(OSV News) — A Catholic health care system in California is being sued for its refusal to perform an abortion on a woman who twice experienced miscarriage, with the plaintiff alleging the hospital’s religious directives endangered her life while failing to meet the proper “standard of care” for her condition.
According to court documents filed Sept. 25 in California superior court, two of the 41 hospitals operated by Dignity Health did not offer abortion as an option to plaintiff Rachel Harrison, who sought care in September 2024 and March 2025 after her water broke at 17 weeks in both pregnancies, draining her womb of amniotic fluid.
Harrison and fellow plaintiff Marcell Johnson, listed in the suit as her partner, are seeking a jury trial, claiming Dignity Health violated California law on emergency services, as well as the state’s civil rights act, unfair competition law and right to privacy.
Suit claims medical malpractice
The couple also allege Dignity — founded by the Sisters of Mercy and now one of the nation’s largest health care systems, with a focus on people who are underserved and impoverished — committed medical malpractice, while causing both negligent and intentional emotional distress.
Also named as defendants are “Does 1-10,” undetermined Dignity personnel “who may also be responsible for the violations alleged in this Complaint,” said the court documents.
OSV News reached out to Dignity Health Oct. 2 for comment, but did not receive an immediate response.
A spokesperson for the organization told Courthouse News Service, which published a Sept. 26 article on the case, that Mercy San Juan is “committed to providing the highest quality, compassionate care to every patient.
Patients’ well-being is ‘central mission’
“When a pregnant woman’s health is at risk, appropriate emergency care is provided,” said the spokesperson. “The well-being of our patients is the central mission for our dedicated caregivers.”
Catholic health care facilities in the U.S. are guided by the “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services,” or ERD, which prevent them from performing abortions.
Now in its sixth edition, the ERD document — developed in consultation with medical professionals and theologians, and regularly reviewed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops — articulates ethical standards for health care in light of church teaching, and provides authoritative guidance on moral issues encountered by Catholic health care.
The Catholic Church teaches that human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the first moment of conception, and since the first century has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. Church teaching and ethical directives do not use the term “emergency abortion.”
Catholic directives never permit abortion
The directives never permit Catholic health facilities to perform abortion, either in cases where it is “the directly intended termination of pregnancy before viability or the directly intended destruction of a viable fetus.”
Medical interventions that “have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman are permitted when they cannot be safely postponed until the unborn child is viable, even if they will result in the death of the unborn child,” the directives state.
In addition, the directives permit induced labor “for a proportionate reason” and “after the fetus is viable.”
For pregnancies outside of the uterus, “no intervention is morally licit which constitutes a direct abortion,” the directives state.
Condition known as ‘Previable PPROM’
In the court complaint, Harrison and Johnson said they had not been advised by medical professionals at Dignity’s Mercy San Juan Medical Center and Mercy General Hospital — which they had selected for care due to medical, insurance and geographic constraints — that Harrison was experiencing a condition known as “previable preterm premature rupture of the membranes,” or “previable PPROM.”
The suit claims that “given the extreme risks, the standard of care for a patient presenting with Previable PPROM is to offer an emergency abortion procedure to safely remove the nonviable fetal tissue, thus drastically reducing the risks of severe life-threatening complications.”
While the suit argues the Dignity hospitals failed to provide abortion as a “standard of care” for previable PPROM, Catholic medical ethical directives take a different perspective, said Joseph Meaney, past president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, where he is now a senior fellow.
‘You have two patients, mother and child’
Meaney — who spoke generally to the issue of Catholic health care responses to endangered pregnancies, rather than to the details of Harrison’s case — told OSV News that “the point is, you have two patients, the mother and the child, and to do everything you can for both of them.”
“The fact that the water has broken puts that pregnancy in danger, and it creates a high-risk situation, potentially, in terms of very dangerous infection,” he said. “But it doesn’t indicate by itself that there’s something to be done immediately.”
Meaney pointed to the “zero-risk” and “defensive medicine” approach of “a lot of secular institutions.”
“Their idea is like, ‘We’re going to preemptively induce labor and avoid the risk of life-threatening infection for the mother by sacrificing the child.”
That approach, said Meaney, “devalues the life of that child.”
Instead, he said, Catholic health care professionals should approach the issue by asking, “What can we do to help both the mother and the child?”
Gina Christian is a multimedia reporter for OSV News. Follow her at @GinaJesseReina.
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