A San Francisco hospital that is offering gender-change surgery is not officially a member of the country’s largest Catholic health-care system, a spokesman for the San Francisco archdiocese has said.
St. Francis Memorial Hospital, boasts of its “health care delivery to transgender and gender nonconforming patients,” is not a member of CommonSpirit Health, the spokesman said. He explained that when that system was established, “a special carve-out was made for the non-Catholic hospitals that would continue to do direct sterilizations.”
But the spokesman, Peter Marlow, said that the non-Catholic hospitals affiliated with the group had agreed not to perform other procedures that violate Catholic teaching, including abortion, assisted suicide, and in-vitro fertilization. The question of gender-change surgery has not yet been addressed explicitly in the directives from the US bishops that have guided the consortium’s policies.