I grew up Catholic and was once vehemently pro-life, part because I thought it was murder because I'd been taught it was and partly because I was jealous bordering on hateful that while I was suffering along anonymously, people were doing fun things like having sex.
Now I'm in the camp of people who don't like that abortions can be necessary -- but are even less fond of having it unavailable. Anywhere. For lots of reasons, but especially this kind:
Phoenix hospital nun rebuked for allowing abortion:
PHOENIX -- A nun and administrator at a Catholic hospital in Phoenix has been reassigned and rebuked by the local bishop for agreeing that a severely ill woman needed an abortion to survive.
Follow me below the fold if you can stomach more.
Update: Wow. Was a rec list virgin. Pity it had to happen because of this woman, but in the mean time, have a newsy and equally disturbing update:
On using the new health bill to restruct reproductive care:
Abortion opponents fought passage of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul to the bitter end, and now that it's the law, they're using it to limit coverage by private insurers.
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"We don't consider elective abortion to be health care, so we don't think it's a bad thing for fewer private insurance companies to cover it," said Mary Harned, attorney for Americans United for Life, a national organization that wrote a model law for the states.
Update 2: I figured I wasn't the first person to diary this, given that it was on the front page of MSNBC, and I figured right.
Read cedubose's diary here.
And because the church is already in the news for allegations of many of its priests sexually abusing children (when not busy excommunicating dying women for having abortions), here is a nicely garbage-filled story about the church's legal stance ahead of a lawsuit claiming it did nothing to stop children from being abused:
The Vatican on Monday will make its most detailed defense yet against claims that it is liable for U.S. bishops who allowed priests to molest children, saying bishops are not its employees and that a 1962 Vatican document did not require them to keep quiet, The Associated Press has learned.
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The Vatican's U.S. attorney, Jeffrey Lena, said it will include a response to claims that the 1962 document "Crimen Sollicitationis" — Latin for "crimes of solicitation" — barred bishops from reporting abuse to police.
Note that the Vatican's defense isn't that the children weren't abused but that the head of the church can't be held responsible for what its bishops do:
The Vatican is expected to assert that bishops aren't its employees because they aren't paid by Rome, don't act on Rome's behalf and aren't controlled day-to-day by the pope — factors courts use to determine whether employers are liable for the actions of their employees, Lena told the AP.
This would be a much stronger argument without the documents made public already in which Benedict as an archbishop toed the church line on not getting defrocking/laicizing priests who were strongly suspected of, or had been convicted of, sexual crimes.
Update 3: From sula in the comments:
Sister Margaret McBride and I grew up together
we've been friends since we were 7 years old and went all through school together. Reading this story tonight I am so proud of her.
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Original diary text:
The article continues:
Sister Margaret McBride was on an ethics committee that included doctors that consulted with a young woman who was 11 weeks pregnant late last year, The Arizona Republic newspaper reported on its website Saturday. The woman was suffering from a life-threatening condition that likely would have caused her death if she hadn't had the abortion at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center.
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The patient, who hasn't been identified, was seriously ill with pulmonary hypertension. The condition limits the ability of the heart and lungs to function and is made worse, possibly even fatal, by pregnancy.
First, because I know someone is scouring the article for this, you won't find where the article says the sex that resulted in the pregnancy was voluntary. It's not your business (or mine), but we have no idea if this woman went out having unprotected sex with every man in Phoenix or if she was raped. So anyone who wanted to raise the "If you have sex, be prepared for the consequences" argument is hereby invited to go away.
Now, on to the meat of the disgust.
I have two favorite sections of this article. Here's the better of the two:
"An unborn child is not a disease[, Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, head of the Phoenix Diocese, said in a statement. ]"While medical professionals should certainly try to save a pregnant mother's life, the means by which they do it can never be by directly killing her unborn child. The end does not justify the means."
I would like to know precisely what measure this medical sage had in mind that he didn't tell the hospital's vice president:
"In this tragic case, the treatment necessary to save the mother's life required the termination of an 11-week pregnancy," hospital vice president Susan Pfister said in an e-mail to [the Arizona Republic].
What a measure of good the bishop could have done by going into Pfister's office so long ago and, with all of his medical training, explained to her that despite warnings that anyone with the disease who wants to get pregnant should think hard about that, and despite the blood clots that often result because the heart is thoroughly stressed by the disease (something like twice normal blood pressure), there must be something else that can be done until the fetus can be delivered massively early -- assuming the woman lives that long -- and then if it's God's will that the thoroughly premature baby dies, that's OK.
The CDC page on pulmonary hypertension links to a scholarly article, no doubt read by the good bishop, that includes the following portion (bolding mine):
The disease-specific PAH therapies, currently available in conjunction with anticoagulant, diuretic, digitalis and oxygen therapy, have improved exercise capacity, functional capacity, time to clinical worsening, hemodynamic parameters, overall quality of life and survival. However, PAH remains a devastating, life-threatening disorder. In more than 50% of patients, exercise capacity remains significantly limited, approximately 50% of patients remain WHO functional class III or IV, PAH patients continue to have frequent hospitalizations for PAH, right heart function remains significantly impaired in most patients, quality of life is suboptimal and despite an increase in survival for functional class III and IV patients with IPAH from a predicted survival of 33% (based on the NIH Registry) to 63% with our current therapeutic modalities, the outlook is far from ideal; we need to continue to aggressively pursue furthering our understanding of PAH if we ever hope to give these patients a near-normal life.
Because, see, the issue is not only carrying the fetus to viability but living through the cesarian section and being able to provide for a child. Having a chronic, life-shortening condition is bad enough, but add pregnancy and child birth -- which tends to require that the woman's heart be circulating plenty of oxygen-rich blood -- and this begins to be something of a serious situation, eh, bishop?
Here's the other fun bit:
Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, head of the Phoenix Diocese, indicated in a statement that the Roman Catholic involved was "automatically excommunicated" because of the action. The Catholic Church allows the termination of a pregnancy only as a secondary effect of other treatments, such as radiation of a cancerous uterus.
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Olmsted added that if a Catholic "formally cooperates" in an abortion, he or she is automatically excommunicated.
(No word on whether the person who administers such radiation that causes an abortion counts in the automatic excommunication sweepstakes.)
Oh, shit, yeah, can't forget to punish the mother AGAIN! Not enough to undergo an abortion AND have sinned so badly (or well, I guess) that God punished her with a life-threatening disease.
No, now you excommunicate her. You excommunicated a woman described thus:
The patient, who hasn't been identified, was seriously ill with pulmonary hypertension.
I'm sure that excommunication is going to make her health much better. Just the other day I was thinking to myself, "Boy, I bet my joint problems and the wife's medical issues would just go away if I went and got excommunicated."
I'm sure it's exactly what Jesus would have done, too. Cure the leper, heal the blind man (albeit in a sort of disgusting way), but excommunicate the woman the doctors said would die if she didn't have an abortion MURDER HER UNBORN CHILD! GOD IS NOT MOCKED!
The hospital medical and ethics staff gets paid to know things like what's medically necessary to save a person's life and how that can be achieved ethically. The bishop -- whose medical expertise is not specified in the article, probably because he is a bishop and not a medical professional -- is, we can only hope, now poring over the literature on conditions that can complicate a pregnancy to the point where death of the woman is likely or certain ... so he can form a task force to determine precisely what to do to ensure the woman stays alive for the 21 weeks and 6 days it takes for a miracle to be possible.
It'll be a second Lourdes!
The state's tourism and other financial woes will be fixed in a second!
This is GREAT news for John McCain!
Alternately, and which would probably make more sense (and seem a lot less vile to heathens like me, in case that was a concern), the Catholic Church could issue a directive to all bishops and cardinals and priests and the like that if the medical personnel in question "[adhere] to the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services" and still think the abortion is necessary (though I'll admit I don't see how they adhered -- and it gets worse), those bishops and cardinals and priests and the like should STFU and thank their lucky stars they aren't the women in question, who presumably did not want the giant pile of fun this must have been.