Saturday, November 29, 2008

The same principles and ideals that move Catholic hospitals to care for the weakest and neediest...

...also move them to oppose abortion, sterilization, and other practices at the juncture of medicine and morality. And at that juncture, Catholic hospitals are running into an increasingly hostile public health establishment with very different values. It is simply incomprehensible to many people in positions of power in both the public and private sectors that the same vision that inspires widely-respected compassionate care would also compel closure or sale of a facility to avoid complicity in providing abortions—yet that is just the difficult choice some Catholic health facilities have faced.

"Health Care wth a Conscience," by James C. Capretta, in The New Atlantis