A Michigan mom is forced to seek legal help after a Catholic hospital refused tubal ligation, which could save her life.
Thirty-three-year-old Jessica Mann works as a social worker in the state. She already has two children but is pregnant with the third one. But according to her doctors, she could no longer have any more after she's diagnosed with a brain tumor known as pilocytic astrocytoma.
Although it's a benign tumor and treatments such as resection are now available, it can still kill her should she decide to have more babies: she can develop seizures while delivering.
To avoid the risks, Mann has decided to deliver through Caesarian and general anesthesia then proceed with tubal ligation to prevent herself from conceiving again-a medical request Genesys Regional Medical Center, a Catholic hospital, said no to.
Based on a 2010 Catholic Church directive, which is followed by Ascension, the organization the hospital belongs to, doctors are allowed to proceed with sterilization only if it's an inevitable consequence of a procedure that is necessary to save a woman's life. For example, the ovaries may be removed as part of a life-saving measure to avoid ovarian cancer metastases.
In her case, however, the reason for the sterilization was to prevent further pregnancies, which is against the church's doctrine of procreation.
The hospital, nevertheless, has a decade's worth of tubal ligation history, but only changed its policy to conform with the directive last year. It's the hospital's history that Mann pinned her hope to as she brought her case to the hospital's board.
However, it took almost five months before she received the negative decision, and now she's somehow at a loss of what to do, although she's thinking about getting birth at the hospital and then having her sterilization procedure a few weeks after she's completely healed in another facility.
She has already sought the help of ACLU, which already sent a letter to the hospital board for another review and hopefully reconsideration.