Among the many, many consequences of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade is the spotlight it has placed on Catholic hospitals across the country with regards to reproductive health care. In states where abortion rights are severely restricted—especially in those states—it’s more important than ever that women have access to healthcare when their lives are in danger. That is not the priority in Catholic hospitals. And yet, as the Washington Post just explained yesterday, with Catholic hospitals rapidly swallowing up public facilities, the two sides are on a collision course.

It’s important to understand why Catholic hospitals are a problem. The main reason is that they’re essentially bound by the rules given to them by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops—the USCCB. By and large, and with very few exceptions, they do not allow Catholic hospitals to perform any procedures that violate Catholic doctrine. If the hospitals violate the rules, they could lose their affiliation with the Church which could theoretically be the beginning of the end for many of those places. Even when they employ doctors and nurses who very much want to help patients, their hands are often tied.

Here’s just a glimpse of those rules:

Directive 45 says “Abortion (that is, the directly intended termination of pregnancy before viability or the directly intended destruction of a viable fetus) is never permitted.” What if a woman has an ectopic pregnancy, where the fertilized egg isn’t implanted in her uterus but gets stuck in the fallopian tube? That’s dangerous. Her life is at risk. A normal hospital could give that woman a drug to induce an abortion… or just remove that fertilized egg through surgery. Catholic hospitals won’t allow either one of those things because that would violate Directive 45.

Directive 48 says “In case of extrauterine pregnancy, no intervention is morally licit which constitutes a direct abortion.” In other words, if the fertilized egg is in the fallopian tube, the USCCB still won’t allow doctors to fix the problem the easy way. In practice, that means doctors may have to remove a woman’s entire fallopian tube to prevent something fatal, reducing her ability to get pregnant in the future, even though it’s totally medically unnecessary, because that’s what the USCCB tells them to do. ...