[Pflienews] PharmFacts E-News Update: London Catholic hospital bans abortion referrals

[PFLI PharmAid Center]

*PharmFacts E-News Update -- 25 Feb 2008 AD #2

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/24/ncatholics124.xml 


  Catholic hospital bans abortion referrals


By Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent
Last Updated: 3:05am GMT 24/11/2007

A fashionable Roman Catholic hospital has agreed a code of ethics 
barring its doctors from referring abortions or providing 
contraceptives, The Daily Telegraph has learned.

The board of the private St John and St Elizabeth Hospital voted to 
implement the new code earlier this month after intense pressure from 
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Britain's senior Catholic leader.

The north London hospital may now face financial difficulties because it 
could have to abandon plans to lease part of its site to GPs who would 
be obliged by their NHS contracts to offer contraceptive services.

According to insiders, the decision by the board may also prompt the 
resignation of staff who have opposed the adoption of the code.

Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, the head of the Catholic Church in England and 
Wales, initially ordered the hospital to adopt a revised code of ethics 
a year ago amid evidence that doctors were prescribing the morning-after 
pill and referring abortions.

An inquiry he set up in 2005, chaired by Lord Brennan, the Labour peer, 
found that the hospital had been flouting existing guidelines.

Senior Catholics had also complained that the hospital's decision to 
permit NHS GPs to operate on its premises in St John's Wood would 
further undermine Church teaching.

The issues were sensitive because the hospital, of which the cardinal is 
the patron, is a favourite with celebrity mothers and has been described 
in magazines as the "poshest place to push".

Heather Mills McCartney, the actresses Cate Blanchett and Emma Thompson, 
the model Kate Moss and Sarah Cox, the radio presenter, have all had 
babies there.

The cardinal even discussed the affair with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 
who was the head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the 
Faith before he became Pope Benedict XV.

In a letter to the hospital earlier this year, the Cardinal said: "There 
must be clarity that the hospital, being a Catholic hospital with a 
distinct vision of what is truly in the interests of human persons, 
cannot offer its patients, non-Catholic or Catholic, the whole range of 
services routinely accepted by many in modern secular society as being 
in a patient's best interest."

He also appointed an Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster, the Rt Rev George 
Stack, to the ethics committee of the hospital to ensure that Catholic 
teaching was upheld.

However, a number of senior executives and doctors at the hospital 
resisted the code, arguing that they were worried about the loss of 
revenue if it could not lease out part of its site to the GP practice.

A spokesman for the hospital said that it was unable to comment at the 
present time because "matters were difficult".

St John and St Elizabeth's, which is open to patients of any or no 
religion, was founded in 1856 by the Sisters of Mercy, who worked with 
Florence Nightingale in the Crimean war.



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