One month after the Supreme Court’s Bostock ruling, the ACLU has filed a lawsuit against a Catholic hospital that refused to perform a hysterectomy on a woman struggling with gender dysphoria. St. Joseph Medical Center was founded in 1864 by Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia and has continued to operate in accordance with their beliefs for over 150 years. Because of those beliefs, the hospital canceled Jesse Hammons’s hysterectomy as it would have removed a healthy organ and left her sterilized. The ACLU argues that, in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling, the hospital’s actions are discriminatory.
In an ACLU press release, Hammon said, “The hospital will perform hysterectomies for everyone else, but they did not think that my life, as a man who is transgender, is equally worthy of protection.” This claim is false. St. Joseph’s Medical Center does not perform hysterectomies for “anyone else,” but instead, only performs them when medically necessary. In a letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the general counsel for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote in 2016,
A hospital does not engage in ‘discrimination’ when, for example, it performs a mastectomy or hysterectomy on a woman with breast or uterine cancer, respectively, but declines to perform such a procedure on a woman with perfectly healthy breasts or uterus who is seeking to have the appearance of a man.
If a patient has breast cancer or uterine cancer, a mastectomy or hysterectomy may be medically necessary. Removing a healthy organ because it does not match an individual’s “identity” is not medically necessary, therefore, it is not discrimination for the hospital to refuse to perform the surgery. The fact that Hammon is a woman is not a problem that needs to be “fixed,” nor will removing her uterus make her any less a woman. It will simply sterilize her, causing harm instead of healing.
Neither the ACLU nor anyone else has the right to demand that religious hospitals violate their beliefs. What is more, no doctor should ever be expected or required to violate their commitment to do no harm. And yet, this is exactly what the ACLU is demanding. Justice Alito was right when he warned that the Bostock ruling could cause healthcare to emerge as an “intense battleground under the Court’s holding.” Just one month after the fact, his words are already proving to be true.
