In September 2015, a woman named Jessica Mann gave birth to her third child at a Michigan medical center. She had sought an exemption to its policy to for a post-partum tubal ligation. Her doctors recommended the procedure due to a potentially life-threatening brain tumor.
The medical center refused the request.
Its parent company, Ascension Health, requires its hospitals to follow the ethical and religious directives of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which consider intentional direct sterilization as unethical and contrary to Catholic teaching.
Mann had the procedure at a different hospital. In a statement Mann said the hospital’s policy distracted her from preparations for the arrival of the baby and meant she had to search for a new doctor. “I don’t want other women to be turned away from hospitals that let their religious views trump their patients’ serious medical needs,” she said.
The ACLU filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights violations charging that the decision to not perform a sterilization violated anti-discrimination laws and “caused her significant harm.”
In response to the complaint, Ken Connelly, legal counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, stated: “No one should be forced to perform or participate in a procedure when doing so would violate their conscience. This is especially true of medical workers and health care systems who are in the profession largely because of – and as an extension of – their faith.”
“Furthermore, no law requires religious hospitals and medical personnel to sterilize women, and, in fact, federal law specifically prohibits the government from engaging in any such coercion,” Connelly continued.
The legal group said federal officials should disregard a complaint filed against Genesys Regional Medical Center in the Flint suburb of Grand Blanc, Michigan. Further, any federal action would be barred under the federal Church Amendment and the reiteration of conscience protections in the Affordable Care Act of 2010.
Brigitte Amiri, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, defended the complaint. “Everyone is entitled to their religious beliefs, but those beliefs do not give anyone the right to discriminate against another person,” she said.
Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys countered in their letter: “It is not an act of discrimination to decline, for conscience reasons, to perform a medical procedure – indeed, if that were the case conscience protections would not exist.”
On Friday, a new Presidential Administration will be sworn into office.
Let us pray that U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office will be revamped and the Obama anti-life and pro-abortion bureaucrats will be removed from their positions of authority and influence. Only then will the rule of law be re-established and such nonsense suits against religious institutions be discouraged and put at bay.
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