ST. LOUIS — A proposed bill promising major changes in the U.S. abortion landscape has Roman Catholic bishops threatening to close Catholic hospitals if the Democratic Congress and White House make it law.
The Freedom of Choice Act failed to get out of subcommittee in 2004, but its sponsor, U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y, is poised to refile it now that former Senate co-sponsor Barack Obama occupies the Oval Office.
FOCA, as the proposal is known, would make federal law out of the abortion protections established in 1973 by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade ruling.
The proposal spurred one Roman Catholic bishop to threaten to shutter Catholic hospitals rather than comply with FOCA.
“It would not be sufficient to withdraw our sponsorship or to sell them to someone who would perform abortions. That would be a morally unacceptable cooperation in evil,” said Bishop Thomas Paprocki, a Chicago auxiliary bishop who has been mentioned as a contender to be the next archbishop of St. Louis. He was speaking at the bishops’ annual fall meeting in Baltimore in November.
There are 624 Catholic hospitals in the country.
But even within the Catholic community, there is disagreement about the effects FOCA might have on hospitals, with some health care professionals and bishops saying a strategy of ignoring the law, if it passes, would be more effective than closing hospitals.
According to the Catholic Health Association of the United States, Catholic hospitals make up 13 percent of the country’s nearly 5,000 hospitals and employ more than 600,000 people. The CHA says one of every six Americans hospitalized in the U.S. is cared for in a Catholic hospital.
Not all bishops or Catholic health care professionals see closing down hospitals as a realistic option. Bishop Robert Lynch of St. Petersburg, Fla., a member of the CHA’s board of trustees, wrote on his blog last month that “even in the worst-case scenario, Catholic hospitals will not close. We will not comply, but we will not close.”
In Brazil
