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.

Someone passed this along to me anonymously right before I left work. Just got around to reading and…wow.

From The Albany Newspaper Guild’s response to Kristi Gustafson-Barlette’s anti-union comments on her Facebook:

“I find unions protect the weak, and don’t produce viable results. People don’t DESERVE raises, they earn them,” Kristi wrote in response to a reader. She went on to add: “If you believe you should earn more, and your company doesn’t give it to you, then leave — find another job.”

…

And she is dead wrong about unions, in general and the Guild specifically. Ironically, I remember when Kristi was an editorial assistant and came to me, upset because a member of management had said if she wanted to be a reporter, she should leave, get experience elsewhere and then apply to come back. I told her that two of her colleagues, Bob Gardinier and Dennis Yusko, had been told the same thing. They perserved and became reporters. I advised her to do the same. She did and succeeded.

As someone who has benefitted from being a member of the Guild and seen colleagues laid off, positions left unfilled after departures, and no raises in over five years, you’d think she’d know better.

I didn’t see the comment. I just hope, for her sake, she at least had the common sense to write that on her personal account rather than her work account.