Transgender Sues Catholic Hospital for Stopping Sex-Change Uterus Removal Surgery
A woman from California who identifies as a man has filed a lawsuit against a Catholic hospital for barring her surgeon from performing a sex change-related hysterectomy that would have removed all or part of her uterus.
Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Carmichael admitted that it stopped the planned surgery in August last year because of its religious convictions, the Christian News Service reported.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit last week on behalf of the 35-year-old woman named Evan Michael Minton against Dignity Health, the parent company of Mercy San Juan Medical Center, according to the Sacramento Bee.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
The lawsuit pits the desires of transgenders seeking sexual reassignment surgery against Catholic doctrines, which prohibit such kind of surgery.
Elizabeth Gill, senior staff attorney for the ACLU Northern California, said the hospital's denial of surgical service to Minton is a "clear-cut case of discrimination," citing the state's Unruh Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination against individuals based on their sex, race, religion, age, disability, marital status or sexual orientation.
Mercy San Juan Medical Center said the procedure that Minton went against the hospital's anti-sterilization policies, which are based on ethical and religious directives issued in 2009 by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Sterilization procedures, such as hysterectomies or tubal ligations, are permitted by Catholic hospitals only to cure or alleviate a "serious pathology and (if) a simpler treatment is not available," said Mercy San Juan spokeswoman Melissa Jue, in a statement issued last August.
Although Mercy San Juan denied Minton the hysterectomy she wanted, hospital officials referred her to Methodist Hospital of Sacramento, a Dignity facility that is not bound by Catholic doctrines. The hysterectomy was performed at Methodist in September.
In November 2015, a coalition of 10 religious groups, including the Conference of Catholic Bishops, opposed the inclusion of gender identity in federal health care laws barring sexual discrimination. "We believe, as do many health care providers, that medical and surgical interventions that attempt to alter one's sex are, in fact, detrimental to patients," the group wrote in a letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "Such interventions are not properly viewed as health care because they do not cure or prevent disease or illness. Rather they reject a person's nature at birth as male or female."
