Tamesha Means was 18 weeks’ pregnant when her water broke. Means, then 27 and the mother of two, knew something was wrong. So she called a friend to take her to the one hospital within a half-hour’s drive, Mercy Health Partners.
During that trip to the hospital — and two return trips, one later that night and then again the next morning — Means says she was discharged with medication and instructions to wait for her pain to subside. According to her account, she was not offered the option to induce labor or terminate the pregnancy, options that could have ended her pain, nor was she told that the fetus was unlikely to survive.
“The pain was unbearable,” Means said in an interview from her home in Muskegon, Mich. “I told them, ‘I need you guys to help me.’ They told me there was nothing they could do.”
Three years later, Means’ treatment at Mercy, part of a Catholic health system, has become the centerpiece of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The suit, filed in late November, argues that the Catholic Bishops’ religious directives for hospitals — which generally bar discussion or performance of abortions — result in negligent care for patients such as Means.
Without being offered “the medically appropriate treatment option of terminating her pregnancy,” the case argues, Means “suffered severe, unnecessary, and foreseeable physical and emotional pain.”
The lawsuit comes in the midst of a wave of high-profile mergers between Catholic hospitals and secular systems. The partnerships have raised questions about how care will be delivered at institutions guided by religious directives, particularly in rural areas like Muskegon where patients have little choice of where to be seen.
“As the number of Catholic hospitals increases, we’re highlighting the way they can constrain care,” said Louise Melling, ACLU deputy legal director. “The suit is significant in that it’s calling attention to what is happening at these hospitals. In some instances, the directives are governing care rather than medical guidelines.”
Mercy Health Partners declined to comment on the case through a spokeswoman, as did the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Much of the tension tends to center on reproductive health; 52 percent of obstetricians who work in Catholic hospitals say they have experienced a conflict over religious-based policies, according to a 2012 article in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
One obstetrician, according to a recent report published this summer in the American Journal of Bioethics Primary Research, faced off with his Catholic hospital’s ethics committee when he wanted to terminate the pregnancy of a women newly diagnosed with cancer, who needed to undergo chemotherapy.
Another doctor reported a conflict at her hospital that had been sold to a Catholic hospital chain three years prior. The ethics committee ruled that a doctor could not terminate a “molar pregnancy,” where the embryo begins to develop but, due to a tumor, will not survive.
The case is meant to push back against the Catholic health directives, ACLU’s Melling said. “It certainly alleges that the imposition of the directives in their current fashion violates the duty of care to patients,” she said.
“We are committed to defending Americans’ right to practice religion,” Melling continued. “We have a long history of doing that. But this isn’t about religious freedom. It’s about medical care.”
