By Kelly P. Kissel
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, Sept. 29, 1999; 3:59 a.m. EDT

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. –– A hospital affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church that allowed outside doctors to sterilize women in its care has been warned by the Vatican to adhere to a ban on artificial birth control.

The operations were performed at Columbia Doctors Hospital before its purchase by the church-affiliated St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center.

St. Vincent stopped abortions and sterilizations at the hospital, but last summer said it needed to resume sterilizations to qualify for some health maintenance organization plans.

On Tuesday, the center announced an end to the arrangement.

"We went into this thing knowing there was a possibility that we would be asked to discontinue the agreement. That's what's happened," St. Vincent spokesman Scott Mosley said.

The procedure in question is tubal ligation, in which a surgeon cuts, ties or burns a woman's fallopian tubes to prevent passage of eggs. It is often done immediately after childbirth to save the woman a return trip to the hospital.

The Catholic Church teaches that artificial contraception, including elective sterilization, is morally wrong. Natural family planning methods are allowed if married couples have a serious reason to limit the number of children they have.

Columbia Doctors asked Bishop Andrew McDonald to let doctors from the independent Arkansas Women's Health Center perform the procedure in the hospital.

McDonald said the sterilization was "an evil in itself," but allowed it. Still, he asked the Vatican to review his approval.

Monsignor J. Gaston Hebert, vicar general of the Diocese of Little Rock, said church officials "felt the arrangement should be discontinued."

Money from the operations had paid for church-sponsored abstinence programs, according to the Arkansas Women's Health Center.