Catholic Hospital Refuses to Provide Life-Saving Abortions

1.8.25

Click to skip ahead: In Care Denied, a California Catholic hospital argues that they don’t need to save women’s lives. An update on Attacks on Abortion Pills and a new book shedding light on Republican strategy. In Better News, a pilot program had Washington pharmacists prescribing abortion pills to patients directly. An awful reminder of What ‘Pro-Life’ Looks Like from Texas. In the Nation, a new language game from Republicans. Finally, Criminalizing Pregnancy has a new story of a woman charged with ‘abuse of a corpse’ after a pregnancy loss.

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Care Denied

On Monday, I told you that a second woman had come forward about being denied miscarriage treatment at a Catholic hospital in California. The civil suit accuses Providence St. Joseph Hospital of refusing care to “Jane Roe,” whose water broke 17 weeks into her pregnancy. In a move that the suit calls “shocking and inhumane,” the religious hospital refused to end her pregnancy even though it was nonviable. Roe ended up enduring “19 hours of agony” before she “spontaneously delivered her deceased baby in a hospital toilet.”

Just a total nightmare. Incredibly, that’s not even the most shocking bit of news I have for you about St. Joseph. You may remember that California Attorney General Rob Bonta brought a suit against the hospital on behalf of the first woman who came forward, Anna Nusslock. (Her story here.) Well, SF Gate reports that St. Joseph hospital has filed a motion to dismiss those allegations of wrongdoing, arguing that the state doesn’t have the right to tell them to save women’s lives with abortion.

That’s right, instead of dealing with the nightmare they’ve put patients through, the hospital insists that the AG doesn’t have standing to tell them what to do in the first place, because they answer to a ‘higher power.’ From reporter Matt LaFever:

“They argued that the state’s attempts to require the hospital to provide life-saving abortion care violate the hospital’s religious identity and First Amendment rights…St. Joseph’s motion made a bold claim: The hospital answers to higher authorities than the state of California. It argued that the attorney general cannot enforce state laws, codes or regulations on Catholic institutions because they are bound by the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services set by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.”

Essentially, the hospital claims that they have the right to deny women life-saving abortions because they’re beholden to the Catholic Church before any silly state law that requires hospitals not kill women.

As you know, there’s been a growing fight over emergency abortions—with Republicans arguing for their states’ right to refuse women care under any circumstances. (For Abortion, Every Day’s explainer of what happened with the Supreme Court and EMTALA, click here.)

If that wasn’t bad enough, LaFever mentions something else important: Labor and delivery units are shutting down in rural areas, even in California—which means that Catholic institutions are sometimes the only option for people in the area.

When Nusslock was denied an abortion by St. Joseph, for example, she went to Mad River Community Hospital for care. But they’ve since closed down their maternity ward.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:

Of Course They Want Us Dead

Attacks on Abortion Pills

We all know by now that one of conservatives’ major goals for 2025 is to take down abortion medication. The pills have been a saving grace post-Roe: The medication allows women to self-manage abortions, even if they live in anti-abortion states—that’s because providers in ‘shield states’ can mail the medication to patients who need it. The medication has also lessened the load on providers, who are overwhelmed with patients, letting them focus on those who require procedural abortions.

Obviously, anti-abortion activists and lawmakers are furious that women have been able to sidestep their laws, so they’re trying everything under the sun to ban and restrict the medication. The New York Times has a piece this week about some of those efforts, from the most recent mifepristone lawsuit to Texas’ attack on a New York abortion provider.

It’s not just the explicit legal attacks we need to worry about, though—but the cultural ones. I wrote about these attacks quite a bit in Abortion: Whether it was Republicans’ attempts to conflate abortion medication and emergency contraception, ‘studies’ trying to prove that the pills are dangerous, or the GOP messaging war on ‘trafficking’ and ‘coerced’ abortion.

There’s a lot. That’s why in a moment when conservatives are exponentially ramping up their attacks on abortion medication, I’m super grateful for Carrie Baker’s new book, Abortion Pills: U.S. History and Politics. Baker, a professor and journalist, has written an incredibly comprehensive look at the political fight over abortion medication—one that sheds light on the anti-abortion tactics we’re seeing today.

I got a chance to speak with Carrie before the holidays, who told me about how panicked conservatives were when the pills first came to be. With women able to end their pregnancies at home, the medication threw a wrench in their messaging—primarily because “there’s no baby.” The pills made it impossible for them to paint a picture of some evil abortionist killing a child.

Baker also pointed out that the medication “allows dignity to women, and that’s what they don’t want.” Especially, of course, when it comes to women who are sexually active. “You should have to put your feet in stirrups and show your stuff,” Baker said. The pills also made it more difficult for anti-abortion activists to do their favorite thing ever: harass women outside of clinics.

All of which is to say: You should get this book. Abortion medication is at the center of the 2025 fight, and the more all of us know, the better.

In Better News

While conservatives are attacking abortion pills, we’re doing everything we can to expand access. A year ago this month, I told you about a pilot program in Washington, where a small group of pharmacists were being trained by the Pharmacy Abortion Access Project on how to screen patients and dispense abortion medication directly.

Well, it appears the program was a success: This week, the group reported that over the course of a month, 10 pharmacists prescribed abortion pills to 43 patients. These pharmacists prescribed using a telehealth screening, not unlike other providers, and pills were shipped directly to patients. The best part? Patients paid $40 for the medication. That’s amazing.

Downing told The New York Times that pharmacists also contacted patients to see how they were doing and if they had questions. “We did not have any seriously negative outcomes at all, but we had a full network of other resources available in case that happened, so that we could take care of them,” he said.

Dr. Beth Rivin, managing director of the program, says that their plan is for other Washington pharmacists to start prescribing this year, and that patients could even go to the pharmacy in person and get the pills in just one visit. The hope, of course, is that this project will serve as a model for other pro-choice states.

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Trusted sources for abortion medication: Aid Access, Plan C Pills, Abortion Finder, I Need An A.

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What ‘Pro-Life’ Looks Like

I’m really so over anti-abortion maniacs calling themselves the party of family and life. Even if you don’t give a shit about women dying—and we certainly know that Republicans don’t—they’re supposed to care about the lives of babies. But the GOP is unwilling to reckon with the hypocrisy of rising infant mortality rates in states with abortion bans.

But it’s not just infant death that’s on the rise in anti-abortion states; The Washington Post reported last month that Texas has also seen an increase in abandoned newborns. One sheriff said there’s been “a little bit of an epidemic on this.” As you can imagine, the mothers of these newborns are deeply in crisis and marginalized—one was living in a homeless encampment, another was a young migrant teen.

To no one’s surprise, Republicans haven’t budgeted anything towards programs to address the issue. Instead, The Post points out, lawmakers have allocated $165 million this year for ‘alternatives to abortion,’ aka crisis pregnancy centers. (And you know how helpful those are.)

While Texas does have a safe haven law that permits women to relinquish newborns without fear of prosecution (supposedly), the state has no campaign to inform people about the law; nor is there really any awareness-raising effort at all. I think Amanda Marcotte at Salon hits the nail on the head:

“Because the goal is punishment, there's no reason for Republicans to invest in safe haven laws, which shield young women from legal consequences for abandoning a newborn. When a young woman throws a baby in a dumpster, however, that's a crime and she can be arrested. More resources into the safe haven program would save lives, but would reduce the number of women that can be thrown in jail. Given a choice between living babies or imprisoned women, Republicans pick the latter.”

Really the only thing the Texas GOP has done is install ‘baby boxes,’ which are, at best, extraordinarily problematic. The boxes are almost never used, instead allowing for money to be funneled to the anti-abortion groups connected with the program. Parents who drop infants off in ‘baby boxes’ are also often not able to get custody of their child back.

This is something I’ve written about before: You’re talking about women who need help in a crisis moment, which isn’t something they should be punished for. Yet there are parents who’ve spent years trying to get their babies back. This is just yet another way for states to terminate the parental rights of marginalized communities.

In the Nation

Well this is clever. You all know that anti-abortion groups love to mess with language, from redefining ‘ban’ to making up terms like ‘maternal fetal separation.’ They also spent a good deal of 2024 twisting their talking points into knots—calling their incredibly unpopular abortion bans “the will of the people,” for example.

Conservatives’ latest language trickery is no different: With Donald Trump about to take office, Republicans are eager to launch federal attacks against abortion—but they won the election in part by convincing Americans that Trump would give abortion rights ‘back to the states.’ So how do they make voters believe they’re keeping their promise while still rolling attacking abortions nationally?

A representative from the anti-abortion Ethics and Public Policy Center gave this incredible quote to a Catholic publication recently,

“President-elect Trump has stated that the abortion issue should be left to the states. To fulfill this promise, Trump should get the federal government out of the business of abortion by rescinding Biden policies that fund abortion, defund pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood, and robustly defend conscience and religious freedom protections in federal law.”

They’re giving Trump and his administration ideas about how to message any potential federal abortion attacks! They just want him to say that any anti-abortion action his administration takes is just an effort to give abortion ‘back to the states.’ Unbelievable.

Quick hits:

• Stat News explains how hospitals’ sedation policies are making abortions more difficult and expensive to obtain;

• The Associated Press on the ‘complicated’ picture of increasing abortions in America;

• Truthout reports on how U.S. feminists are looking to Latin America abortion rights groups for tactics and ideas;

• And Jezebel points out that Meta’s new ‘free speech’ policy will force employees to move to anti-abortion Texas.

Criminalizing Pregnancy

We all remember Brittany Watts’ story—the Ohio woman who was arrested for ‘abuse of a corpse’ after flushing her miscarriage at home. Watts had sought out care for her health- and life-threatening pregnancy, but because the hospital was religiously-affiliated, doctors delayed treating her. After hours without care, Watts went home where she lost the pregnancy.

Her case was the perfect example of how pregnancy criminalization works: From the fact that a nurse called police when Watts went back to the hospital for bleeding—most people targeted for pregnancy outcomes are turned in by healthcare providers—to the way racism framed how the hospital, media, and prosecutors treated her.

Thankfully, she wasn’t indicted—in part because of the public outrage around her story. But we always knew this wouldn’t be the last case of its kind. Over the past year, I reported on other arrests and investigations; now it appears there’s a similar case in Texas.

A woman there has been arrested for ‘abuse of a corpse’ after losing her pregnancy in a public restroom. (I’m deliberately not linking to the local media coverage of arrest, because I don’t want to drive traffic to the sensationalized pieces.)

As we saw with Watts, this woman’s obviously-traumatic experience has been covered as a crime story—with headlines declaring that she “spent hours” trying to flush her “baby girl” down the toilet. As was also the case with Watts, what’s being reported isn’t reliable; outlets are only relying on police’s account and are playing an irresponsible game of telephone with the facts.

For example, after a detective told one reporter he believed the fetus was in the third trimester, other outlets reported that it was medical professionals who made that determination. Yet in the affidavit, police relayed that they saw “human-like material” in the toilet—which doesn’t necessarily sound like a later term pregnancy.

But here’s the thing: None of us—including these reporters—have any idea what happened in that bathroom. Nor should we. And regardless of how far along this woman was, or why she lost her pregnancy, it’s clear she needed help—not criminalization.

I’ll be following up on this story soon, but in the meantime read a refresher of how pregnancy criminalization operates, and make sure to familiarize yourself with groups like Pregnancy Justice and If/When/How.

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If you missed my email earlier today with 2025 predictions and AED’s plans for the year, make sure to read it below:

Aggrieved Men, Conspiracy Theories, and More Predictions for 2025