The Green family who initiated the Hobby Lobby case may be evangelical Christians, but Hobby Lobby is very much a product of the Catholic Church’s long standing efforts to create conscience exemptions from the provision of reproductive health care.
The road to Hobby Lobby began in 1972, when the ACLU filed suit against St. Vincent’s Hospital, a Catholic hospital in Billings, Montana, for refusing to allow a 32-year-old woman named Gloria Jean Taylor to receive a tubal ligation because of the Catholic prohibition against sterilization. The ACLU argued that the hospital was required to provide sterilization, which Taylor needed for medical reasons, since it was the only obstetrics facility in the area and accepted funding under the federal Hill-Burton Act, which provided money for hospitals to expand and modernize in return for a promise to serve the local community.
Read Full Article »