Newspaper Page Text
PAGE 3-April 12, 1973
Hospitals’ Anti-Abortion
Strategy Is Threatened
BY JERRY FILTEAU
(NC News Service)
GIFT FOR THE POPE -- West German President long-lasting and worthy of mankind, and we nourish
Gustav Heinemann gives Pope Paul a modern statue as the hope that West Germany will be able to make an
a memento of their discussions at the Vatican March important and precious contribution for the
26. The Pontiff told Heinemann: “We place great maintenance of peace in Europe and in the world.”
confidence in West Germany in establishing true peace, (NC Photo)
Interest in Birthright Is
High After Court Ruling
While Catholic hospitals see
“conscience clauses” as essential for
their freedom to continue operating
without performing abortions, an
Oregon legislative proposal is shaping up
as a possible serious threat to the
hospitals.
The notion of a conscience
clause-protecting the right of hospitals,
physicians and health care personnel to
refuse to participate in abortions-has
widespread support from the
professional medical community.
There is some fear, however, that new
state abortion laws conforming to the
U.S. Supreme Court’s decision may
include auxiliary legislation which will
force hospitals to perform abortions in
spite of their moral objections to it.
The reasons for the fear are obvious.
Since the court’s decision at the end of
January, bills to limit the freedom of
physicians and hospitals have been
introduced in Oregon and Wisconsin.
-In Wisconsin, two bills were
introduced, one to revoke the license of
a hospital if it refuses to perform
abortions, the other to suspend the
license of a physician if he refuses to
perform an abortion and to revoke it if
he refuses a second time.
-In Oregon a bill was introduced to
force all hospitals receiving tax
exemptions or any form of local or state
aid to perform abortions and
sterilizations upon request. It would
also demand that the hospitals provide
personnel to perform the operations if
all currently employed personnel or
staff refuse to participate.
Wisconsin Catholic Conference
executive director Charles M. Phillips
said the Wisconsin bills “are not being
taken seriously here. There is no wide
support for them.”
The Oregon bill, on the other hand, is
causing considerable concern. “Because
of the spare population in Oregon,
many hospitals are the only ones in
their communities,” said Fritz Meagher,
WASHINGTON (NC) - Connecticut
has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to
take a second look at abortion - this
time viewing medical evidence that
includes color photographs of human
fetuses.
The state said the evidence -- which
was not made available in previous
abortion cases decided by the high court
- affirms that life begins at conception
and that the unborn child is a “citizen”
the state has the right to protect.
Connecticut presented the evidence
in a petition to the Supreme Court
asking that it rehear its appeal of a
lower court ruling that the state’s
stringent abortion law was
unconstitutional.
Besides containing color photographs
of human fetuses, the Connecticut
petition included affidavits signed bv
prominent physicians, citations from
medical journals and books, passages
from previous court rulings and a sample
copy of a birth certificate issued in New
York City.
This certificate, the petition said, is
issued for all normal live births and for all
legislative reporter for the Catholic
Sentinel, the state’s Catholic newspaper.
Proponents of the bill contend that
these hospitals should be required to
provide their communities with a full
range of health services, including
abortion or sterilization, if a patient
requests it.
To fight such legislation the Catholic
Hospital Association (CHA) recently
developed a model conscience clause to
protect hospitals and individuals from
being forced to perform abortions under
new abortion legislation.
The CHA’s model law, if adopted
by state legislatures, would allow
institutions and individuals to refuse to
participate in abortions for religious,
moral or ethical reasons. It would also
protect individuals and institutions from
being penalized because of their refusal.
The CHA’s “good conscience” stand
is supported, in principle at least, by the
American Hospital Association (AHA)
and the American Medical Association
(AM A).
Shortly after the high court’s
abortion decision the AHA’s board of
trustees passed a resolution endorsing
“the recognition of individual
conscience given by the Supreme
Court.”
“The right of conscience of hospital,
physician and all health care personnel
be further secured in all states by
appropriate conscience clause legislation
consistent with that decision,” the AHA
said.
In its 1970 policy statement on
abortion the AMA said, “No physician
or other professional personnel shall be
compelled to perform any act which
violates his good medical judgment.
Neither physician, hospital, nor hospital
personnel shall be required to perform
any act violative of personally-held
moral principles.
“In these circumstances, good
medical practice requires only that the
physician or other professional
personnel withdraw from the case, so
long as the withdrawal is consistent and
with good medical practice.”
live births induced by abortion,
“regardless of length of earlier gestation
or survival.”
The petition said the certificate,
similar to one used in Connecticut, is
evidence that a fetus is a citizen of the
United States under the 14th
Amendment, which says every person
born or naturalized in this country is a
U.S. citizen.
“The point, then,” the petition said,
“is that regardless of whether an unborn
child is a ‘person’ under the 14th
Amendment, the child is a citizen under
that provision upon delivery.
“Your petitioners note that we thus
have a serious situation where live births
caused by induced abortions can result
in a citizenship status. Such citizenship
can be attained prior to ‘viability’ as
well as ‘normal’ full term birth.
“The legislature (of Connecticut) was
thus entitled to conclude that human
life exists prior to these stages also and
that human life is, in fact, a continuing
process from the time the child is
conceived.”
While there is general agreement that
physicians and health care personnel
have a right to act in accord with their
consciences in the areas of abortion and
sterilization, the right of institutional
conscience is another matter.
Part of the difficulty revolves around
the fact that some religiously-run
hospitals are the only health care
facilities in their communities. Also
slightly larger communities with two or
three hospitals, the hospitals often enter
“shared services” agreements with each
specializing in certain medical and
surgical procedures.
John McCabe, legislative director for
the National Conference of
Commissioners of Uniform State Laws,
pointed out some of the difficulties that
might be faced by private nonprofit
hospitals.
Laws such as those proposed in
Wisconsin, however, “create substantial
due process problems,” McCabe said,
and they would probably be decided in
favor of the constitutional rights of
hospitals and personnel.
The Oregon proposal, on the other
hand, might be decided against the
hospital on grounds of the patient’s
right to “equal protection of the law,”
McCabe said. He pointed to a recent
case in Billings, Mont., where a Catholic
hospital was ordered by the court to
provide facilities for the sterilization of
a woman.
A hosptial serving a community “is
like a public utility in some ways,”
McCabe said. As such it may come
under the powers of regulation “which
might permit the state to order such an
institution to provide certain services.”
The state would have to give
adequate notice, provide hearings, set
standards and show its capacity to
regulate, McCabe said. However, if it
could show adequate cause and public
interest, he said it might well be able to
force Catholic hospitals to provide
facilities for abortion or sterilization.
“No Catholic hospital could live
under such legislation,” said Vincent
Allred of the U.S. Catholic Conference’s
general counsel staff. “The nuns would
have to close their hospital lock stock
and barrel.”
Allred said, however, other
constitutional provisions should still
protect the religiously-run hospital-the
First Amendment protection of the free
exercise of religion, and the institution’s
rights to due process and equal
protection.
He pointed out that Catholic
hospitals are funded, in part at least, by
donors whose intention was “to provide
health care in conformity with certain
moral rules.” Forcing a hospital to
provide services outside the framework
of those rules, he said, involves
“attempting to divert trust funds that
have been given for another purpose.”
The Oregon proposal presents a more
difficult problem since it is limited to
removal of state and local funding and
tax-exempt status for hospitals that
refuse to provide abortions or
sterilizations.
“This raises a constitutional question
that I don’t believe anyone can answer
right now,” said Allred. He pointed out
that in a recent California case it was
decided that “tax exemption could not
be qualified on the basis of ideological
viewpoints.”
However, he said, the courts have
moved into this area by lifting tax
exemption from some organizations
“that discriminate on the grounds of
race.”
BY SUZANNE GUYETTE
SAN FRANCISCO (NC) - Interest in
Birthright, an organization that offers
pregnant women alternatives to
abortion, increased dramatically
following the U.S. Supreme Court
abortion decision.
“We began to get phone calls and
letters from people who realized that
since efforts to prevent the widening of
the (abortion) law had failed, this was
the way to go,” said Louise Summerhill
of Toronto, the woman who founded
Birthright five years ago.
“We sent out 22 applications for
charters in just one-week,” she noted.
Mrs. Summerhill, mother of seven,
established her organization to help
women cope with unwanted pregnancies
instead of seeking abortions.
“We give person-to-person,
non-judgmental . . . compassionate
help,” she said. This help includes
securing public financial aid for eligible
pregnant women; setting up job
interviews; arranging appointments with
doctors or professional counselors, and
providing basics like clothing, furniture
and a place to stay.
Birthright now has 37 centers in
Canada, two in Great Britain and about
200 in the United States, all staffed by
volunteers. Mrs. Summerhill was in San
Francisco at the request of Northern
California’s 10 Birthright chapters,
which invited her to inspect facilities.
In its January decision, the U.S.
Supreme Court nullified abortion laws
in most states.
“The wider the law is, the more
Birthright is needed . . .” Mrs.
Summerhill said. “Many people think
that once something is declared legally
right it becomes morally right, too,” so
Birthright’s task of educating the public
about the moral issues involved in
abortion is “more urgent now.”
She criticized the “tendency to
believe that when you have wide open
abortion laws you will cut way down on
the illegal abortions performed.”
fast, but not tomorrow, and not
secretly. It goes on a record
somewhere,” she said. “Expediency and
secrecy. Some girls still want both of
these. They don’t want to go on record
as having an abortion.”
Mrs. Summerhill said the idea for
Birthright came to her several years ago
when she read about an abortion
referral service in England.
“I thought how really destructive this
was,” she said.„“If you call up a suicide
prevention center, you don’t get help to
go kill yourself. If you call a center for
alcoholics, they don’t help you get
drunk.”
She decided that someone should set
up a referral service to promote what
later became her organization’s motto:
“It is the right of every pregnant woman
to give birth and the right of every child
to be born.”
Mrs. Summerhill said her most
rewarding experience as foundress of
Birthright was “the moment of seeing
the first baby we helped to be born.”
The mother involved was a young
American lady who “had an illegal
abortion planned for the next day,”
Mrs. Summerhill said. After visiting the
Birthright Toronto office, however, she
canceled the abortion.
“She had that child, and he is one of
the most beautiful little boys,” the
Birthright foundress said. “After he was
born, the mother said to me ‘I shudder
to think that he almost wasn’t.’ ”
In Canada, “you can have an abortion
Right-To-Life Bracelets
The right-to-life bracelets mentioned in a recent story from
St. Paul, Minn., may be obtained from Save Our Unwanted Life,
4803 Nicollet Ave., Minneapolis, Minn. 55409. Price for each
bracelet is $3.25.
High Court Asked to Take
Second Look at Abortion
Lenten Series
- Justice in the World
AMERICAN POWER
BY JAMES R. JENNINGS
Associate Director
USCC Division of Justice and Peace
Unlike Avis, the United States is
Number One. And, judging from the
rhetoric of some political leaders,
retaining that position has the aura of a
divine calling. In a grossly imbalanced
world, being number one means having
a superabundance of power. And power,
like money, is nicer to have than not to
have.
Power is defined here as the capacity
of a nation to determine a course of
action for itself without being
dependent upon other nation (s) for
supportive responses. Of course, in a
world growing ever more
interdependent, the occasions for
unilateral “power plays” by individual
nations are becoming fewer. But clearly,
the range of options available to some
nations is vastly wider than that of most
of their confreres.
The influence of a compound of
political and economic power is so
pervasive in international development
that power is perhaps more appropriate
than the level of development for
classifying nations into categories:
s u p e r - p o werf ul countries,
more-powerful countries, and
less-powerful countries.
The use of power, and its
self-maintaining capacity, is especially
evident in two conventional areas of
development: foreign aid and trade.
(Article V, “The Right to Develop,”
explored some aspects of the trade
picture.)
Because of the kind of financial
“assistance” offered by the
super-powerful countries, the 92 less
powerful countries have virtually
Special-
mortgaged their futures. In 1955, the
less-powerful countries external debt
was $10 billion. By 1970, it had risen to
about $60 billion. If the loans and their
terms continue at the present levels, by
1975, the less-powerful countries will be
returning more money by repaying old
loans than they will be receiving in new
loans.
The predominant factor in this
explosive increase in indebtedness was a
shift to hard-line banking operations In
1960, only 13 percent of the official
financial “assistance” to the
less-powerful countries was in the form
of interest-bearing loans; the balance
was grants. By 1970, 50 per cent of the
so-called assistance from the
super-powerful countries was taking the
form of loans.
The asymmetry of power is especially
evident in the operation of the World
Bank, a major component of the
international power structure in the
field of world development. Composed
of more than 100 member nations, it
makes loans to governments and private
organizations working in major
development fields. Its source of funds
is the sale of bonds to private investors
and consortia.
The Bank’s origins are rooted in the
free-market model of development. Its
primary interest is financing
development programs in the nations of
the Third World (the less-powerful
countries). David Baldwin reported in
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND
AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY
1943-62 that, from the outset, the
World Bank “threatened to withhold
loans in order to ‘encourage’
governments to pass legislation more
favorable to private foreign investors; to
avoid government-owned enterprises;
and to improve the climate of
investment in other ways.”
Although essentially a multilateral
agency, it was never envisioned that
control of the Bank’s operation could
be taken over by the less-powerful
countries. In 1960, conservative
American critics feared that the World
Bank’s multilateral assistance .programs
might be subject to political
manipulations adverse to America’s
interests. Henry Cabot Lodge, then U.S.
Ambassador the United Nations, assured
then that “nothing could be more
wildly inaccurate and more totally
impossible. The governing body of the
Bank is so constituted as to make
impossible any act opposed by the
nations of the free world.”
The allocation of power is specified
in the Bank’s bylaws: “Each member
nation shall have 250 votes plus one
additional vote for each share
($100,000) of stock held.” The effect
of this arrangement is that the United
States has 26 per cent of the Bank’s
shares, voting power equivalent to a
combination of the 90 poorest member
nations, the less-powerful countries.
Power is a world reality, not evil in
itself. Its use is what makes the
difference. A recent example of that
use: without consultation, the United
States imposed an across-the-board
surtax on imports, and cut foreign aid
by 10 per cent. These actions were
designed primarily to maintain the U.S.
leadership among the rich nations of the
First World.
The impact on Third World nations
was severe, adversely affecting their
already weak trade position and
reducing the amount of badly needed
capital. Commenting on these events,
the bishops at the Roman Synod in
1971 said: “The Third World’s recent
DE FACTO exclusion from discussions
on world trade and also the monetary
arrangements which vitally affect their
destiny are an example of lack of power
which is inadmissible in a just and
responsible world order.”