Protecting access to reproductive health care at hospitals and clinics: How state hospital oversight laws can give women a voice in the decision-making

Access to reproductive health care at hospitals and affiliated clinics is being jeopardized as the American health care industry dramatically reconfigures itself through hospital mergers, acquisitions and closings.  Local hospitals are dropping reproductive care in order to join rapidly-expanding Catholic-sponsored systems, as reported in Miscarriage of Medicine: The Growth of Catholic Hospitals and the Threat to Reproductive Health Care, our 2013 publication. These changes will have lasting repercussions for women seeking reproductive care, especially those low-income women who are dependent on safety-net hospitals and affiliated clinics, and rural women who have no other convenient options.  Yet, because of deregulation, many of these hospital transactions are proceeding with little or no assessment of the likely impact on patients and no opportunity for advocates to seek protection of existing reproductive health services.

This paper will present new research  on how strong state hospital oversight laws can give women a voice in the decision-making and protect access to reproductive services when secular hospitals merge with Catholic hospitals, or when new delivery system models are proposed.  The authors will describe how reproductive health advocates in some states are seeking and employing strengthened state hospital oversight procedures, while advocates in other states (particularly in the South) have been left with little or no say about what happens to their local hospitals, because of deregulation. The paper will describe how state hospital oversight can be made more responsive to the needs of affected health care consumers, including women seeking reproductive health care.