‘Religious freedom is important for all of society,’ Cardinal Dolan says

Washington D.C., Feb 12, 2021 / 02:00 pm (CNA).- Members of Congress on Thursday debated abortion funding restrictions in a proposed COVID relief package, with one member comparing abortion coverage to cancer treatments.

 

“Abortion is health care, and excluding abortion from COBRA coverage makes as little sense as excluding cancer coverage,” Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) said of an amendment to bar funding of abortion coverage in health coverage subsidies for unemployed workers.

 

In response, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, tweeted that “[r]eal healthcare in the case of a difficult pregnancy looks like addressing the illness of the mother or unborn child; not eliminating the child. Real doctors heal; they don’t harm.”

 

Several House committees convened on Thursday to consider and advance measures for a massive COVID-19 relief package. President Biden had proposed nearly $2 trillion in funding of health care and economic relief in response to the pandemic.

 

Democratic leadership have already signaled that they will pass a coronavirus relief bill with or without Republican support in the House and Senate. Pro-life groups have warned that the relief proposals do not include sufficient pro-life protections—and thus could fund abortions, abortion coverage, and abortion providers in a number of ways.

 

The House Democrats’ proposal released this week includes $750 million in funding of global health, and billions of dollars for community health centers. It also includes expanded subsidies towards health plans and COBRA coverage.

 

Within the committee hearings themselves, members debated the ethics of abortion funding.

 

In the House Energy and Commerce Committee, members discussed the $50 million in additional funding of the Title X family planning program. Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) introduced an amendment redirecting the funding to youth suicide prevention, as the Title X funds could go to abortion providers.

 

The Trump administration in 2019 required Title X grant recipients to neither refer for abortions, nor be co-located with abortion facilities. This resulted in Planned Parenthood withdrawing from the program and forfeiting an estimated $60 million in annual funds, rather than comply with the new mandates.

 

President Biden has already begun the process of reversing that rule, and some Republicans on the committee thus did not want additional funding of Title X if abortion providers would benefit from the program.

 

“We know that Title X has been used to fund abortion providers,” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) stated.

 

However, committee Democrats accused Republicans of being anti-contraception and hurting women’s health.

 

Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas) defended the access of abortion providers—such as Planned Parenthood—to the Title X program. “For many women, the only doctor they see in a year is someone who works at Planned Parenthood or at another clinic that gets Title X funds,” she said on Thursday.

 

Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), a Chaldean Catholic, also opposed the pro-life requirements for the Title X program and said it is about family planning, not abortion.

 

Eshoo said she often asks new committee members about their families. “I don’t know one member of our committee that has 8, 10, 12, 14 children,” she said. “This isn’t about abortion. This is about family planning.”

 

Rep. Lesko said that for many pro-life members, their beliefs on life are “part of our faith” and “ingrained in us.”

 

“So when you say that we’re attacking women, I totally disagree. Because half of the babies that are aborted are going to be women,” she said to fellow members. Lesko’s amendment failed in a 31-26 vote.

 

During a markup of COVID relief in the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ill.) introduced an amendment to ensure protections against funding of abortions in health coverage.

 

The relief measure would fund COBRA health insurance premiums for unemployed workers, and Walorski’s amendment would have ensured that federal subsidies could not pay for abortion coverage.

 

“I believe every human life is precious, and taxpayers should not be forced to pay for the destruction of life,” Walorski said on Thursday. Her amendment failed in committee.

 

Rep. Chu opposed Walorski’s effort and compared funding abortion coverage with funding coverage for cancer treatments.

 

In a hearing of the House Education and Labor Committee, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) responded to accusations that pro-life members were just trying to “score cheap political points” with their amendments.

 

“We hold sincere beliefs that life is sacred from the point of conception to natural death, and we truly believe that violating that moral code is a stain on our entire society and our entire world,” Foxx said.

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Washington D.C., Feb 10, 2020 / 05:00 pm (CNA).- Pro-life Democrats responded on Monday to Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ suggestion that there is no room in the party for pro-lifers.

“It’s a disturbing time in America,” Louisiana state senator Katrina Jackson (D) told CNA, “when the party that’s supposed to be the big tent party, that has always had differing views not only on abortion but also on other issues, begins to have candidates that try to close off the party to those with diverse views.”

“Across our country, there are pro-life people of all political persuasions and I don’t believe it makes sense for any party to try to exclude people because of their position on life,” Rep. Colin Peterson (D-Minn.) said to CNA on Monday.

Democratic presidential candidates continued their support of legalized abortion over the weekend, while in New Hampshire for Tuesday’s primary.

At a debate at St. Anselm College in Manchester, hosted by ABC News on Friday evening, candidates pledged that they would implement a litmus test on abortion for judicial candidates, and push to codify legal abortion.

On Saturday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—the longest-serving politically independent member of Congress in U.S. history—said that support for abortion “is an absolutely essential part of being a Democrat.”

Sanders, in addition to running for the Democratic presidential nomination this year, ran for the party’s nomination in 2016 but has always served as a political independent while in the House and Senate.

“By this time in history, I think, when we talk about what a Democrat is, I think being pro-choice is essentially—an essential part of that,” Sanders said on Saturday at a presidential forum co-hosted by the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the Demand Justice Initiative.

Jackson, in response, told CNA on Monday that Sanders’ rhetoric is unpresidential.

“What you’ve said to America is ‘I cannot assume the role as president and represent all Americans’,” Jackson said.

She said that abortion is a “Christian issue,” and thus “for Christians who read the Word and understand the Word,” to say the party has no room for pro-lifers, “you’re essentially saying is there’s no room in the party for a Christian who follows God’s Word.”

Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who was the unofficial winner of last week’s Iowa caucuses, on Saturday reiterated previous campaign trail statements that he supports legal abortion even if pro-life Democrats oppose him because of the issue.

“We are a big tent,” he said, acknowledging that some people identify both as a Democrat and as pro-life. However, he added, he will not soften his pro-abortion platform to get pro-life Democratic votes.

“What I’m not going to do is get somebody’s vote by tricking them,” he said, noting that any attempts to criminalize abortion and punish women or doctors “is simply not consistent with the values that draw me to the Democratic party.”

Candidate Andrew Yang at Saturday’s forum that one “pro-life voter” told him his policy of providing $1,000-per-month universal basic income would support women in need, and that the voter would support Yang because of this.

“I have zero compromise when it comes to women’s reproductive rights,” said Yang, who has previously said abortion at any point in pregnancy should be up to the woman.

However, Yang said that abortion should not be celebrated—an answer that drew a rebuke from the head of NARAL.

“I think we have to get back to the point where no one is suggesting that we should be celebrating an abortion at any point in the pregnancy,” Yang said

He added that “it’s a tragedy, to me, if someone decides that they don’t want to have a child, and they’re on the fence, and that maybe at some point later—it’s a very, very difficult personal decision, and it should be something that we’re very, very sensitive to.”

Ilyse Hogue,  the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, tweeted in response, “This was a bad take” which “shows a dangerous ignorance about abortions later in pregnancy and it perpetuates stigma of women who choose not to have families for reasons that are varied and very much none of our business.”

At Friday’s debate, candidates also promised they would only appoint pro-abortion candidates to the federal judiciary, and said they would codify Roe v. Wade.

Former Vice President Joe Biden said that legal abortion is “a fundamental value of the Constitution, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) advocated for “a national law to protect the right of a woman’s choice.”

Sanders pledged not to “nominate any person to the Supreme Court, or the federal courts in general, who is not 100% Roe v. Wade,” and pushed to “significantly expand funding for Planned Parenthood.”

On Saturday, Buttigieg said that “the American people” largely support the Roe v. Wade “framework” of few restrictions on abortion earlier in pregnancies and “very few exceptions” late in pregnancy.

Buttigieg, however, did not give limits on late-term abortion that he supported, saying instead that “the time has come to trust women to make decisions for themselves.”

For late-term abortions, he said, “usually we’re talking about cases where, by definition, if it’s late-term, a parent, a family, a woman is expecting to carry a pregnancy to term and then gets devastating medical news” about her health or the health of the baby.”

“That creates an unthinkable situation,” he said, and “that decision will not be made any better, medically or morally, because it is being dictated by some government official.”

[…]

Columbus, Ohio, Feb 20, 2019 / 04:36 pm (CNA).- A doctor at a Catholic health system in Ohio has been fired after being accused of prescribing excessive doses of drugs to at least 30 ailing patients, some near death and some not. The accusations have also prompted the suspension of 20 hospital staff and over a dozen lawsuits alleging wrongful death.

Mount Carmel Health System fired Dr. William Husel from his job on Nov. 21, 2018, accusing him of prescribing excessive pain medicine to 34 patients in the intensive care unit. All of the patients died over the period of 2015-2018, the Columbus Dispatch reports.

“We are sorry for this tragedy, and we will continue to investigate how we responded to this report and whether there is any other information that should have led us to investigate sooner into Dr. Husel’s practices,” Edward Lamb, president and CEO of Mount Carmel Health System, said Jan. 24.

In a previous Jan. 14 statement, Lamb said the doctor’s actions were “unacceptable and inconsistent with the values and practices of Mount Carmel, regardless of the reasons the actions were taken.”

“We take responsibility for the fact that the processes in place were not sufficient to prevent these actions from happening,” he said.

The hospital said it received a formal report about the apparent behavior on Oct. 25 of last year. An employee reported the behavior out of safety concerns. The hospital said it knows of three deaths that took place from the time it received the report about Husel to the time it fired him.

Of the 34 patients who received overdoses of the drugs under Husel, 33 died at Mount Carmel West primary care hospital in Columbus, while one died at Mount Carmel St. Ann’s in Westerville. The hospital believes a few of these deaths were not caused by the overdoses.

Mount Carmel Health System is the second-largest non-profit Catholic healthcare system in the state. It is a member of the Michigan-based system Trinity Health.

Husel treated patients taken to the ICU for various reasons, including respiratory problems, infections, and gallstones. Some families said their loved ones were not terminally ill and they would have questioned the use of the medication administered under the doctor’s orders.

The Franklin County Prosecutor’s Office and Columbus police are investigating but no formal charges have been filed, NBC News reports.

The Ohio State Medical Board suspended Husel’s medical license in January.

Many of the details of the alleged victims come from lawsuits, court filings, and plaintiffs’ attorneys.

In one case, lawyers with the Leeseburg & Valentine law firm said, the doctor ordered a large dose of fentanyl – an opioid – and midazolam – a sedative – to be administered to 57-year-old Michael Walters just minutes before the patient died.

Walters had resided at a nursing home for several years after a stroke. He was admitted to the hospital on Oct. 6, 2017 suffering from respiratory failure and brain swelling, and was placed on a breathing machine. Late on Oct. 10, his family was persuaded to change his status to do-not-resuscitate. He died the next day.

The family members of Janet Kavanaugh, 79, have filed a lawsuit against the doctor and the hospital. They said she received a lethal dose of fentanyl and pronounced dead 18 minutes later.

Lawyer Gerry Leeseberg, who filed the suit on behalf of Kavanaugh’s estate, said she had not consented to the high dose. He was not aware whether she had previously been given the drug for pain relief, NBC News reports.

“We’re concerned some of these families were misled into granting a do-not-resuscitate order,” Leeseberg said.

CNA sought comment from the Diocese of Columbus but did not receive a response by deadline.

The hospital released a statement and an apology on Jan. 14, the same day a patient filed a lawsuit. It removed 20 employees from patient care pending the results of its investigation, including nurses who administered the drugs and pharmacists.

Lamb, the health system head, said Jan. 24 that based on the initial report, the hospital system “should have begun a more expedited process to investigate and consider immediate removal of Dr. Husel from patient care at that time.”

More patients might be discovered as the investigation continues, he said.

According to Lamb, clinicians must provide “complete and clinically accurate” information about a patient’s condition, potential treatments, likelihood to recover and options for care. The investigation will determine whether this was the practice for the treatment of each of the patients.

“These events are heartbreaking,” said Lamb. “We are committed to being open and honest about what happened and what we are doing to ensure it never happens again.”

He pledged to respect the privacy and rights of those involved in accordance with privacy laws and to continue to cooperate with law enforcement and other relevant authorities.

For many of the patients, the doctor was able to use emergency overrides to bypass safeguards in the medication system. He was also able to avoid required pharmacist pre-approval.

A review from the Ohio Department of Health faulted the two hospitals for failing to ensure a system to prevent overrides that access large doses of “central nervous system” medications, the Columbus Dispatch reports.

The reports have already caused federal authorities to tell two hospitals in the health system they were non-compliant with Medicare standards for pharmaceuticals. They warned that the hospitals’ Medicare provider agreement would terminate on Feb. 24. Hospital leaders later agreed to a corrective plan and state oversight to ensure compliance.

 

[…]