ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

University Affiliations: Academic Health systems and their discontents

• In Event: Circulating Care: Universities, Hospitals, and the Making of Medical Expertise

English Abstract

Universities across the United States are academic medical centers, blending cutting-edge research, graduate education, and high-level medical care in one institution. As such, this has caused universities to become hospitals. My research looks at how the university/hospital dyad is complicated by the politics of reproductive and trans healthcare. Many academic health centers partner with Catholic hospitals, many of which are located in rural areas. These partnerships have been controversial because of how Catholic hospitals operate under the Ethical and Religious Directives (ERDs) which oppose contraception, abortion, sex reassignment procedures, and assisted suicide. This creates a dilemma for universities which often send out their own physicians and medical residents to work at these Catholic facilities. This conflict is often posited as a binary: whether to expand affiliations with Catholic hospitals to reach new patients in underserved areas or reject it on behalf of women and LGBTQ populations who would be impacted by the imposed Catholic doctrine. This simplistic formulation, however, obfuscates the intricacies of the healthcare system, capitalistic market logics, and the medical field’s shortage of providers, particularly in underserved communities. I take this as a historical event that signifies a postmodernist shift in liberal multiculturalism, in how institutions have acknowledged the marginalization of certain groups and understand that care must be dictated, but that care should come at the expense of another group. This ethical dialectic does not consider how often modes of marginalization are intersectional and that positioning the needs of the underserved as antithetical to that of the needs of women and LGBTQ populations narrows the frameworks and potentialities of care. Who deserves to receive care? Who decides who receives care? These are the questions that animate this paper.

Author

• Dalena Ngo, Yale University