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Vatican Concerned over Abortion Drugs and Referrals at UK Catholic Hospital

LONDON, August 12, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The private Catholic hospital of St John and St Elizabeth is under Vatican scrutiny, after the hospital began leasing its premises to National Health Service physicians, who, as public employees, are obliged to refer for abortions and to prescribe chemical abortifacients and contraceptives.

The hospital, known for delivering the babies of such celebrities as Cate Blanchett, Heather Mills McCartney, and Kate Moss, is the focus of an inquiry spearheaded by the UK's leading Catholic prelate, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor. An additional part of the hospital's expansion includes a plan to open a NHS primary care centre in 2007.

"We and others are concerned by the hospital's proposal to move an NHS GP practice into the space the Linacre Centre now occupies," said centre director Dr. Helen Watt, according to the Telegraph. The Linacre Centre for Healthcare Ethics, a bioethical think-tank for the Church is also housed at the hospital site. It will be displaced by the new NHS treatment facility. "These GPs will be obliged by their NHS contracts to provide abortion and contraception referrals or prescriptions - for example, for the morning-after pill."

"Neither the NHS practice, nor the private GP practice at the hospital, nor other hospital doctors should be permitted to facilitate abortion," Dr. Watt emphasized. "We would urge the hospital to use this opportunity to re-commit to a truly Catholic ethos, in which women are offered unequivocal support with their pregnancies."

A separate hospital spokesman said that patients there were already being referred for abortions when the physicians deem them "medically necessary." "This is the compromise between Catholic belief and the hospital's philosophy of care," she claimed.

A spokesman for the cardinal's office said, "For some years there have been concerns over the code of ethics and its application. At the heart of what the inquiry will be looking at is the question, 'What is a Catholic hospital and what stance should it take on ethical issues in medicine?' Obviously a Catholic hospital must witness to Catholic teaching, but it must also serve everyone."

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