“It is damning that here in California, where abortion care is a constitutional right, we have a hospital implementing a policy that’s reminiscent of heartbeat laws in extremist red states,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said.
A Catholic hospital in Northern California is facing a lawsuit by the state’s attorney general after it reportedly refused to perform an abortion on a woman whose pregnancy was not viable and whose life was in danger.
Anna Nusslock was already in severe crisis when she and her husband Daniel arrived last February at Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka, according to the suit, which AG Rob Bonta filed Monday in Humboldt County Superior Court. A doctor examined Nusslock, who was 15 weeks pregnant with twins, and told her they would not survive, the suit explains.
Without a dilation and evacuation procedure, or, what is commonly known as “an abortion,” Nusslock was also at risk of death, the complaint contends.
However, it goes on, “Providence refused to allow Anna’s doctors to treat her, as the hospital’s policies prohibited them from terminating a pregnancy so long as they could detect fetal heart tones. The only exception was if the mother’s life was at immediate risk, a high threshold that Anna apparently did not yet reach. Only at some poorly defined point in the future, when Anna was close enough to death, would Providence permit her doctors to intervene. Until then, Anna and her physicians could do nothing but wait, worry, and hope.”
I think to call yourself a hospital the law should require them to adhere to medical science, not a religious belief. If they want to be religion first, and medical second, then they should be a private clinic that is labeled as such so people know they are not going to get the full hospital medical care one would expect from an institution calling itself a hospital.
We should have a law that keeps religious organizations from receiving Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements. That would stop this shit real quick.