“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’ve been thinking about this for a minute, and I think a good standard here is making a list of (relatively) non-overlapping causes of death that have claimed over a billion human lives.
Infectious disease is almost certainly at least one entry on this list, primarily secular war as well, starvation/famine probably a few times over, cancer and heart disease are probably distinct entries, and death attempting to grow/hunt food. I suspect deaths by religion could be on that list as well, but it’s the entry I’m least confident in.
In every sense of the word, this is a bad list to be on, but I don’t think religion is near the biggest culprit on the list, even if you do a lot of special pleading, and group all deaths by religious cause together, but split each disease, war, etc up for some reason.