A nun reportedly approved of an abortion and is now automatically excommunicated. This, of course, is already being portrayed as the Church oppressing pregnant women and nuns.
To be technical though, the sister who approved of the abortion excommunicated herself. Bishop Olmsted simply acknowledged it but secular reporters aren’t likely to appreciate that distinction.
A Fox affiliate is reporting:
Sister Margaret McBride, who was also a long-time administrator at St Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, has also been reassigned to other duties, Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, head of the Phoenix Diocese said.
The incident occurred late last year when McBride was consulted — along with doctors — in the case of a young woman who was 11 weeks pregnant.
The woman was suffering a life-threatening condition which was likely to have caused her death had she not had an abortion.
“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 told the newspaper.
Pfister issued the statement on behalf of the hospital, its parent company Catholic Healthcare West, and the Sisters of Mercy, McBride’s religious order.
Olmsted confirmed McBride was “automatically excommunicated” because of her involvement in the abortion.
“I am gravely concerned by the fact that an abortion was performed several months ago in a Catholic hospital in this diocese,” Olmsted said.
“I am further concerned by the hospital’s statement that the termination of a human life was necessary to treat the mother’s underlying medical condition.
“An unborn child is not a disease. 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.”
As always, we should pray for all involved. St. Gianna Molla pray for us.
Jean at Catholic Fire writes:
I have been reading all the secular news items on this story and they are making the Bishop out to be the heavy, when all he is doing is stating the obvious — those who cooperated in the abortion automatically excommunicated themselves.
Courageous Priest has more on this story.
May 17, 2010 at 7:47 pm
I wish the bishop had made the most of this "teaching moment" and explained what the proper course of action would have been. If indeed the mother would have died without the removal of the baby–what should the hospital have done?
May 17, 2010 at 7:50 pm
A Jesuit told me thst this kind of situation is covered by the "law of double effect". If the intention is not to kill the baby, but to save the mother's life, and the death of the baby is necessary, but incidental, the act is not evil. He gave the example of someone who drives off amountain road, to certain death, to avoid killing a pedestrian. He said that such an act would not be suicide.
I'm no moral theologian, but was he right?.
May 17, 2010 at 7:53 pm
The Thomistic principle of double effect is well-known even to high-schoolers back then. First, one does not achieve the good effect through the bad effect. Saving the mom is not done by killing the baby. Second, the evil effect is not pursued; it is tolerated. So, one does not go about doing the abortion. The "abortion" is tolerated while pursuing the remedy e.g. removing a cancerous uterous. Those are basic tenets that the nun ignored; because, I seriously doubt that she didn't know about them.
May 17, 2010 at 8:01 pm
@Left-Footer: You're right it won't be suicide because the person did not intend to kill himself but was trying to save others. Judging the morality of an action considers the act itself – driving into the ravine, the intent – to save others & the circumstances – knowledge & freedom.
May 17, 2010 at 8:02 pm
As far as I understand it, the doctrine of double effect only applies when the action in question is not intrinsically immoral. That is, it doesn't apply in this situation.
May 17, 2010 at 8:06 pm
@Anon at 3:02. That's right. That is why, she cannot be excused because of it – if that is what she was thinking.
May 17, 2010 at 8:29 pm
Wouldn't the proper course of action have been just to deliver the child prematurely? Yes, the child will probably die outside the womb, but that is a tolerated, unintended consequence that can be fought against (in the NICU).
May 17, 2010 at 9:06 pm
Christina, that may indeed be the case. If so, I wish that Bishop Olmsted would have made that clearer.
May 17, 2010 at 9:11 pm
From the bishop's statement, "Every procedure whose sole immediate effect is the termination of pregnancy before viability is an abortion."
So I dunno. What is the proper course of action pre-viability when the mother's life is at stake? A indirect abortion involves a medical procedure to heal a sickness that, as a side-effect, would cause an abortion (like removing the uterus). But if the illness is not such that the uterus needs to be removed…?
May 17, 2010 at 9:21 pm
@Christina: You're right in pointing out how complicated medical ethics is. But a simple rule of thumb to address all solutions is "the end (or goal) does not justify the means (or solution)" because the means has a morality of it's own. One cannot look at it as less than the goal. Consequently, while the end is to save the mother, killing the child can never be considered a solution.
May 17, 2010 at 9:28 pm
I realize that it is complicated. Supposedly, this happened several months ago. All the more reason for the diocese to have been more prepared to respond to the "Bishop Olmsted wanted this woman to DIE!!!!" talking point that the left is currently hammering.
May 18, 2010 at 12:23 am
Interesting that this nun and this hospital have a crystal ball to predict the outcome of this pregnancy on the mother. They assume, in their hubris, that death is absolutely certain.
I sure would like to get a look at that for five minutes.
Yes, I do want more of a "teaching moment" from this bishop, Al. It would really serve the public well to understand Catholic teaching on this issue.
May 18, 2010 at 5:06 am
In October 2007, First Things printed an excellent article about medicalizing abortion. The author was head of maternal-fetal medicine at a very large hospital in Los Angeles. The article is available online in the First Things archives. The title is "The Medicalizing of Abortion" Sick mothers are often told their only choice is abortion or die, when that is not actually the case. As a nurse who worked obstetrics for many years, I saw too many women pressured by their Drs to "terminate their pregnancy." I would be really interested in what exactly was this mother's condition. None of the stories I've seen are very specific. Probably for reasons of privacy but it also conveniently shuts down any discussion of the real medical aspects of the case. We have only the word of a pro-abortion nun that the problem was life threatening.
May 18, 2010 at 5:10 am
Gerard Nadal has an interesting look at this on his blog, here:
http://gerardnadal.com/2010/05/17/the-bishop-the-nun-the-mother-and-child/
Interestingly, he says that pulmonary hypertension (if that's what the mother had) is NOT resolved by abortion–that is, ending the pregnancy doesn't provide an improvement in this kind of hypertension as it does in other kinds.
Which is not to say that the pregnancy wasn't a complication to the mother's physical condition–it's just that the "life-saving abortion" aspect of this as reported in the media appears to be wildly overstated.
May 18, 2010 at 1:21 pm
In my opinion, there should be NO medical reason to murder an unborn child to save the mother's life. Period. This is 2010. We have so much advanced technology, so many options available that, I don't believe, this is EVER necessary. The Duggar's delivered a baby at 24 weeks because of pre-eclampsia. Dying women have lived on life support for several months to allow their unborn babies a chance at life. Plenty of women have remained hospitalized for weeks or months on total bedrest just to deliver their babies. These feminist ideologues convinced this woman and her family that murdering her child was a real option. It is sick, sad, and disgusting that our society has devolved into accepting this at all.
May 18, 2010 at 6:14 pm
First of all, the principles involved, which so many people who commented don't appear to understand.
To achieve a good effect (saving a woman's life) one can do something not intrinsically immoral (such as removing a cancerous uterus or a fallopian tube with an ectopic pregnancy in it) even if there is an unintended side effect which is bad (such as that the cancerous uterus or the fallopian tube also has an embryo in it.) The good effect (saving the mother's life) cannot be achieved by an intrinsically immoral action (killing a human being at whatever stage of development) although it can be saved by an intrinsically moral action (removing a defective or diseased organ). Therefore, although it is moral to remove a fallopian tube with an ectopic pregnancy in it, it is not moral to flush the tube with methotrexate, which kills and flushes out the embryo and spares the woman's fallopian tube.
Which leads to #2; how do we evaluate moral rules? Catholic moral theology evaluates them by the intrinsic morality or immorality of the actions involved NOT BY THEIR OUTCOME! In the case of the ectopic pregnancy, the outcome using methotrexate seems much better, doesn't it? In both cases the embryo dies and the mother lives,and with the methotrexate, she gets to keep her tube, which might seem important to her, espcially if it is the only one she has left! But despite the better outcome, the methotrexate procedure is still wrong, because it involves achieving a good end by an immoral means, a direct attack on a human life, rather than by a moral means, removing a dysfunctional organ which also has the unintended effect of kiling the embryo.
No Christina, you cannot "deliver" prematurely an 11 week old unborn baby. In the current medical circumstances that is the same as killing it. There isn't even NICU equipment that is designed for such a small and delicate being. What you are describing is an abortion, plain and simple. One can deliver prematurely, for serious medical reasons, a baby that has a reasonable chance of survival.
While some babies have survived down to 21 or 22 weeks, I would say 24 weeks is really the absolute earliest I would call a "reasonable" chance of survival, and of course every day in the womb makes a difference.
You ask, what is the proper course pre-viability, when the mother's life is at stake?
The proper course is to do everything possible to treat the mother without delivering her, trying to get to that point in pregnancy when the baby can be delivered with a reasonable chance of survival.
If that is impossible and she and the baby both die, that is a preferable outcome to committing the sin of killing an unborn human being. That is the Catholic position.
Cardinal Newman said that it would be preferable for thousands to die in agony than for one single venial sin to be committed.
Obviously he put this in the most extreme form possible to make his point. I can't think of a case in which a venial sin would prevent thousands from dying in agony. (Lying to the Nazis at the door about the Jews you have hidden in the convent is NOT a sin, by the way.)
But the point remains, death is far preferable to sin. Catholic morality is not a morality aimed primarily at happiness in this life, but at eternal happiness. When the two coincide the world may cheer us, but when they diverge the world will hate and excoriate us.
This may be one of those times.
Susan Peterson
May 18, 2010 at 6:21 pm
The woman had pulmonary hypertension. She may have been very ill indeed. There are treatments for this, but perhaps she had failed to respond to them. Some people do, and some people die from this, even relatively young, unpregnant people.
If she was so ill as to be considered unstable, COBRA laws prevent the transfer of an unstable pregnant woman. These laws were passed to prevent the dumping of difficult cases on other hospitals, and to prevent a hospital from refusing a woman in labor because they knew she couldn't pay for services. But they might well apply to this situation. The hospital might not have had the option, legally, of transferring her.
If they did allow her to die rather than perform an abortion, they might well have been faced with an enourmous lawsuit, which they would lose, because this would be violating the "standard of care."
So it may well be that the hospital found itself between a rock and a hard place.
Our faith does put us in such places sometimes.
Susan Peterson
May 18, 2010 at 8:07 pm
How can we show Bishop Olmsted that we support him?
May 19, 2010 at 7:35 am
According to a prominent Neonatologist, a pregnancy would not complicate pulmonary hypertension until the third trimester at which time, if necessary, the baby would be considered viable and could be delivered.
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/may/10051712.html
As for the Bishop using this as a teaching moment, remember that we rarely hear anything more than sound bites from the media. I'll be curious to see if the Phoenix Catholic Sun covers this well.
Susan
May 19, 2010 at 7:36 am
By the way, that link:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/may/10051712.html
has contact information for the bishop and the hospital.
Susan