Dr. Coll traded a living woman’s fertility to protect a theoretical embryo. Harmonie Perrone, twenty‑eight years old, had already lost one fallopian tube to an ectopic pregnancy. When the third came, she drove to Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital in Illinois, bleeding and in pain, and asked for methotrexate — the standard, medically indicated treatment that would dissolve the non‑viable tissue and save her remaining tube. Across two encounters, including one with Dr. Dympna Coll, she was turned away, told there was a “one percent chance that there is a baby in there,” and later sued for defamation for telling the world what happened.
Let me show you the chasm between what the plain text of the Bible says and what this apparatus has made it say. The captured operation runs on a single premise: potential life outweighs the actual woman in front of you. The rule must be kept, even if the person breaks. Catholic health‑care directives classify methotrexate as a direct abortion, while the removal of a ruptured tube is permitted under the principle of double effect — even though both end the pregnancy. The distinction is a theological loophole, and it cost Harmonie Perrone her fertility.
I am a family doctor. I have prescribed methotrexate for ectopic pregnancies. There is no baby to save. An ectopic pregnancy is a mass of trophoblastic tissue implanted outside the uterus — non‑viable, zero chance of live birth, lethal to the woman if untreated. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says to administer the drug as soon as possible. Dr. Coll told Harmonie she would not be bullied: “You’re not going to bully me into doing this.” That is not the language of a physician addressing a patient. That is the language of a pulpit addressing a congregation. The doctor becomes the defender of the faith; the bleeding woman becomes the heretic demanding an exception to the rule.
Luke 13:10–17 names this exact inversion. A woman bent double for eighteen years is present in the synagogue. She is in agony, literally folding inward under the weight of her condition. Jesus calls her forward and heals her on the Sabbath. The synagogue leader — the man whose job it is to apply the rule — is indignant. Not because the woman suffered, but because a healing occurred on a day the apparatus had designated for rest. Jesus does not debate the definition of the Sabbath. He names the plain‑language reading of the rule itself: “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or your donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?”
Read that alongside Dr. Coll’s calculus. The religious‑hospital apparatus would untie an ox or a donkey on the Sabbath to keep it comfortable — yet it refused to administer methotrexate for a hemorrhaging woman. The text places the woman’s actual, suffering, embodied reality above the leader’s abstract rulekeeping. Jesus calls the leader a hypocrite for letting a beast of burden remain bound while a daughter of Abraham breaks. The same charge holds when a physician in a white coat tells a bleeding patient there is a one percent chance of a baby, then leaves her to rupture. The one percent chance was a statement with no basis in reproductive physiology — a medical absurdity in the same family as the medieval belief that a woman could gestate a stone. But the hospital’s religious calculus didn’t require medical accuracy; it required the appearance of moral seriousness. And so a woman who had been trying for years to conceive was sent home while her remaining fallopian tube swelled with the tissue that would end her fertility. She stood at a work meeting six days later, felt the rupture, and knew everything was over.
We have watched this logic metastasize. The same shape appeared last month when a Christian fertility doctor in Tennessee aligned his practice with his personal moral doubts, freezing the entire clinical process while patients sat paralyzed in the waiting room. In both, the physician’s personal moral certainty overrode the patient’s urgent medical need, and the institution backed the doctor. The rule consumes the person.
Illinois is a state that enshrined reproductive rights in law. The Reproductive Health Act explicitly protects them. The Illinois Hospital Emergency Service Act names ectopic pregnancy as an acute medical condition requiring stabilizing care. The Health Care Right of Conscience Act does not apply in emergencies. Federal EMTALA law requires every hospital that accepts Medicare to screen and stabilize — regardless of the institution’s religious character. Harmonie Perrone had the law on her side. She still lost her tube, because a frightened, bleeding patient sitting in a med‑spa examining room cannot enforce a statute against a physician who has already decided her body is a theological problem. Law fails when the institution’s priority is not her life but a one percent chance.
The defamation lawsuit that followed is the captured operation’s signature. Six days after being turned away, Harmonie felt her remaining tube rupture at a sales meeting. She underwent emergency surgery. She lost her fertility. She went on TikTok — because where else does a twenty‑eight‑year‑old go when the system fails her? — and told the truth: she was refused care, she lost her ability to conceive without expensive IVF, and she was told she would not be bullied into it. Dr. Coll sued her for defamation. When the woman in Luke 13 was healed, the synagogue leader did not sue her for slander; the crowd rejoiced and his opponents fell silent in shame. The captured operation has learned to weaponize the courthouse. It is the same institutional instinct that kept the Southern Baptist Convention’s abuse list secret for two decades: protect the institution, silence the survivor, and call it witness.
Jesus reserved his harshest words for the religious professionals who used their rules to avoid the weightier demands of the law. “You give a tenth of your spices — mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law — justice, mercy and faithfulness” (Matthew 23:23). A hospital that tithes its mint and dill by maintaining a faith‑based identity while neglecting the woman bleeding in its emergency room has abandoned its own Scripture. The Torah itself protects the actual woman who cries out. Deuteronomy 22:25–27 describes an attacker in the open country who violates a betrothed woman; the penalty is death for the attacker, but the pregnant woman is declared innocent. The reason the text gives is not theological abstraction. It is physical reality: “because she cried out and there was no one to save her.” The Torah does not weigh the potential against the actual and choose the potential.
The Catholic directives that barred methotrexate would have permitted the far more invasive surgery that ultimately removed Harmonie’s tube — a distinction that protects the institution’s moral framework at the expense of the patient’s intact body. The ox is untied and given water on the Sabbath. The staff who could have helped Harmonie hid behind a policy that would have made the synagogue leader blush. Dr. Coll left a woman to rupture.
To the women who have been harmed by religious health care: your body is not a theological battleground. And to the believers who work inside these systems: you are not serving God by letting a woman’s tube rupture while you deliberate over the metaphysics of ensoulment. Jesus healed on the Sabbath. He didn’t form an ethics committee. The Scripture is plain. Go and do likewise.