A Nashville woman was prepped for sterilization surgery. Then the Catholic hospital blocked it.
At Ascension St. Thomas Midtown, administrators overrode doctors and denied a legal procedure in the name of “sacred fertility.”
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In a disturbing story out of Nashville, Tennessee, a woman says she was prepped for surgery to remove her fallopian tubes and become sterilized—the IV had already been placed inside her—when doctors informed her they were banned from doing their job.
The reason? It was a Catholic hospital and voluntary sterilization violates their religious dogma. They wouldn’t perform the operation because they believed they had to protect her “sacred fertility.”
The unnamed woman spoke to news reporters about her ordeal.
The woman told WSMV her reasons for pursuing sterilization included a history of assault, previous issues with other forms of birth control, and concerns about living in a state without abortion access.
“I went on birth control at a young age after being assaulted,” she said. “That’s another big reason I wanted to pursue sterilization. Because we live in a state that, you know, you can’t get an abortion.”
She always knew she wasn’t interested in having children, and getting sterilized seemed like the most responsible way to make sure that wouldn’t happen, even accidentally. She scheduled the salpingectomy at Ascension St. Thomas Midtown and paid for the surgery in advance… but once she was prepped and ready to go, the medical team let her sit there for three hours while administrators stepped in to prevent it from happening.
Now she’s waiting to get a refund while sounding the alarm.
The sad thing is this was entirely predictable.
Catholic hospitals have an obligation to the Catholic Church, not their patients. They’re not in the business of helping people. They’re in the business of imposing Catholic doctrine through medicine. If that happens to help some people, great, but so often, we get stories like these where patients who need medical care can’t get it specifically because the hospital closest to them is a Catholic one.
The people who tend to get hurt the most are 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.
All of this is because Catholic hospitals’ 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 or sterilization 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. (By the same logic, they also won’t perform vasectomies on men because that would interfere with natural pregnancies in the future.)
If we were just talking about a handful of hospitals, that would be one thing. But Catholic hospitals are taking over the country. 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.” They also own or control 864 urgent care centers, 385 ambulatory surgery centers, 274 physician groups, and more than 1,100 hospitals overall. 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.
We don’t know who this woman is in Nashville. She wanted to remain anonymous. (Her boyfriend apparently wrote about all of this on Reddit, in a now-deleted post, which is what got the media’s attention.) What she told reporters is that she found a doctor willing to perform the surgery and he’s the person who scheduled the operation at the Catholic hospital.
Did the doctor not know the Catholic hospital’s rules? That would seem… odd.
In any case, many people have no clue how their medical options are limited by Catholic-run hospitals in their midst. If this story raises their awareness, fantastic.
State Rep. Aftyn Behn said this decision was the result of a GOP-sponsored bill (House Bill 1044) which allows doctors to refuse to provide treatment that goes against their personal beliefs.
I would take issue with that characterization, though. As far as I can tell, the problem here wasn’t the doctors refusing to perform the surgery. It was the Catholic administrators who wouldn’t allow them to do it for reasons that existed long before that bill went into effect.
(Behn has sponsored a different bill that would forbid any kind of discrimination in medical care for pregnant people. Even if that bill were in effect, though, it likely wouldn’t have solved this particular problem.)
In a state that ranks among the worst for infant mortality, and where one lawmaker has just sponsored a bill that could impose the death penalty on women who have abortions (and the doctors who help them), what we know is that the people with power aren’t interested in helping women, period. They want to force them to have children against their will, whether it means denying them abortions or refusing to sterilize them.
But what happened at Ascension wasn’t some misunderstanding. It was the system working as designed. Catholic hospitals believe patient care isn’t as high a priority as religious doctrine. If a safe procedure is scheduled in their facilities, they unfortunately have every right to step in and block it. No one should be surprised by that.
That also means people in Tennessee are at a higher risk. With Catholic hospitals across the state, and laws designed to punish people who have abortions, women who don’t want to keep their pregnancies for any number of reasons—or have them in the first place—are running out of options. It’s hard to know who the bigger enemy is at this point: The Catholics who want to force women to get pregnant or the Republicans who want to force women to give birth against their will.
This is another reason why Catholic hospitals should be required to publicize a list of what procedures they will and won’t perform. It shouldn’t be a guessing game and patients deserve to know their options before the IV is already inside their bodies.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
There is absolutely nothing that cannot be justified in the name of religion. The Catholic church's stand on contraception doesn't elevate the status of life, it trivializes it. Like every other patriarchal misogynist organization, they have no concern for the woman what so ever.
God damn the RCC. An obscenely wealthy patriarchal organization that treats women, LGBTQs and (especially) children with contempt while shielding its own from any sort of accountability.
Pro-life, my ass. Pro their own lives.