What would Jesus do … if he was the CEO of a Catholic hospital confronted with the proposed new abortion laws currently before the Victorian Parliament?
According to Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart, he might be obliged to close the hospital’s emergency and maternity departments, if the new laws are passed by the Victorian upper house.
As one in three Victorian babies is born in a Catholic hospital, this would clearly place an unmanageable burden on the state’s other maternity services.
The Archbishop’s comments may be unnecessarily alarmist, given that the Government argues that the new laws will not require Catholic hospitals to perform abortions and the Catholic health sector has not supported the Archbishop’s threats of mass closures.
However, they do highlight one of the underlying tensions within Australia’s complex health system.
The Catholic health sector is the largest non-government provider of health and community services. It straddles the public and private health sectors and includes 75 hospitals nationally (both public and private) aged care homes, hospices and community health services.
It provides a substantial amount of essential but often not profitable (largely because they are under-funded by governments) health services, such as oncology, aged care and palliative care.
The Government relies on the Catholic health sector’s commitment to providing these services and Catholic hospitals in turn rely significantly on public sources of funding (for example via Medicare, the private health insurance rebate and the Medicare safety-net).
Consumers benefit from this symbiotic relationship through receiving increased access to services which the public and “for profit” sectors are often reluctant to provide. Consumers (particularly those from disadvantaged groups) also benefit from the strong advocacy role undertaken by the Catholic health sector, in particular in relation to complex health and social problems, such as alcohol and drug addiction.
Those inclined to dismiss Catholic health services as socially conservative anachronisms should remind themselves that it was a group of Catholic nuns who in the 1990s fought the NSW government to establish the nation’s first injectable heroin trial.
Of course the benefits provided by the Catholic health sector come hand-in-hand with values not shared by the majority of the Australian population, such as opposition to reproductive health services like abortion and IVF. This creates a challenge for a health system which needs to balance respect for the religious and ethical beliefs of health care providers with the needs of consumers who do not share these views.
It is the role of Government to ensure that no woman is denied access to the full range of reproductive health care options. This requires ensuring that women are given a choice of health care provider and made aware of the limited services provided by some individuals and institutions.
Despite the difficulties this may present to state health departments in the specific area of reproductive health services, it would be hard to argue that overall Australian consumers would be better off without the contribution of the Catholic health sector to the health system.
In balancing the rights of women with the views of the Catholic health sector on the proposed abortion laws, let’s not throw the babies out with the Holy Water.
Jennifer Doggett is a health policy analyst and Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development.
An article bracketed by two untuously patronising but ‘catchy’ propositions which says much about the author.
The article implicitly suggests that Catholic health care providers are being unsociably difficult, presumably for alluding to the moral difficulties of providing emergency obstetric services in a state would allow abortion without question up to 6 month gestation and longer with two medical signatures.
And so they should.
You would not need be a Catholic to have the self same difficulty…….
Perhaps, if Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart changed his prehistoric mind set. Allowing full and frank sex education in all Catholic Schools, and heaven forbid the use of condoms, even if they do have rosary beads built in.
The Abortion rate would drop substantially, as would STD and Aids infections.
While this article raises some good points, I don’t know anything about the proposed laws and am still none the wiser.
I also think the “What Would Jesus Do” title is somewhat rhetoric, and would in no way affect Catholic policy. A lot of contemporary Catholic policy seems to fly in the face of Jesus’s teachings, supported by various interpretations of the Bible. My understanding was always that Jesus accepted all people; hung out with prostitutes, lepers, the social pariahs of the time. Now, Catholics openly vilify gays, and worship riches in ways that would have deeply offended their founder, who overturned tax collectors tables in the temple. I’m not going to go any further with this, except to say that I don’t associate the Catholic Church with an organisation trying dilligently to uphold Jesus’s teachings, rather as an organisation trying desperately to maintain control, by manipulating opinion in any way that can support their agenda.
Whilst the catholic church promotes its dogma on anything to do with reproduction as being the Word of God. It is not. It is a human construct based on many elements and ideas including the interpretion of biblical texts, historical events, various cultures and the self interest of many of it’s popes and supporting monarchys over the ages. It must be rememebered that priests have not always been celibate and I recall that there was a bit of trouble caused to quite a few people which resulted in them fast tracking to hell during the inquisition.
When one looks at the “flexibility” that the Catholic church approaches other issues such as war, the forgiveness of sin (indulgences) and the more outrageous effects of capitalism on the poor, I’m sure they will be able to find an accomodation with this piece of legislation without shutting down the system. A doctor who is not willing to perform an abortion because of concscience has a duty of care to that patient which can be discharged by a referral. No one is asking them to refer the patient for an abortion, they are being asked to refer the patient to someone who can help them. This hysterical reaction to the issue is a good measure of how desperate they are.
I think the catholic health system is fantastic. I have been a beneficiary of it and I think that those who work in it and actually run it will probably cope without the advice of politically inspired Bishops. That,s the main problem. The organisation is top heavy. Noone down the bottom is allwed to think for themselves. The doctors consciences aren’t theirs, they are the churches!
Jennifer Doggett asks a very salient question, ‘What Would Jesus Do?’. The best way to find out the answer is to discover what He DID do.
One of His many comments on children was recorded by His disciple Matthew, ‘Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.’
King Herod, on the other hand, is infamous for making a political decision, and slaughtering many hundreds of little children – though nowhere near as many as are killed in Australia every year.
Whose example should we be following?