something they don't approve of. 

But omg, that poor woman. This is infuriating.

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It does say that a written statement from the healthcare provider states that their policy would be to remove a misplaced or bothersome IUD; also a representative says that doing so is not against their rules. I'm thinking the doctor screwed up and would have been within hospital ruled removing it to begin with.

The article also talks about a woman who was turned away from a Catholic hospital twice while miscarrying, and I don't get that. I had a D & C at a Catholic hospital after my miscarriage and it wasn't an issue because the baby was already dead.  When I had a tubal ligation I had to go to another facility, which was fine because it was pre-planned--but I don't even understand what the rationale would be for not treating someone who was miscarrying. 

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I agree it sounds like the Dr was wrong.

I had a tubal ligation at a Catholic hospital. The only issue was that it had to be cleared by their committee first. It's an extra step, so someone couldn't have a same day sterilization procedure (like during a c/s), but my OB said they are very rarely denied. 

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2 hours ago, Emilycharlotte said:

I don't even understand what the rationale would be for not treating someone who was miscarrying. 

In past cases Catholic hospitals have refused to perform D&Cs while the fetus still has a heartbeat even if fetal demise is inevitable. One of the worst cases for this was Savita Halappanavar in Ireland in 2012. She died of complications from a septic miscarriage after doctors refused to perform an abortion because the fetus still had a heartbeat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar

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I really don't see any reason for the doctors' decision other than to make the woman suffer for using contraception.

If it was really about an opposition to birth control, a doctor could simply remove the IUD and tell her to follow up with her primary care if she wants a new one. (I assume she would need to heal up a bit before they replaced it anyway.) The emergent situation of a dislodged IUD causing pain and bleeding is a separate issue from the woman's future family planning decisions.

I'm glad the patient is pursuing legal action. A hospital should not be refusing to provide appropriate emergency care.

(On a snarky note, I can't help but think there's some hypocrisy going on here too. Going by the pronouns, the patient was being treated by a female doctor. I highly doubt that all the female doctors in that health network are either completely celibate or open to having as many "blessings" as they can conceive regardless of the impact on their medical careers, so I think there's a good chance a contraceptive user was refusing to treat another contraceptive user.)

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The doctors, male and female, who work at the Catholic hospital have to follow the hospital's rules--it has no bearing on their own beliefs or how they live their own lives.  The doctor may very well use birth control, but knows she can't prescribe it at that particular hospital--there isn't anything hypocritical about it.

In this case, the doctor was apparently misinformed about the rules, which is worrisome. If that is the case, I would think the patient definitely has a law suit.

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2 hours ago, Mercer said:

I really don't see any reason for the doctors' decision other than to make the woman suffer for using contraception.

Bingo.

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42 minutes ago, Emilycharlotte said:

The doctors, male and female, who work at the Catholic hospital have to follow the hospital's rules--it has no bearing on their own beliefs or how they live their own lives.  The doctor may very well use birth control, but knows she can't prescribe it at that particular hospital--there isn't anything hypocritical about it.

Prescribing birth control was never at issue, though. 

The issue was denying emergency medical treatment which was unrelated to the future use of contraception (removing the IUD is not contraception) on the basis that the woman was a contraceptive user.

The reason I say it's hypocritical is that it was used as an excuse to deny treatment based on what appears to be judgment of the woman's reproductive choices rather than based on either sound medicine or a consistent hospital policy.

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1 hour ago, Emilycharlotte said:

 

In this case, the doctor was apparently misinformed about the rules, which is worrisome. If that is the case, I would think the patient definitely has a law suit.

it was not just the doctor but they hospital and if I remember the insurance provider.

  we are seeing more hospitals taken over by catholic groups. 

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I had a tubal ligation after the baby was delivered c section. I asked the doc if he would be able to do it because catholic hospital, and he said sure. That was 34 years ago.

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I'm a Catholic and this is SICK. You have NO business turning away a bleeding patient. I don't give a rat's ass what your religious views are, your first responsibility is to your patients and your oath to do NO HARM. What if something had been seriously compromised and she'd hemorrhaged? Gotten a serious infection? You think THAT is what our faith dictates? Fuck that noise. You're no better than a white doctor turning away a gay patient or a colored patient. 

"What you do for the least of your brothers, you do for Me." -- this guy named Jesus. Seems to be big in the Cat'lic circles... 

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1 hour ago, Mercer said:

Prescribing birth control was never at issue, though. 

The issue was denying emergency medical treatment which was unrelated to the future use of contraception (removing the IUD is not contraception) on the basis that the woman was a contraceptive user.

The reason I say it's hypocritical is that it was used as an excuse to deny treatment based on what appears to be judgment of the woman's reproductive choices rather than based on either sound medicine or a consistent hospital policy.

Obviously, I understand having an IUD removed is not contraception. I used prescribing birth control as an example, in part because  you had said the situation was probably "one birth control user refusing to treat another birth control user", and that it was hypocritical.  I don't agree with you on the use of the word hypocrisy, because staff members aren't claiming to follow the hospital rules in their personal lives--they just have to follow them at work.  But that is probably splitting hairs.

Anyway, I couldn't use "refusing to remove an IUD" as an example of hospital policy, because it doesn't sound like it is hospital policy---it sounds like this doctor made an idiotic mistake.  Agreed that their policy must be inconsistent, vague or not well communicated...but seriously, would you expect someone smart enough to go to medical school to interpret "we don't provide birth control"  to mean, "we don't remove messed up IUDs from suffering,  bleeding patients in emergency situations"?  Unbelievable.

 

 

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My issue with what I see as hypocrisy is not really about whether they should follow the rules in their personal lives. That's entirely up to them.

What's at issue is that this woman was denied treatment on the sole basis that she was judged unworthy of emergency aid because she used a contraceptive.

Say the woman had been in a car accident, and in the process a piece of metal had become lodged in her body, but the circumstances were otherwise identical. The doctors would have assisted her to relieve her bleeding and pain without a second thought or a need to discuss amongst themselves whether they should help her.

This particular piece of metal was an IUD, though. And as a result, treating her suddenly became controversial. Doctors suddenly started to worry about hospital rules over a patient's active suffering. This patient was less deserving than everyone else because her pain was caused by a contraceptive - unlike the car accident victim, who would have been helped.

To me, the hypocrisy is that she was judged as unworthy of treatment because she used birth control by someone who probably also uses birth control. It's not about who uses what to prevent babies, it's that an action that both the patient and the doctor most likely engage in was used to dehumanize the patient so much that "first do no harm" was no longer applied to her.

Obviously you don't have to agree with me, but I felt that I hadn't really gotten my point across. :) Either way, I'll leave it at that and agree to disagree.

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2 hours ago, Emilycharlotte said:

Agreed that their policy must be inconsistent, vague or not well communicated...but seriously, would you expect someone smart enough to go to medical school to interpret "we don't provide birth control"  to mean, "we don't remove messed up IUDs from suffering,  bleeding patients in emergency situations"?  Unbelievable.

Exactly.  Mercer is saying that it's unbelievable and it may have been an episode of discrimination, in which a doctor, that may be using birth control for herself, chose to not to treat a patient not because of hospital policies but because of prejudices/judgement/discrimination towards a birth control user that coming from another bc user amounts to hypocrisy.

Anyway I really don't understand this sort of issues, I'm reminded of a different era when there was no healthcare for "those" women. Here hospitals are mostly public and the few private ones work exactly like the public ones if they want to receive fundings. They can't have discriminating policies nor refuse to treat patients. The law says that every ob/gyn can refuse to do abortions in reason of personal conscience (in that case there must be in that hospital a doctor who agrees to perform it) but they can't refuse to prescribe bc and they must follow through with care of a patient whose abortion procedure was started by another doctor if there's need.

I know some fundie lite Catholics  here in Italy and nearly all of them condemn abortions but are perfectly fine with using bc. I don't understand their reasoning since the RCC makes it very clear that it's not in their book but they suddenly become all deaf when clerics say something like that. Or maybe thanks to ebil public school they know bc=/=abortion and thus bc is regarded as a matter of personal choice that's not harmful to anyone so it's not the RCC's business. The only sub group I personally know that doesn't use bc are the so called "neocatecumenali" and are looked very suspiciously by other Catholic fundie lite groups. 

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I don't know as much about how Catholic social teachings relate to the adminstration of Catholic hospitals as I do with other aspects of Catholicism, but the impression I get is that the extent to which CST is applied depends on where you are, meaning that one hospital might allow for tubal ligations, but another won't, for example. I have also read accounts of final directives of dying people being disregarded because they violate CST, but once again, I'm not sure how common this is. Of course, if you're having an emergency, you shouldn't have to shop around to find a hospital willing to treat you.

8 hours ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

Exactly.  Mercer is saying that it's unbelievable and it may have been an episode of discrimination, in which a doctor, that may be using birth control for herself, chose to not to treat a patient not because of hospital policies but because of prejudices/judgement/discrimination towards a birth control user that coming from another bc user amounts to hypocrisy.

Anyway I really don't understand this sort of issues, I'm reminded of a different era when there was no healthcare for "those" women. Here hospitals are mostly public and the few private ones work exactly like the public ones if they want to receive fundings. They can't have discriminating policies nor refuse to treat patients. The law says that every ob/gyn can refuse to do abortions in reason of personal conscience (in that case there must be in that hospital a doctor who agrees to perform it) but they can't refuse to prescribe bc and they must follow through with care of a patient whose abortion procedure was started by another doctor if there's need.

I know some fundie lite Catholics  here in Italy and nearly all of them condemn abortions but are perfectly fine with using bc. I don't understand their reasoning since the RCC makes it very clear that it's not in their book but they suddenly become all deaf when clerics say something like that. Or maybe thanks to ebil public school they know bc=/=abortion and thus bc is regarded as a matter of personal choice that's not harmful to anyone so it's not the RCC's business. The only sub group I personally know that doesn't use bc are the so called "neocatecumenali" and are looked very suspiciously by other Catholic fundie lite groups. 

I've heard that the fundie-lite Communion and Liberation is big in Italy and has a lot of behind the scenes power. Here in the US, C&L run Ignatius Press, a conservative Catholic media company, although I didn't know of the C&L connection until last year. The neocatecumerical way movement is controversial among conservative Catholics here, because they essentially "do their own thing" in terms of liturgy and are essentially a church within a church. The same is true of many movements within Catholicism, but it's more obvious of the NCW followers.

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3 hours ago, Cleopatra7 said:

I've heard that the fundie-lite Communion and Liberation is big in Italy and has a lot of behind the scenes power.

It's not behind the scenes. They just held their annual meeting in Rimini and President Mattarella was the guest speaker (maybe a fitting comparison would be if Obama went to speak at an evangelical convention). Imho though they are fast losing momentum, young people are less Catholic by the day, C&L and Catholic leaning politicians are still somehow relevant thanks to the boom generation growing older and becoming more conservative (there's a say here "quando il corpo xe frusta l'anima xe giusta", it means that when people grow older and start having health problems they go back to religion). But they were undeniably much stronger in the past, the tide for them turned long ago in 1994 when the Democrazia Cristiana (biggest Italian party after WWII with strong ties to Comunione e Liberazione and the Catholic world in general) sank into the Mani Pulite inquest over corruption. They never recovered but stayed somehow afloat. The sooner we will definitely get rid of their wasps nest the better will be. Their last half victory was forbidding gay couples from adopting children, I'm saying half victory because they failed to outright deny gay couples all the other marriage rights as they wished.

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I'm beyond the need for reproductive care, but I would like to reject care at Catholic hospitals. I find their policies abhorrent, as I would any policies that are based in medical science.

That said, I would have to travel more than an hour (twice as long) to get to a non-Catholic hospital. Not the best option in an emergency...

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5 hours ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

It's not behind the scenes. They just held their annual meeting in Rimini and President Mattarella was the guest speaker (maybe a fitting comparison would be if Obama went to speak at an evangelical convention). Imho though they are fast losing momentum, young people are less Catholic by the day, C&L and Catholic leaning politicians are still somehow relevant thanks to the boom generation growing older and becoming more conservative (there's a say here "quando il corpo xe frusta l'anima xe giusta", it means that when people grow older and start having health problems they go back to religion). But they were undeniably much stronger in the past, the tide for them turned long ago in 1994 when the Democrazia Cristiana (biggest Italian party after WWII with strong ties to Comunione e Liberazione and the Catholic world in general) sank into the Mani Pulite inquest over corruption. They never recovered but stayed somehow afloat. The sooner we will definitely get rid of their wasps nest the better will be. Their last half victory was forbidding gay couples from adopting children, I'm saying half victory because they failed to outright deny gay couples all the other marriage rights as they wished.

Thanks for the information. The only critical English language book on C&L, the Neocatecumerical Way, and Focolore is "The Pope's Armada" by Gordon Urquhart, which is really good, but quite dated (it came out in 1995). I guess that when the book was published, C&L had already peaked in Italy. My guess is that these groups will become even more bunker-like as their influence declines, and they become convinced they are a "remnant."

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2 hours ago, Cleopatra7 said:

Thanks for the information. The only critical English language book on C&L, the Neocatecumerical Way, and Focolore is "The Pope's Armada" by Gordon Urquhart, which is really good, but quite dated (it came out in 1995). I guess that when the book was published, C&L had already peaked in Italy. My guess is that these groups will become even more bunker-like as their influence declines, and they become convinced they are a "remnant."

OMG! Looking for what you meant with "remnant" I've found The Remnant's petition for Pope Fancis resignation in italian translation (kudos to them for the translation it is very well done) :pb_lol: the "libello" with which they explain all the horrible things he did was fantastic, reading it I was all "oh I didn't know this! Well done Francis you're great! If half of this were true I would nearly consider going back to Catholicism!" :pb_lol:. Seriously they are the best propaganda for progressivism ever.

Unfortunately C&L isn't this much fun. The stereotypical "ciellino" (C&Ler, and yes for many it amounts to an insult,  it's generally pronounced with great despise) is very hypocritical, very interested in politics would love to make very pro RCC political choices, it's nearly more a political identity than a religious one. In general they want to preserve the political preeminence of the RCC in Italy especially in the social services sector because it's very influential (and a very affluent part of the economy) and only tangentially care for the core of Catholicism social teachings. In popular culture they are perceived as the enablers of the greedy/money handling/political influencing side of the RCC and there's a widespread allergy to this approach. Their strength was in being perceived as very mainstream, just very politically involved Catholics,  their decadence started with the end of their perceived moral superiority to other political movements. No way they would ever openly speak against the pope or openly oppose what is the mainstream society thought and this is their current problem,  society is a lot less conservative now than in the past and they can't reconcile anymore their being mainstream and pro RCC. 

Neocatecumenali are a completely different bunch. It's more of a different way to live Catholicism. What truly sets them apart from more common conservative Catholics is their refuse of bc easily deduced by the size of their broods (C&Ler definitely use bc). Unlike fundies we discuss here though they (those I personally know, I am not an expert on the movement per se nor of its variations in different geographical areas) tend to be involved in their local parishes, their women are very educated and generally outspoken persons (my math professor in high school, one very good local orthotics maker etc), their men are usually in very good earning positions, they aren't endlessly proselytising, they like colourful Masses with lot of singing and community moments but they use the same liturgy of everyone else, they engage in politics as sigular individuals not as a movement nor it is their primary concern. Since 1995 they have added a couple of generation since they tend to marry young.

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Personally I feel that the words, "refused to treat a patient in an emergency", should always be followed with the expression, "lost his/her rights to practice medicine due to lack of ethics".

 

 

 

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7 hours ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

OMG! Looking for what you meant with "remnant" I've found The Remnant's petition for Pope Fancis resignation in italian translation (kudos to them for the translation it is very well done) :pb_lol: the "libello" with which they explain all the horrible things he did was fantastic, reading it I was all "oh I didn't know this! Well done Francis you're great! If half of this were true I would nearly consider going back to Catholicism!" :pb_lol:. Seriously they are the best propaganda for progressivism ever.

Unfortunately C&L isn't this much fun. The stereotypical "ciellino" (C&Ler, and yes for many it amounts to an insult,  it's generally pronounced with great despise) is very hypocritical, very interested in politics would love to make very pro RCC political choices, it's nearly more a political identity than a religious one. In general they want to preserve the political preeminence of the RCC in Italy especially in the social services sector because it's very influential (and a very affluent part of the economy) and only tangentially care for the core of Catholicism social teachings. In popular culture they are perceived as the enablers of the greedy/money handling/political influencing side of the RCC and there's a widespread allergy to this approach. Their strength was in being perceived as very mainstream, just very politically involved Catholics,  their decadence started with the end of their perceived moral superiority to other political movements. No way they would ever openly speak against the pope or openly oppose what is the mainstream society thought and this is their current problem,  society is a lot less conservative now than in the past and they can't reconcile anymore their being mainstream and pro RCC. 

Neocatecumenali are a completely different bunch. It's more of a different way to live Catholicism. What truly sets them apart from more common conservative Catholics is their refuse of bc easily deduced by the size of their broods (C&Ler definitely use bc). Unlike fundies we discuss here though they (those I personally know, I am not an expert on the movement per se nor of its variations in different geographical areas) tend to be involved in their local parishes, their women are very educated and generally outspoken persons (my math professor in high school, one very good local orthotics maker etc), their men are usually in very good earning positions, they aren't endlessly proselytising, they like colourful Masses with lot of singing and community moments but they use the same liturgy of everyone else, they engage in politics as sigular individuals not as a movement nor it is their primary concern. Since 1995 they have added a couple of generation since they tend to marry young.

If the Ignatius Insight blog and the books published by Ignatius Press are any indication, C&L come off as a humorless lot without the WTF aspect found in the Remnant and other traditionalist publications. Ignatius Insight does have a lot of articles about why birth control is evil, but that could be because conservative American Catholics are more fixated on it than their Italian counterparts. 

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16 hours ago, AlysonRR said:

I'm beyond the need for reproductive care, but I would like to reject care at Catholic hospitals. I find their policies abhorrent, as I would any policies that are based in medical science.

As am I, but there's another reason to avoid Catholic hospitals if you are in a state that has a Death With Dignity law and you want to take that route off this mortal coil.

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