DETROIT (CNS) – Lawyers for a woman who claims she suffered a miscarriage because of the way a Michigan Catholic hospital handled her case have filed suit on her behalf against the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) over its “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care.”
The lawsuit was filed Nov. 29 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan/Southern Division by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
All Catholic hospitals in the U.S. are required to adhere to the directives, most recently revised by the U.S. bishops in 2001. They guide Catholic health care facilities in addressing a wide range of ethical questions, such as abortion, euthanasia, care for the poor, medical research, treatment of rape victims and other issues.
According to the suit, plaintiff Tamesha Means was 18 weeks pregnant in December, 2010 when her water broke and she had a friend rush her to a Catholic hospital, Mercy Health Muskegon, as it is now called. It says that as a mother of three, Means, then 27, knew something was seriously wrong with her pregnancy, and the Catholic hospital was the only such facility close to her home.
Means claims that she received negligent care from the hospital, ending in her miscarriage, because it was required to follow the USCCB directives and was prevented from telling her “the fetus she was carrying had virtually no chance of surviving” and informing her the safest option was to “induce labor and terminate the pregnancy.”
The Catholic Church opposes abortion. The directives state, “Catholic health care ministry witnesses to the sanctity of life ‘from the moment of conception until death.’”
The suit says the hospital sent Means home and told her to make an appointment with her own doctor. She returned to Mercy Health the next day, was sent home again, only to return a third time, according to the suit. As “she waited to be sent home for the third time … she began to deliver,” the suit says. “The baby died shortly after birth.”
The Conference of Bishops had no immediate comment.
