The leadership of the Catholic Church in the US was very upset when a Catholic Hospital in Arizona performed an emergency abortion to save a mother's life. Now it is being reported that Bishop Thomas Olmstead
is not only castigating Catholic Healthcare West, the group that runs St. Joseph's Hospital, for saving her life but threatening them in order to force them to promise that doctors will never save a woman's life if it requires an emergency abortion ever again...Bishop Olmstead calls the life-saving procedure "morally wrong" even though he doesn't deny that it almost certainly saved her life.The irony is, of course, that the Catholic Church defines itself as a "pro-life" church and considers its position on abortion to be a "pro-life" stance. I guess saving the life of a mother is less important than letting her (and her fetus) die, all for the sake of a rigid and morally incomprehensible religious dogma.
2 comments:
The law is an ass!
This is an interesting post in that I havent seen you post on abortion before. You've picked up on what I'd see as an extreme case where the Catholic church is being clearly hypocritical and applying a rule without any thought to the reason that unborn lives are valued in the first place. If there's one situation where abortion may be valid it must be when the mother's life is threatened.
But you do mention that the unborn child is a 'fetus' - that strikes me as an easy way out. Just pretend that the unborn baby isnt in fact a baby at all and give it a name to distinguish it from babies that are born. Science has made it very clear that unborn babies are still babies. Human. Calling them a 'fetus' doesn't mitigate our responsibility to care for them at all.
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