A Catholic hospital was sold. Reproductive care returned immediately.

Beacon Health's takeover of Ascension Borgess in southwest Michigan restored reproductive health services that Catholic doctrine had blocked for years.

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A secular non-profit group took over a Catholic hospital chain in southwest Michigan a year ago, and the result is that patients can finally get the reproductive services they were previously denied.

It’s amazing what can happen when the Catholic Church doesn’t dictate health care.

In April of 2025, the Ascension health care system announced it would be selling off four hospitals in the Kalamazoo region, along with dozens of outpatient clinics, to Beacon Health System, an Indiana-based non-profit. The sale was finalized that July.

Beacon Health System (screenshot via YouTube)

What made the sale stand out is that these things usually happen the other way around. According to the health advocacy group Community Catalyst, as of 2020, the 10 largest Catholic health care systems now “own or control 394 short-term acute care hospitals.” Four of the 10 largest health care systems in the country are affiliated with the Catholic Church. More than 30% of births in the U.S. now happen in a Catholic hospital.

And that’s been a major problem because Catholic hospitals play by different rules, not dictated by what’s best for patients.

Their directives don’t come from medical professionals, but rather the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. And since anything involving contraception is forbidden in the faith, even a normal procedure like tubal ligation isn’t permitted. This rule applies even if future pregnancies would put the woman’s life in danger.

By and large, and with very few exceptions, the USCCB does not allow Catholic hospitals to perform any procedures that violate Catholic doctrine. Hospitals that violate those rules risk getting shut down. Even if the doctors and nurses who work there know that a procedure is necessary for the health of the patient, their expertise takes a backseat to the whims of religious leaders.

A lot of people know that Catholic hospitals won’t perform abortions, but fewer know how radical that policy is. Even if you set aside elective abortions, patients who have ectopic pregnancies (and whose lives are at risk) would be in danger if they went to a Catholic institution.

A normal hospital could give that patient a drug to induce an abortion... or just remove that fertilized egg through surgery. Not Catholic hospitals, though. They might make doctors remove a woman’s entire fallopian tube to prevent something fatal, reducing her ability to get pregnant in the future, even though it’s medically unnecessary, because that’s what their faith dictates.

What if a woman has a miscarriage? That’s already emotionally draining, but Catholic hospitals make things worse. Normal hospitals might induce an abortion to make sure the embryonic tissue is removed from a woman’s body to prevent infection. Not Catholic hospitals. They require doctors to wait until a woman is infected before providing treatment.

What about contraception? Catholic hospitals won’t dispense it. If a victim of sexual assault needs birth control immediately, and a Catholic hospital happens to be the one nearby, it may not help her. If there’s any chance the victim is already pregnant when the hospital sees her, that help is even less likely.

Catholic hospitals also won’t perform vasectomies on men because those would interfere with natural pregnancies in the future.

Nor will they help women who want to get pregnant by using a sperm donor.

They also won’t help couples use a surrogate mother to give birth to their biological child because that would also be seen as “gravely immoral.”

Catholic hospitals are equally awful at the other end of life. What if you’re an elderly person who is dying of a terminal disease, constantly in pain, and eager to end life on your own terms, peacefully, while you are able to make those kinds of decisions? Even in states where euthanasia, or death with dignity, is legal, too damn bad. You will just have to suffer. They will not assist you in those cases.

Catholic hospitals will also not help you if you’re a transgender person who wants (or needs) hormone treatment, or a hysterectomy, or a mastectomy.

In short, Catholic hospitals have an obligation to the Catholic Church, not their patients. The people they hurt the most tend to be low-income people, women, and LGBTQ individuals—people who may not be able to decide in advance which hospital they want to go to due to emergencies, or a lack of insurance, or because they simply don’t know about these restrictions in advance. Even if they have insurance, it’s possible their policies require them to go to a Catholic hospital, where their options are severely limited.

So what happened after Beacon took over Ascension in southwest Michigan?

Just look at this headline from MLive.

A major change at Beacon Health has been the addition of reproductive health services that were not offered previously by Ascension Borgess prior to the transition.

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Starting July 1, 2025 — the day Beacon acquired the four Kalamazoo-area hospitals — Beacon began offering tubal ligations and a wider variety of intrauterine devices and birth control products, per a Beacon spokesperson.

A group of urologists will also soon be joining Beacon Kalamazoo and perform vasectomies.

“Beacon Health System welcomes and supports all individuals who follow our region’s wide breadth of belief systems, spiritual and faith traditions,” said Dr. Mark Noffsinger, Beacon Kalamazoo chief medical officer.

This is what happens when doctors come before dogma.

The hospitals themselves won’t provide elective abortions, which is not unusual for places like this, but they will direct patients to places that can handle those procedures. (The article notes that, “According to the Guttmacher Institute, only 4% of abortions in the U.S. are performed in hospitals.”)

Who knew that all you had to do to improve patient care was provide patient care? It says a lot that Catholic oversight left this hospital system and everything significantly improved. The buildings didn’t change and the staffers didn’t suddenly become more qualified, but medical care no longer required a bishop to get between a doctor and a patient.

That’s the big lesson here. Catholic hospitals don’t provide better health care because they’re religious. They provide less health care because they’re religious. Evidence-based medicine goes out the window and replaced by religious whims.

That’s not to say the American health care system is working. It’s not. It’s fundamentally broken. We shouldn’t be having any discussions about what care people can get because everything should be available to everyone who needs it. But within the broken system we have, this is still good news. Patients deserve treatment based on science, medical expertise, and their own informed choices.

If anything, this story raises a much bigger question: Why are so many communities dependent on hospitals that refuse to provide legal, medically appropriate care in the first place? Americans shouldn’t have to hope a secular non-profit buys out their local Catholic hospital just to receive standard reproductive care. Stories like this one shouldn’t be anomalies. They should be the norm.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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