In the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishop's Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, directive 45 states that Catholic health-care facilities are not to provide abortion, "even based upon the principle of material cooperation. In this context, Catholic health-care institutions need to be concerned about the danger of scandal in any association with abortion providers."1 Directive 67 goes on to say,
Decisions that may lead to serious consequences for the identity or reputation of Catholic health-care services, or entail the high risk of scandal, should be made in consultation with the diocesan bishop or his health care liaison.
What is this scandal to which the Bishops refer? The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines it as follows:
Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil. The person who gives scandal becomes his neighbor's tempter. He damages virtue and integrity; he may even draw his brother into spiritual death. Scandal is a grave offense if by deed or omission another is deliberately led into grave offense. Scandal takes on a particular gravity by reason of the authority of those who cause it or the weakness of those who are scandalized. Scandal is grave when given by those who by nature or office are obliged to teach and educate others. Jesus reproaches the scribes and Pharisees on this account: he likens them to wolves in sheep's clothing.2
But the federal government has intimidated many Catholic health-care facilities by forcing them to choose between receiving federal dollars and tolerating the scandal of having abortionists on their staffs. According to the U.S. Code, hospitals which receive various kinds of federal funds, grants, or loans must not discriminate in the extension of staff or other privileges to any physician or other health-care personnel, because he performed or assisted in the performance of a lawful sterilization procedure or abortion.3
In 1998, Peter Liebold, the Catholic Health Association's general counsel at the time, commented on this cause of scandal:
Having such a physician on staff at a Catholic hospital certainly creates the danger of scandal, even though no abortion procedures are being performed on the premises of the hospital. However, a Catholic facility faced with this type of situation must tread carefully before considering termination of the physician's staff privileges in order not to give the physician a viable, federal cause of action.
If the individual is so notorious in the community that his or her activities give rise to scandal, as that term is used in the Directives, then perhaps the health-care provider can argue that its constitutional right to the free exercise of religion supersedes the statutory protection provided to the physician. However, winning this kind of case would be extremely difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Close scrutiny of the facts of the situation by counsel is strongly encouraged to minimize the negative legal ramifications of any decision."4
How directives 45 and 67 interact with U.S. law is virtually unexplored territory. There has been a dearth of case law on this subject, according to Peter Liebold. In my research, I have not been able to find one instance of a diocese using the ERD's teaching on scandal to ask a Catholic hospital to revoke an abortionist's privileges.
Dr. Richard Grossman, who has been Planned Parenthood's abortionist in Durango, Colorado, for over two decades, is also affiliated with the largest obstetric and gynecology group in the area and has privileges at the local Catholic Hospital, Mercy Regional Medical Center (the only hospital in a radius of fifty miles). He is listed on the Mercy Hospital Web site as being part of their obstetric and gynecology staff. He is not a stereotypical abortionist (in it for the money) but is a prominent community leader, author of a monthly column in the Durango Herald titled "Population Matters," and a member or director of several important organizations, including the Durango Friends Meeting (Quaker).
Everywhere one turns in Durango, Dr. Grossman is lauded as a high-minded, principled man. A good man. An idealist and seeker of truth. His obstetric and gynecology patients acknowledge his great skill and compassion. He is, in fact, the most dangerous kind of abortion-ist -- one who does it for "moral" reasons. In a 2003 article for the Quaker Eco-Bulletin, he explains his population control philosophy,
Why is abortion necessary? Almost one half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned. People believe that most of these conceptions occur because people don't plan ahead and don't use contraception. Certainly, this is true for some unplanned pregnancies, but many are because of family planning method failure. Every method has a significant failure rate, unfortunately. Couples choose to have smaller families now, and use contraception for a large proportion of their fertile lives. It has been calculated that the average American woman will have 1.8 unplanned pregnancies in her lifetime. Each year just over a million pregnancies are aborted in the U.S. I am happy that this number is decreasing. In the 30 years since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion, about 42 million abortions have been done. If no abortions had been done in these three decades, the U.S. population, now 290 million, would be over 332 million! There are reasons that I perform abortions other than my concern about population. If I didn't, someone would do the abortions in a back alley. Women used to die from illegal abortions. The people who did the abortions abused women, and women were also abused by the system that made them seek care from quacks.5
Dr. Grossman was involved with a free-standing abortion clinic in Taos, New Mexico, before he came to Durango. Here in Durango, he performs abortions only one day a week. By granting Dr. Grossman privileges, Mercy Hospital makes it possible for him to make a living delivering babies on the days he is not killing them. Mercy is also making it easier for Planned Parenthood to perform abortions. If Mercy did not grant privileges to Planned Parenthood's current medical director or his successor, Planned Parenthood would have to fly an abortionist in every week, as they do in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
In a community like Durango, dominated by outdoor recreational and environmental concerns, Dr. Grossman performs his work without controversy. To my knowledge, there has been no public protest against his being granted full privileges at Mercy in the more than twenty years he has been Planned Parenthood's abortionist. Our Catholic consciences have been dulled by small-town peer pressure not to make waves.
This is the scandal. We watch our historic Catholic hospital accept a well-intentioned abortion practitioner onto its staff, and we are led to believe that this is acceptable. The need to be tolerant and nonjudgmental, especially since our hospital serves the whole community, is supposedly the ideal. But what kind of example is being given to the faithful when an abortionist has privileges at their Catholic hospital (especially when doctors at the same hospital have been denied privileges for far less serious matters)? Catholics, and the community at large, get the message loud and clear that not disturbing the good-old-boy network is more important than defending Catholic principles. When Dr. Grossman retires, which may be soon, the precedent has been set for granting privileges to his replacement, who is most likely apprenticing with him as we speak.
Abortionists are protected from dismissal primarily because the law also protects Catholic hospitals from reprisals when they refuse to do abortions and sterilizations. No serious-minded Catholic would choose to work at a Planned Parenthood clinic, but pro-abortion physicians have no qualms about working at an institution where the understanding of life is the opposite of their own. The solution to this problem is to challenge the law. Recent defeats over mandatory contraceptive coverage in California and New York are cause for gloom, but our opposition to the evil of abortion, and our reasons for that opposition, are widely understood.
Beyond that, we need to exercise more care when we consider granting privileges to physicians at Catholic hospitals. A questionnaire should be used to help determine which physicians are abortion providers. The same instrument should screen out those who practice in vitro fertilization. Once these physicians are ensconced in Catholic facilities, it is very difficult to remove them. Every diocese should have a health-care liaison, and local parish priests should keep their bishop informed as to what is going on at the hospitals as they make their rounds. Ideally, the bishop would have a representative on the board of each Catholic hospital in his diocese.
Outside the Catholic Church, the sanctity of human life has become a foreign concept, replaced in the last ten years by proportionalism and the "dictatorship of relativism," so beautifully identified by Pope Benedict XVI. If Catholic hospitals must grant privileges to abortionists in order to receive the federal money they need to serve the poor, what good is their Catholic identity? A Church that tolerates abortionists on staff in its hospitals is not a prophetic Church. It is a Church checkmated by the culture of death.
1 U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, 4th ed. (Washington, D.C.: USCCB, 2001). [Back]
2 Catechism of the Catholic Church, nn. 2284-2285. [Back]
3 U.S. Code, Title 42, Chapter 6A, Subchapter VIII, Sec. 300a-7, http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode42/usc_sec_42_00000300Ņa007-.html. [Back]
4 Peter Leibold and Charles S. Gilham, "When Physicians Perform Abortions Outside the Catholic Hospital," Health Progress 79.2 (March-April 1998): 12-14. [Back]
5 Richard Grossman, "Emergency Contraception, Abortion, and Population Stabilization: One Friend Addresses Some Difficult Issues" Quaker Eco-Bulletin 3.2 (March-April 2003): 1-4. http://www.ncbcenter.org/em/0702-1.aspx [Back]