When an E.R. doctor walked past, I drew her attention to what I thought was obvious — that I was bleeding out — and pleaded with her to examine me. But she just grimaced and walked away. At some point I started shaking violently; I was going into shock. I later learned that I lost nearly 40 percent of my blood. Only then did the hospital give me the D & C procedure that saved my life.
When I finally got home, my 2-year-old didn’t recognize me. “Who’s that lady?” she asked. It took weeks to recover my strength, and much longer to stop reliving the experience in my mind. Upon reviewing the medical records from the provider, I could find no reasonable explanation for the roughly four-hour delay in treatment that resulted in the extreme loss of blood. Given what I now know about the Catholic health care systems’ restrictions, my best guess is that the hospital was willing to gamble with my life in the name of its ethical directives.
Given that as many as one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage, complications are not uncommon. The 2016 A.C.L.U. report to which Dr. Eisenberg contributed his story detailed a number of other ways in which women experiencing pregnancy complications may not receive the kinds of medical care from Catholic facilities that they desperately need.
These facts may help explain some alarming trends in maternal health, particularly among women of color. According to a 2018 report, “Bearing Faith: The Limits of Catholic Health Care for Women of Color,” by the The Law, Rights, and Religion Project at Columbia Law School, in conjunction with Public Health Solutions, “Pregnant women of color are more likely than their white counterparts to receive reproductive health care dictated by bishops rather than medical doctors.” America’s maternal mortality rate is startling high among nations in the developed world, and Black women are roughly three times as likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause as white women.
“In many states women of color disproportionately receive reproductive health care restricted by ERDs,” the authors wrote, before suggesting that this “should be evaluated against the backdrop of vastly inferior health care delivered to women of color across the board.”
Religious restrictions on maternal medicine are not exclusive to Catholic hospitals. In a 2021 report, “The Southern Hospitals Report: Faith Culture, and Abortion Bans in the U.S. South,” the results of a two-year investigation also by the Law, Rights, and Religion Project, researchers concluded that Protestant and even secular hospitals across the South delay or deny care to women facing severe pregnancy complications at the behest of anti-choice administrators or boards, community pressure, or fear of losing private or public funds.
“Our research reveals that access to abortion, including during medical emergencies, is even more severely curtailed than already restrictive state laws might suggest,” the authors wrote. If Roe v. Wade is overturned or weakened, state abortion bans “will make hospital restrictions on abortion even more significant, as patients facing serious pregnancy complications or underlying health conditions, such as cancer, will no longer have any legal alternative for abortion care in their state.”
