MENDOCINO—For more than two years, physician assistant Dawn Hofberg fought to bring access to abortions back to California’s Mendocino Coast, a picturesque stretch of shoreline about three hours north of San Francisco and 90 minutes from the nearest facility offering abortions.
According to Healthline, Hofberg enlisted help from local health care providers and the American Civil Liberties Union, which sent letters to the Mendocino Coast Health Care District that operates the hospital in Fort Bragg and other medical services. The letters noted that the state constitution requires public hospitals to offer abortions if they offer other pregnancy-related care.
Hofberg and others worry that the community’s newly won abortion access could be in peril. With a net loss of $1.2 million in the 2018 fiscal year alone, the district says its only shot at survival is to lease its operations to Adventist Health, a Roseville, California-based system affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which opposes most abortions. Voters will decide whether to approve the 30-year lease agreement on March 3.
Adventist officials said that despite their religious teachings that abortions should be limited to cases of life- or health-threatening pregnancies, rape, incest or severe fetal anomalies, they will not restrict the use of medication abortions at the clinic.
“We don’t control our physician practices in the way some others do and we don’t put constraints around what they can and can’t prescribe,” said Bob Beehler, an Adventist Health mergers and acquisitions executive.
Beehler said the introduction of abortion-inducing pills had changed the system’s approach to abortions. “Our historical position has been based on the way they used to be done, in a hospital.”
But abortion-rights enthusiasts still fear what could be coming.
“Obviously, we do have a lot of concerns about Adventist’s position with respect to restricting abortion access in its facilities, and so we’re going to keep a close eye on the situation,” said Phyllida Burlingame, director of social justice subtexts—reproductive justice and gender equity—for the ACLU of Northern California.
Burlingame said the deal also raises broader concerns about the spread of religious health systems that restrict abortion access. “Not only are they taking over the private marketplace, but now they’re even spreading into these public spheres,” Burlingame said.
In October, the Seventh-day Adventist Church raised concerns among reproductive health care advocates when it approved a statement saying it “considers abortion out of harmony with God’s plan for human life.”
Officials said at the time that they would develop updated protocols for church-affiliated health care institutions, where, they emphasized, few abortions are performed.
Adventist Health spokesman Jill Kinney said in an emailed statement that the hospital system’s usual practice “is not to provide elective abortions, but we respect that patients may wish to have them.” If that’s the case, she added, “clinicians help coordinate referral and transfer to capable facilities without prejudice.” Prejudice. ‘Convictions’ would be a better word.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church’s teachings can influence other issues, too. It has opposed what it calls “transgenderism,” stating that gender identity “is determined by our biological sex at birth,” and has called homosexuality “a manifestation of the disturbance and brokenness in human inclinations and relations caused by the entrance of sin into the world.”
Arneta Rogers, an attorney for the ACLU of Northern California, voiced concern about these beliefs. “It’s not about shutting down religious entities; we just don’t want people to be discriminated against,” Rogers said in an interview. More likely, she doesn’t want endemic liberalism to experience any setbacks.
Jason Wells, president of the Adventist Health hospitals in Ukiah and Willits, said the system “cherishes diversity and its LGBTQ employees.” In its statement to the attorney general, Adventist Health said some of its physicians provide hormones for transgender patients but none of its facilities offer “gender reconstruction surgery.”
In a statement provided by Kinney, Adventist Health said that it “strives to be free from biases related to gender identity” but that its hospitals “are not currently equipped to offer the complex, comprehensive programmatic approach necessary to provide gender reassignment treatments and surgeries.”
For many in the Mendocino community, uncertainty over the hospital’s finances has overshadowed concerns about Adventist Health’s religious affiliation as residents prepare for the vote next month. “If the affiliation doesn’t go through, I don’t know how we’ll stay in business,” said Karen Arnold, secretary of the district board.
Bible-based Seventh-day Adventist Christians continue to oppose transgenderism and abortion as departures from the will of God. We hope Adventist Health finds the courage to do the same, and is a positive light on the Mendocino community—should the ballot initiative pass on March 3.
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“If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine but the Father's who sent Me” (John 14:23-24).