Cormac Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, the senior prelate of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, has instructed a Catholic hospital to cease in vitro fertilisation treatments, contraception distribution and abortion referrals.The Daily Mail reports that the Hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth in North London, popular with celebrities, will no longer allow any staff members to participate in contraceptive or abortion related activities under a new code of ethics to be instituted starting next month.
Bishop George Stack, an auxiliary of Westminster, has been appointed to the ethics committee to ensure that Catholic principles are upheld in the Catholic hospital.
As far back as August, 2005, the Vatican had expressed its concerns about the hospital.
St. John and St. Elizabeth had come under scrutiny after it began leasing premises to National Health Service physicians, who, as public employees, are obliged to refer for abortions and to prescribe chemical abortifacients and contraceptives.
In 2006, at the request of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a Catholic Labour Peer, Lord Brennan, investigated the situation and in February the same year informed the Cardinal that the hospital was in regular violation of its Catholic ethics code.
After an investigation, Lord Brennan said the hospital was referring for abortions and distributing abortifacient drugs such as the morning after pill. Far from expressing any discomfort at the criticism, the hospital responded defiantly, saying it was committed to an “ecumenical philosophy and was responsible for the care of all.”
In March 2006, the hospital argued that it was obliged under British law to refer for abortions.
The new code of ethics will be based on Catholic teaching on the value of human life and sexual morality. In addition to abortion referrals, IVF and contraception, the hospital will also ban the use of amniocentesis, a test commonly used as a ‘search and destroy’ tool for eliminating handicapped children.
The Cardinal wrote in a letter to Robin Bridgeman, the chairman of the hospital, “There must be clarity that the hospital, being a Catholic hospital with a distinct vision of what is truly in the interests of human persons, cannot offer its patients, non-Catholic or Catholic, the whole range of services routinely accepted by many in modern secular society as being in a patient's best interest.”
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