As The Media’s Pro-Abortion Propaganda Heats Up, Catholic Hospitals Are In The Crosshairs

Since the leaking of the Supreme Court’s expected overturing of Roe v. Wade this spring, there has been a seemingly coordinated hostility toward any institutional or cultural opposition to abortion. There have been overt attacks on pregnancy resource centers and FBI raids of pro-lifers’ homes, but perhaps one of the largest, longest-standing pro-life institutions facing an increasing number of attacks from both the federal government and their allies in the corporate media is Catholic hospitals.

With more than 5,000 Catholic hospitals nationwide, Catholic health providers are a substantial part of the country’s health care infrastructure. One in six hospital patients in the United States is treated in a Catholic facility, according to the Catholic Health Association. So for pro-abortion activists, undermining the legitimacy of Catholic health systems makes sense as an efficient and far-reaching target. Catholic hospitals, of course, reject the left’s favorite euphemism that abortion is “health care.”

The Seismic Effect of Section 1557

Although hostility toward Catholic health providers goes back years, one could argue it was just a few weeks after the Dobbs decision was handed down in July that the Biden administration sanctioned an all-out war. Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced revised rules to implement Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that would force Catholic health providers to violate their religious beliefs by forcing them to perform abortions and wrongly named “gender-affirming” procedures. 

The rule change would alter the definition of “discrimination on the basis of sex” to include “discrimination on the basis of pregnancy or related conditions” including “pregnancy termination.” 

The effect of this rule change cannot be overstated considering how removing First Amendment rights and conscience protections from more than 5,000 hospitals across the country — often the only health care providers in rural and minority communities — would exacerbate the existing health care worker shortage. When the HHS comment period on the proposed rule change closed on Oct. 3, there were nearly 74,000 comments submitted.

Of course, the abortion industry immediately hopped on board. The same day as the HHS announcement, the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, not only celebrated the proposed rule change but insinuated that health providers such as Catholic hospitals are “systemic barriers.”

“Today’s undertaking will help people lead healthy lives, without fear of discrimination in how or where they seek care. This proposed rule is a critical step in protecting people who already face discrimination and systemic barriers to accessing health care,” a Planned Parenthood statement read.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other Catholic organizations said the proposed rule change would force providers to violate their religious and moral convictions and “threaten our ability to carry out our healing ministries, and others’ to practice medicine.”

Enter Media Allies

Despite such a consequential rule change on the horizon, any media-driven conversation on its impact on religious health care workers and the patients they serve has been nearly non-existent. Instead, as we entered the fall and midterms inched around

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