This piece from the New York Times really highlights the biggest logical problem with the pro-life stance: people will stand behind it to the point of death.
The Catholic Church is severing ties with St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix.
The hospital’s offense? It had terminated a pregnancy to save the life of the mother. The hospital says the 27-year-old woman, a mother of four children, would almost certainly have died otherwise.
Bishop Olmsted initially excommunicated a nun, Sister Margaret McBride, who had been on the hospital’s ethics committee and had approved of the decision. That seems to have been a failed attempt to bully the hospital into submission, but it refused to cave and continues to employ Sister Margaret. Now the bishop, in effect, is excommunicating the entire hospital — all because it saved a woman’s life.
The real consequences of this seem to revolve around the fact that mass can no longer be held in the chapel, which seems a little silly since, like the article points out, Catholic mass is held in generic chapels of non-affiliated hospitals and airports all across the country. I suspect some funding may be in danger too, which would be unfortunate for a hospital that clearly will put everything on the line to save a patient’s life.
I’d love to ask this bishop why this already-living woman’s life means to little to him and God? Isn’t there a good chance that the baby would have also died if the mother died? What life is being saved by letting the mother die in that case?
This sad, backward decision should be shocking not only to skeptics, but also to people claiming the Catholic faith. And good for the nun who chose that woman’s life over her membership to the church - she at least has her priorities straight.
S.A.M.
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