Hoag Hospital and womens rights: Kamala Harris extracts more pledges

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http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-hoag-hospital-20140404,0,3443586.story



Demonstrators protest the decision to end abortion services at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach last year.

Hoag Hospital and womens rights: Kamala Harris extracts more pledges
By Michael Hiltzik
April 4, 2014, 3:57 p.m.

The underhanded way that women's reproductive rights were abridged in Orange County last year after the merger of Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach with the Catholic hospital chain St. Joseph Health System raised important issues for the community.

California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris, who had originally blessed the merger, has addressed those issues, and it looks like she's taken some positive steps to protect women's reproductive services. An agreement between her office and Hoag unveiled Friday fixes some, though not all, the flaws in the merger deal.

First, some background. Even though OB/GYNs had been explicitly assured that the merger would bring about "no change" in women's health services at Hoag -- including no change in the availability of elective abortions -- Hoag management abruptly barred abortions last spring. That ban remains in place.

Hospital management claimed the reason it barred abortions had nothing to do with St. Joseph policies against them. Instead, it implied that Hoag physicians performed so few abortions that they couldn't meet the "requirement for clinical excellence" for the procedures. The medical staff disputed Hoag's statistics on the number of abortions performed, as well as the implication that they weren't up to the task. Evidence soon surfaced that Hoag indeed was responding to St. Joseph's "sensitivity" about abortions.