Apparently, stupid is catching
Women are no longer able to get tubal ligations at a Catholic-run hospital in Humboldt, Saskatchewan!Uhm, okay... WTF? This is a public hospital! And the only one in the area. This is seriously unethical. I'm sure the government won't let them get away with it for long. They'll either force them to do the procedures, or to pay for them to go to
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Actually it's mentioned in several articles. The hospital doesn't do vasectomies. But They hadn't been doing them even before this, because vasectomies aren't done in hospitals -- they're just office procedures. Consequently, vasectomies are performed at the Humboldt Clinic owned by the area's physicians and not under the St. Elizabeth's board. (It's noteworthy that vasectomies are covered under medicare in Saskatchewan, but not medicare in Alberta.) ...
While there are only slightly more vasectomies performed in Saskatchewan each year compared with tubal ligation surgeries, (1,898 in 2005-06 versus 1,511), tubal ligations have to be performed in hospitals because the surgical procedure requires an anesthetic. Tubal ligation surgery is usually done after a caesarean-section birth and is often required by mothers who have had multiple C-section births because of the dangers further pregnancies pose.
So if a woman is having a C-section and wants her tubes tied, she has to have two separate surgeries!
But the hospital is trying to fudge the issue. St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Humboldt hopes a statement planned for later today will end the controversy surrounding its decision to stop performing tubal ligations. ...
CEO Shirley McNeil denies accusations of discrimination, saying the hospital doesn't offer vasectomies to men either. She says that surgery is now done in physician clinics.
Oh, what balderdash. They don't do vasectomies because they don't do them in a hospital anyway!
But they've got pipe dreams over there. Discussion will begin next week aimed at finding a mutually agreeable resolution. They say "its [sic] hoped agreement can be reached that will satisfy all parties." I can't imagine any mutually agreeable resolution! They either do them or they don't. What middle ground is there?!
A few years ago the nonprofit community hospital here in town put itself up for sale. (Hospitals are banding together these days into regional health care conglomerates.) There were several large hospital associations looking to buy it, but the two leading contenders were St. Agnes Hospital and Johns Hopkins Hospital. Everyone in the community was worried about what would happen if the hospital became a branch of St. Agnes -- it's the only hospital for miles around, and all the doctors in the area are affiliated with it. So if you want to use a different hospital, it means finding a new doctor in another area and making lots of long drives.
Fortunately the hospital's board decided on Hopkins. (Although it's connected mostly in just a financial way -- the medical care is still at the same mediocre level. We don't have the kind of world class care that Johns Hopkins provides.)
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The middle ground would be paying the expenses of sending people to the nearest hospital that does them. It sucks, but it would be a decent enough compromise.
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