The California Court of Appeals has ruled that a “transgender patient can sue a Catholic hospital for refusing to perform a hysterectomy.” In the ruling, the Court held that a “Catholic hospital could indeed face legal liability for failing to perform a hysterectomy as part of a female-to-male ‘transition.”
However, the ruling is incredibly misleading because it insinuates that the hospital denied the surgery because its values do not align with gender reassignment surgery. That is not exactly the case in this situation. The National Review reveals that the hospital’s “policy broadly bans sterilization surgery generally” not just for trans individuals. The hospital even “referred the patient to a non-Catholic facility in the same network.”
The individual in the case received her hysterectomy “only three days after the original scheduled surgery date and sued anyway.” So California has taken an opportunity to turn a hospital’s widely used ban of sterilization surgery and turn it into a liberal, trans-gender issue; as if the hospital was committing a hate-crime.
Unfortunately, facts were not important in this ruling. As The National Review lays out, the facts of this case are simple:
The plaintiff, Evan Minton, initially scheduled a hysterectomy for August 30, 2016, at Mercy San Juan Medical Center (part of the Dignity Health hospital network) as a treatment for gender dysphoria. Mercy is a Catholic hospital, and the day before the scheduled surgery, Mercy canceled the procedure. It cited the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ ‘Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services.’ As the court noted, ‘The Directives prohibit direct sterilization and require that bodily and functional integrity be protected and preserved.’
To be clear, the Catholic hospital was upholding “basic Catholic religious doctrine” that it would have done for any female because they “prohibit direct sterilization” and not because the woman suffered from gender dysphoria. Clearly the hospital was not proving some sort of political or idealogical point as proven by the following:
Mercy’s president then recommended that Minton’s doctor obtain emergency admitting privileges at nearby Methodist Hospital, which is also a Dignity Health facility. The doctor obtained privileges and performed the surgery on September 2, 2016.
Despite the swift action, Minton decided to sue “claiming that he was the victim of gender identity discrimination.” Initially the trial court dismissed Minton’s complaint, but today the California Court of Appeals revived his claim.
Continue Reading: National Review
