Was it true? Catholic doctors.

[Anonymous]

Interesting comments about Georgetown. I’m a patient there and was told that they would have to refer me to another practice to get an IUD. This was about 5 years ago, I’ve posted on the expectant moms forum about this once and was told by several posters that they got a different message from their doctors there. Wonder if it's physician dependent there?

[Anonymous]

I just want to say that a lot of expectant mothers would choose to save the baby's life over their own. So this isn't just a Catholic thing. There was even a thread on DCUM about this where most people would choose their baby's life over theirs. I personally would choose me and made this clear to DH. I need to be alive to care for my other children and I can have more children later. It's a personal decision. But I always had that discussion with DH while I was pregnant because he'd make the decisions for me if I was incapacitated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Just last week, something similar happened in a small town in Washington state where the only hospital was Catholic.

https://rewire.news/article/2019/09/25/miscarriage-catholic-hospital/

And more info here in a Forbes article about how widespread this is.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/judystone/2016/05/07/health-care-denied-at-550-hospitals-because-of-catholic-doctrine/#25d6a0c5ad9d

Just to be fair, it looks like the people enacting these laws were hospital administrators and nurses. The people seen in the ED were “providers,” and the only MD mentioned was essentially an admin as well. From the article, the physicians involved in the actual
patient care were the ones who advocated for and saved these women.

This. Don’t conflate doctors with administrators. Catholic doctors are actively fighting these policies at their specific institutions.
Catholic doctors invented oral contraceptives and are continuing to look for contraception that doesn’t violate the church’s policies. Catholic doctors are on call 24/7 in hospital ethics committees with decisions made within minutes. Catholic doctors are caring for patients anyway and risking getting fired. Catholic doctors are getting patients transferred out of these hospitals. In every case posted here, the doctors are taking care of patients.

Still though, if a choice of hospitals is available, wouldn’t you choose the one which doesn’t have policies and administrators and nurses who are more concerned with church doctrine than patient care? That’s all OP’s mom was saying. And if you have a choice, you’re lucky - in a lot of areas of this country you don’t have a number of hospitals to pick from.

Maybe, but that’s not really the point. OP didn’t ask about hospitals. She asked about doctors.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When I was a teenager, my mom told me that if I ever had a baby, don't go to a Catholic hospital because if something went wrong and the doctor had to choose just one of us to save, he’d save the baby. Was there any truth to that? I assume it’s not true today.

This is almost verbatim from a novel from the 60s. I want to say Peyton Place? I remember reading my mom’s copy decades ago.

OP here. That is a possible source for my mother. I really don’t know. My mother is pro life, but her telling me this story sowed the seeds of my pro choice beliefs. It made me think I mattered. That she cared that I lived. And I could try to have another baby. These were my teenaged thoughts, so forgive me for sounding morbid.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I had a miscarriage while seeing doctors at Georgetown and they gave me the option of letting it play out naturally or having a D&C.

Same and that was over a decade ago.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
At Georgetown, I understood very clearly that some doctors saw themselves as my doctor, while others viewed themselves as the baby's doctor. A situation arose during my three-day induction, when I decided to ride out the time of the doctor on duty to get the care I needed.

After delivery, a nurse did come to me to ask about Obama. I'm black, maybe that's why?!!! He was newly-elected, so maybe she was doing this to everyone? She was quite young and seemed sweet. Never asked about the birth or the baby. She pulled my blanket straight then launched into a diatribe about how sad it was that Obama was going to kill all of the babies. I held my firstborn in my arms and remained silent until she wandered out.

I used one of those feedback cards to state my discomfort and note how inappropriate I thought it was for her to talk about such things as a representative of the hospital.

They also had very strange policies about cord blood donations. It had something to do with stem cells.

I had no issues with cord blood there. It is a completely separate source of stem cells than those from aborted fetuses. When expected my younger DD, we were encouraged to bank hers due to her rather unusual mixed ancestry.

We also had no issues with that at G'town. The only issue we had was with our premature baby because we didn't have everything set in place yet when he arrived so unexpectedly early. And they were amazing in that crisis, by the way.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I just want to say that a lot of expectant mothers would choose to save the baby's life over their own. So this isn't just a Catholic thing. There was even a thread on DCUM about this where most people would choose their baby's life over theirs. I personally would choose me and made this clear to DH. I need to be alive to care for my other children and I can have more children later. It's a personal decision. But I always had that discussion with DH while I was pregnant because he'd make the decisions for me if I was incapacitated.

It is very rare for the delivery room to only have 2 choices, to either save the baby or mother. Perhaps we should not use that as an analogy since it just about does not happen
I am more concerned with Catholic hospitals refusing to give sterilizations, forcing women to carry a stillborn fetus until she gets septic before helping her, delaying care for ectopic pregnancy, etc

[Anonymous]

It’s actually worse than a choice between mother and baby because there are numerous reports of Catholic hospitals insisting that they will not permit the fetus to be removed when there’s a heartbeat even though it is clear it cannot survive and the mother is septic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s actually worse than a choice between mother and baby because there are numerous reports of Catholic hospitals insisting that they will not permit the fetus to be removed when there’s a heartbeat even though it is clear it cannot survive and the mother is septic.

Is that legal?
They are being reckless in denying care

[Anonymous]

I would have chosen the baby’s life over my own - until I became a mother. DC #1 and #2 deserved to have their mom.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I would have chosen the baby’s life over my own - until I became a mother. DC #1 and #2 deserved to have their mom.

I don't get what you are saying
Would it not be better for the kids to have some kind of mother instead of no mothy

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s actually worse than a choice between mother and baby because there are numerous reports of Catholic hospitals insisting that they will not permit the fetus to be removed when there’s a heartbeat even though it is clear it cannot survive and the mother is septic.

Is that legal?
They are being reckless in denying care

Yes. You can thank the twin evils of forced birth beliefs and big business for making it so.

And if you have a choice, birth at a non-catholic hospital.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I would have chosen the baby’s life over my own - until I became a mother. DC #1 and #2 deserved to have their mom.

I don't get what you are saying
Would it not be better for the kids to have some kind of mother instead of no mothy

That’s exactly what she’s saying. Pre kids, if the delivery of her first baby threatened both their lives, she’d choose to die so her baby could live. Now that she has kids and understands her role as mother, she’d choose herself so that she could continue to be a mother to the kids she already has.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s actually worse than a choice between mother and baby because there are numerous reports of Catholic hospitals insisting that they will not permit the fetus to be removed when there’s a heartbeat even though it is clear it cannot survive and the mother is septic.

Is that legal?
They are being reckless in denying care

There is literally no Catholic doctrine or hospital policy that promotes this. Don't be so stupid as to fall for the hatred. Please cite an actual policy from an actual hospital that says the mother must die. You won't find it. You may find malpractice cases from all kinds of hospitals though.

[Anonymous]

It's not that they say the mother must die, it's that many times, they won't do anything, as long as there is a fetal heartbeat even though the the fetus clearly cannot survive until the mother is very sick and thus, they risk her life.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2636458/

This is what happened in the well known case of Savita Halppanavar who died in Ireland several years ago.