Ohio Catholic hospital resolves First Amendment dispute over ‘body cavity’ search

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CNA Staff, Mar 13, 2025 / 12:20 pm (CNA).

An Ohio Catholic hospital has resolved a legal dispute in which it alleged that city authorities violated its constitutional rights in attempting to force it to perform a drug search on a patient.

Mercy Health, the city of Lorain, and Lorain County have reached “a fair and mutually satisfactory resolution of recent state and federal legal matters between them,” the three parties said this week, with the resolution coming after the hospital filed a lawsuit in January against the city.

The suit had alleged that police in August brought a “detainee” to the hospital’s emergency room and requested that doctors “perform a body cavity search” to determine if the suspect was in possession of drugs.

Doctors at the hospital refused, citing what they said was “an unjustifiably high risk of serious bodily injury or death” to the patient, specifically the risk that the search would release drugs into the patient’s system.

The police subsequently terminated an agreement with the hospital to provide policing services to its campus. In its suit, the hospital said the alleged retaliation violated its First Amendment rights, as the doctors had refused to risk the patient’s life in accordance with the hospital’s ethical and religious directives.

In their Wednesday joint statement, the hospital and government officials said the new agreements “establish a new policy that governs body cavity searches and the execution of search warrants as well as a new memorandum of understanding with the Lorain Police Chief, which allows the Mercy Health Police Department to employ commissioned police officers to perform police duties.”

The agreement “resolves all of the recent state and federal legal matters,” a hospital official told CNA. 

The hospital was founded in 1986 by the Sisters of Mercy. It has been sponsored at various times by the ​​Grey Nuns, the Sisters of the Humility of Mary, and the Franciscan Sisters of the Poor.

On its website, the hospital cites the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, which stipulates that Catholic health facilities must be “rooted in a commitment to promote and defend human dignity.”

The “first right of the human person, the right to life, entails a right to the means for the proper development of life, such as adequate health care,” the bishops say.