Lead doctor sues his own Catholic hospital operator over abortion ban

A lead doctor has filed a lawsuit against his Catholic hospital operator after being prohibited from performing prenatal infanticide. Joachim Volz, the doctor, believes the merger of the two Lippstadt hospitals restricts his medical practice and is therefore waging a legal battle against Catholic guidelines in medical care.

Volz had performed abortions under the Protestant hospital's sponsorship. Previously, the Protestant hospital had performed around 15 prenatal infanticides annually.

Merger led to abortion ban

The controversy arose from the merger of the Evangelical Hospital Lippstadt with the Catholic Trinity Hospital to form the "Lippstadt Hospital – Christian Hospital," with approximately 2,500 employees. From an economic perspective, the merger was necessary to secure long-term healthcare in the region.

A prerequisite for the merger negotiations for the Catholic side was that abortions would no longer be permitted from February 1, 2025 – even for medical indications.

"This is usually the case when examinations reveal that the unborn child will suffer from severe, often non-viable malformations or impairments," Volz defined the term "indication." The only exception to the new regulation is in cases of acute danger to the mother's life. If the ban is not consistently enforced, the merger could be reversed, the chief physician continued.

According to Catholic doctrine, any form of direct and intentional abortion is to be condemned without exception, regardless of life circumstances or medical indications. According to the Church's view, human life begins with conception and is to be "absolutely respected and protected from conception."

Any intervention that deliberately ends the life of an unborn child is, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 2271), a "grave moral offense," and no one, "not even an authority, can ever claim the right to perform a direct abortion." Doctors can, of course, save a mother's life, even if the child may not survive as a result of these rescue measures. This is not a direct abortion.

Under current law, more than 100,000 unborn children are killed in the womb every year in Germany. Between 1996 and 2023, approximately 1.8 million children were aborted.

Lawsuit before the Labour Court

Volz filed a lawsuit with the Hamm Labor Court in early February 2025, requesting a declaration that the two service instructions prohibiting prenatal infanticide were unlawful and ineffective. He specifically criticized the violation of the right of direction, a violation of professional freedom, and the clinic's duty to provide care.

According to WDR, no agreement was reached at the conciliation hearing in mid-April. Presiding Judge Klaus Griese made it clear that the Catholic Church is permitted to issue such instructions. For the Catholic Church, abortion is still murder, and the employer could not approve of Volz's request.

The clinic's lawyer, Philipp Duvigneau, argued that the articles of association for the merger leave no room for maneuver when it comes to abortion. The shareholders set clear guidelines.

Petition reaches 100,000 signatures

Parallel to his lawsuit, Volz launched an online petition titled: "I am a doctor & my help is not a sin: Stop the criminalization of abortions!" The petition reached over 100,000 signatures just a few days after its publication.

In the petition, Volz made two main demands: "End religious regulations in public hospitals" and "End the criminalization of any form of abortion." He argued that his case was not an isolated one and that several mergers with similar consequences for gynecologists had already occurred.

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