Troy hospitals to stop offering family planning services?

Balloon Juice, via MergerWatch.org: Catholic affiliations mean Troy Hospitals can’t offer family planning, women’s health solutions

Due to Northeast Health’s recent mergers with Catholic organizations, two of Troy’s three hospitals – St. Mary’s and Samaritan – can no longer offer family planning services including but not limited to abortions, tubal ligations, and contraception counseling(!).

Samaritan’s solution was to institute essentially a hospital within a hospital that was independent of Catholic affiliations, creating a 20-bed independent maternity ward within its walls. Which I’m sure the people working there are just thrilled about given the already voluminous bureaucracy inherent in running a health care facility.

So the worst-case scenario was, in at least one instance, avoided. But the point is that this goes beyond simple rhetoric and is the sort of thing I think people don’t realize when they talk about religious exemptions. Those religious organizations are actual hospitals that serve the community. I think too many hear “the Catholic Church” and think that means its practices are limited strictly to the confines of church and convent walls. It’s about the hospitals they have a financial stake in that serve a vast majority of the community, which then in turn suffer due to the archaic whims of the Catholic Church.