Court Decision: 85 Pacific Reporter, 3d Series 67; 2004 March 1 (date of decision). The California Supreme Court agreed with a lower court decision that the state\'s Women\'s Contraception Equity Act (WCEA) requires employers who provide prescription drug benefits in their health care insurance plans to include prescription contraception coverage. Catholic Charities of Sacramento challenged the constitutionality of the provision, specifically with regard to its right to the free exercise of religion. The court held that Catholic Charities was not entitled to an exemption as it did not meet the criteria of a \"religious employer\" as delineated in WCEA. Furthermore, WCEA \"served a compelling state interest in the elimination of ... gender discrimination in the provision of health benefits\"; had a \"secular legislative purpose\"; was valid and neutral; and neither advanced or inhibited religion.

Health care institutions, including Roman Catholic institutions, are in a time of crisis. This crisis may provide an important opportunity to reinvigorate Roman Catholic health care. The current health care crisis offers Roman Catholic health care institutions a special opportunity to rethink their fundamental commitments and to plan for the future. The author argues that what Catholic health care institutions must first do is articulate the nature of their identity and their commitments. By a renewed commitment to the praxis of health care on their own distinctive terms, Roman Catholic health care institutions may reestablish a vision of human nature and human service in an increasingly secular society. Health care could then reclaim its place as a powerful setting for the expression of Roman Catholic faith, life and witness.

Within the hospice literature, spirituality and religion are usually defined in opposition to one another, with religion negatively associated with the external, authoritarian doctrines of Christianity and spirituality positively associated with the free search for truth, meaning, and authenticity. According to survey data, however, most Americans integrate spirituality and traditional religious commitments. The hospice literature is promoting spirituality to its own detriment by alienating potential patients and depriving religious patients of the resources that religious traditions and their affiliated religious communities have to offer.

James Drane\'s More Humane Medicine: A Liberal Catholic Bioethics is an outstanding contribution to the study of bioethics in our day. Catholics and others who are interested in the issues discussed here will benefit from this masterful treatment. The author opens with a set of definitions, starting with what he means by a \"more humane medicine.\" Drane contends that a more humane medicine has become necessary and desired, but not because the traditional medical ethic as \"a self-declared and self-imposed ethic, outlining what noble service to others entails\" is no longer valid. Rather he defines it as an advance on the traditional ethic; a \"new foundation\" based on a \"lived set of obligations derived from a felt commitment to other persons ... an ethics based on the relationship between doctors and patients and essentially an ethics of virtue.\" Drane\'s work is a \"liberal Catholic Bioethics\" in which he challenges his own faith tradition, the Roman Catholic Church, on such topics as sexuality, birth control, abortion, cloning, stem cell research, aging and dying, and euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. The present article is a critical essay that analyzes the author\'s statements and conclusions.

Roman Catholic healthcare institutions in the United States face a number of threats to the integrity of their missions, including the increasing religious and moral pluralism of society and the financial crisis many organizations face. These organizations in the United States often have fought fervently to avoid being obligated to provide interventions they deem intrinsically immoral, such as abortion. Such institutions no doubt have made numerous accommodations and changes in how they operate in response to the growing pluralism of our society, but they have resisted crossing certain lines and providing particular interventions deemed objectively wrong. Catholic hospitals in Belgium have responded differently to pluralism. In response to a growing diversity of moral views and to the Belgian Act of Euthanasia of 2002, Catholic hospitals in Belgium now engage in euthanasia. This essay examines a defense that has been offered of this practice of euthanasia in Catholic hospitals and argues that it is misguided.

In this article, the place and the nature of an ethical dialogue that develops within Christian healthcare institutions in Flanders, Belgium is examined. More specifically, the question is asked how Christian healthcare institutions should position themselves ethically in a context of a pluralistic society. The profile developed by Caritas Catholica Flanders must take seriously not only the external pluralistic context of our society and the internal pluralistic worldviews by personnel/employees and patients, but also the inherent inspiration of a Christian healthcare institution. This article concludes with ten general orientations that could shape the ethical dialogue from a Christian inspiration in a pluralistic context.

In this essay, I defend three Simple Views concerning human beings. First, that the human embryo is, from the one-cell stage onwards, a single unitary organism. Second, that when an embryo twins, it ceases to exist and two new embryos come into existence. And third, that you and I are essentially human organisms. This cluster of views shows that it is not necessary to rely on co-location, or other obscure claims, in understanding human embryogenesis.

Catholic opponents of abortion and embryonic stem cell research usually base their position on a hylomorphic account of ensoulment at fertilization. They maintain that we each started out as one-cell ensouled organisms. Critics of this position argue that it is plagued by a number of intractable problems due to fission (twinning) and fusion. We\'re unconvinced that such objections to early ensoulment provide any reason to doubt the coherence of the hylomorphic account. However, we do maintain that a defense of ensoulment at fertilization must deny that we\'re essentially organisms.

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