'Tis the season for the liberal media to ramp up it's attacks on the Catholic Church.
"One in nine hospital beds is now in a Catholic institution. That may be bad news for pregnant women," reads the caption on the front-page tease for a December 19 Irin Carmon story, "What Catholic hospital expansion means for women," wherein the abortion-rights absolutist turns the network's "war on women" artillery on Church-run hospitals. Here's how Carmon opened her story (emphasis mine):
Imagine a system with hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue, one that is rapidly expanding and taking up more and more market share. Imagine that this system claims to be charitable, but in practice “provides only an average amount of charity care,” and serves fewer low-income people than comparable institutions. At the same time, this system offers legal protection for denying women life-saving healthcare.
The system in question is the array of Roman Catholic-affiliated hospitals in the United States, which, according to a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union and MergerWatch, now are responsible for one in nine hospital beds. In the past decade, the number of such hospitals has risen by 16%, thanks to mergers that often leave the new combined organization under Catholic health care directives.
According to the authors of Miscarriage of Medicine report, released Thursday, such hospitals “have organized into large systems that behave like businesses – aggressively expanding to capture greater market share – but rely on public funding and use religious doctrine to compromise women’s health care.” The report notes that “if these 10 Catholic systems were viewed as one, they would constitute the largest health system in the country.”
Carmon had more to add, but you get the drift. And, of course, at no point did she turn to a representative from the Catholic Church or a Catholic hospital to give defense of Catholic medical ethics.
All that matters is this:
- Catholic hospitals are prominent and profitable
- Catholic hospitals are staunchly pro-life
- Catholic hospitals are uncompromising in their stand on faith and principle
That trifecta is always going to stick in the craw of the folks at MSNBC and MSNBC.com, particularly with Ms. Carmon, a Visiting Fellow in the Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice at Yale Law School.
MSNBC sees a country where 1 in 9 hospital beds being in a Catholic institution is a travesty. Millions of grateful patients, including unborn children, would say it's a Godsend.
