On Thursday the Catholic Church in California scored a significant legal victory regarding the right of Catholic hospitals to refuse certain medical procedures. Rebecca Chamorro, a 33-year-old mother of two expecting her third child at the end of the month, asked Mercy Medical Center—a Catholic hospital in Redding, Calif.—to perform a tubal ligation after her upcoming delivery.
According to the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Conference Ethical and Religious Directives for Health Care Services (ERD), “Direct sterilization of either men or women, whether permanent or temporary, is not permitted in a Catholic health care institution” other than as a “cure or alleviation of a present and serious pathology and a simpler treatment is not available.” The ERD goes on to group voluntary sterilization alongside abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide as both “intrinsically immoral” and “intrinsically evil.”
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