Ok new item to contemplate in slack-jawed horror and then shout the place down about. A Twitter friend alerted me to the fact that the University of Texas at Austin medical school recently partnered with a Catholic hospital group, Seton, and the students were told they have to comply with the ERD.
I can barely get my head around it. It’s a state school. And the ERD tells hospital and medical staff that they may not perform abortions ever.
A publicly funded university is ordering its med students to comply with church rules. In the United States, in 2013.
From the Austin Statesman a year ago, December 2012.
Plans to establish a medical school at the University of Texas and train its students at a Catholic-owned teaching hospital have rekindled debate over public health care services for women and the impact of Vatican rules against birth control.
Local health and university officials said they don’t see a problem with a partnership between UT, the Seton Healthcare Family and Central Health, Travis County’s hospital district. Services for women will continue to be offered in the same way they are being provided now, officials said.
Except for the Catholic part. This was a year ago, so it was weeks after the news about Savita Halappanavar came out. You would think health officials would be paying attention.
More recently here is Catholic Watch this past August.
Below is a message sent out by the University of Texas at Austin that contains a line of such unadulterated BS that it’s making CatholicWatch’s head spin. For those in the know, the University of Texas is trying to justify its partnership with Seton Health Care Family (which requires compliance with the ERDs) to train future physicians. You can read more about ithere.
Here’s what Executive Vice President and Provost Steven Leslie had to say about the deal that is so mind-boggling: ”It is true that the doctors employed by Seton must abide by Catholic directives while practicing medicine in those facilities, including rules on birth control, abortion and end-of-life care. However, those same directives also require that patients are fully informed so they can give free consent, which requires doctors to share the full range of information about medications and procedures, including contraception.”
Now it’s clear that Leslie has either never read the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care or he read them but didn’t comprehend what they actually say.
Here’s what the ERDs say on this point, starting with an excerpt from Directive 27: ”Free and informed consent requires that the person or the person’s surrogate receive all reasonable information about the essential nature of the proposed treatment and its benefits; its risks, side-effects, consequences, and cost and any reasonable and MORALLY LEGITIMATE alternatives, including no treatment at all…..The free and informed health care decision of the person or the person’s surrogate is to be followed so long as it does not contradict Catholic principles.”
Which means a person who enters into a Catholic hospital automatically is deprived of THE RIGHT TO FREE AND INFORMED CONSENT because no procedure can be done that violates Catholic principles and no information about alternatives that are not deemed “morally legitimate” in the eyes of the Catholic Church need be discussed either.
This is such an outrage.