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Dr. Simon Stampe hadn’t been working at Eureka’s St. Joseph Hospital for long before his medical training came into direct conflict with the religion-based anti-abortion policies of Providence Health and Services, the Catholic health care system that owns and operates the hospital. 

In a court declaration submitted as part of California’s recently filed lawsuit against St. Joseph Hospital, Dr. Stampe says he voiced concerns about the facility’s obstetrics policies to hospital leadership in July of last year and never received a substantive response.

The state’s suit, filed late last month, accuses the hospital’s Catholic owner/operators of endangering the life of local chiropractor Dr. Anna Nusslock by denying her emergency abortion care this past February. 

Dr. Nusslock’s water had broken when she was just 15 weeks pregnant with twins, and she arrived at St. Joseph hospital bleeding heavily and in severe pain. “Despite the immediate threat to her life and health, and despite the fact her pregnancy was no longer viable, Providence refused to treat her,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office said in a press release.

Dr. Stampe is a family medicine physician with advanced training in high-risk and surgical obstetrics. Shortly after being hired by Open Door Community Health Centers in June of 2021, he applied for privileges at St. Joseph Hospital — a common arrangement that allows local doctors to work at multiple facilities.

As part of his orientation, medical staff at St. Joseph Hospital provided Dr. Stampe with documentation — he believes it was either a summary or an excerpt — on the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, a set of instructions issued by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. These directives often contradict accepted medical standards, especially in areas of reproductive health, according to physicians and other medical practitioners.

The hospital’s chaplain later underscored the inviolability of these rules when it comes to abortion, telling Dr. Stampe that “under no circumstance was I to terminate a pregnancy at Providence [St. Joseph] Hospital,” he says in his declaration.

That policy impacted one of his patients just a few months later when, like Nusslock, she presented with an emergency medical condition related to her pre-viable pregnancy. The accepted standard of care in such situations is to terminate the pregnancy, Dr. Stampe says, but leadership in St. Joseph’s perinatal department informed him that he was not allowed to do so while the fetus had still had cardiac activity and “the patient was not actively dying.”

Dr. Stampe was told that if he went against this rule, he would risk losing his privileges at St. Joseph. “It was never made clear to me how close the patient had to be to death before doctors could intervene under the policy,” he says in his declaration.

He consulted with senior physicians at St. Joseph on at least two other occasions, and they only affirmed the hospital’s rigid stance on the matter, he says. On July 17, 2023, Dr. Stampe met with hospital leadership, including regional and local ethics leaders, to bring forward his concerns about such situations — that is, patients presenting with preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM) before the fetus is viable. 

Dr. Stampe says he was told only that they would think about his concerns and return with an answer at a later date. “Despite reminders to them, including a follow up e-mail, I never received a clear answer about this issue,” he says in his declaration. He’s aware of at least one other patient who arrived at St. Joseph Hospital’s emergency department with pre-viable PPROM only to get discharged without treatment, which caused her to suffer complications.

There have been numerous other cases like this, according to another declaration submitted as part of the lawsuit. Dr. Elizabeth Micks, the OBGYN who treated Anna Nusslock at Mad River Community Hospital, says that in the two years she has worked at Mad River she has personally treated two such cases.

“Specifically, these were pregnant women who initially sought care at Providence [St. Joseph] Hospital for an inevitable miscarriage,” Dr. Micks says in her statement. “In these cases, abortion care was necessary to preserve the patient’s health and potentially their life yet Providence [St. Joseph] Hospital refused to provide appropriate care due to the presence of fetal heart tones.”

Based on her own experience, Dr. Micks estimates that one or two women each year receive abortion care at Mad River after being refused such care at St. Joseph Hospital, needlessly endangering their lives.

“I believe Providence [St. Joseph] Hospital’s management falls below the standard of care and puts patients at risk of serious bodily injury or even death,” she says in her declaration.

Mad River Community Hospital’s Trillium Birth Center is scheduled to close next week, with management citing a declining volume of births in recent years. Its closure will leave St. Joseph Hospital as the lone remaining birthing center in Humboldt County.

Providence was initially given until last Friday to respond to the lawsuit, which was accompanied by a request for preliminary injunction to prevent St. Joseph Hospital violating state laws by refusing to treat anyone and everyone with an emergency medical condition. But since Dr. Stampe’s declaration was submitted after the lawsuit, Providence now has until Oct. 28 to submit its response.

A hearing on the motion for preliminary injunction has been delayed from Oct. 25 to Nov. 15.