When she was 22 weeks pregnant, Mindy Swank began to bleed. She had known for nearly two weeks that she was miscarrying – and in such a way that she was at risk for infection.
But the Catholic hospital near her home had refused to induce labor, apparently believing that doing so would violate its ban on abortion. And on this morning, the bleeding made no difference. The hospital sent her home – and then again and again, for five more weeks until she began severely hemorrhaging at week 27. Then, they induced her labor.
Swank’s story comes from a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union and MergerWatch, a public health watchdog that monitors healthcare institutions with religious affiliations. The report finds that one out of every six beds in the country’s acute care hospitals is in a hospital with Catholic affiliations and that Catholic hospitals make up 15%, or 548, of the country’s hospitals.
Those numbers attest to the sharp rise in Catholic control of medical institutions over a decade: since 2001, through a steady thrum of sales and mergers, the number of hospitals with Catholic ties has gone up by 22%.