By J.D. Long-García | June 22, 2010 | The Catholic Sun
The Catholic Church has for centuries taught that abortion is wrong.
The first century Didache, or “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” states: “You shall not kill the embryo by abortion and shall not cause the newborn to perish.”
“Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense,” according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life.”
It is at least consistent, then, that those involved with the highly publicized abortion at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center late last year were automatically excommunicated. That included Sr. Margaret McBride, the Sister of Mercy and former vice president of mission integration for the Phoenix Catholic hospital, who reportedly authorized the abortion.
The circumstance of that particular abortion — in which the hospital reported the mother’s life was in danger — does not change the Church teaching.
“St. Joe’s is a good hospital,” said Mike Phelan, director of Parish Leadership Support in Marriage and Family Life. “But there’s a line. If we don’t have core principles intact, it taints everything we do.”
Those core principles steer the “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services,” which help Catholic institutions make tough decisions.
In a statement issued last month, St. Joseph’s Hospital officials said the directives do not explicitly address certain clinical situations — including when a pregnant mother’s life is in danger.
The patient, who has not been identified, was 11 weeks pregnant and suffering from pulmonary hypertension, a condition that the hospital said carried a near-certain risk of death for the mother if the pregnancy continued.
“If there had been a way to save the pregnancy and still prevent the death of the mother, we would have done it. We are convinced there was not,” said a May 17 letter to Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted from top officials at Catholic Healthcare West, the San Francisco-based health system to which St. Joseph’s belongs.
But the bishop said in a May 14 statement that “the direct killing of an unborn child is always immoral, no matter the circumstances, and it cannot be permitted in any institution that claims to be authentically Catholic.”
“We always must remember that when a difficult medical situation involves a pregnant woman, there are two patients in need of treatment and care, not merely one,” Bishop Olmsted said.
He cited a section of the directives that reads: “Abortion (that is, the directly intended termination of pregnancy before viability or the directly intended destruction of a viable fetus) is never permitted. Every procedure whose sole immediate effect is the termination of pregnancy before viability is an abortion.”
Double effect
The principle of double effect has its origins in St. Thomas Aquinas. The 13th century Dominican friar concludes that it can be morally permissible to kill someone in self-defense because one’s intention is self-preservation, not murder.
Some would apply the same principle to situations in which a mother’s unborn child exacerbates her illness or pathology. The intention is not to kill the child, they would argue. The intention is to save the life of the mother.
But, the Church counters, the case of the pregnant mother’s life being endangered is far different. For starters, the intention of every abortion is to kill the unborn child. That unborn child is also innocent, unlike the attacker in the self-defense argument.
“The unborn child’s life is just as sacred as the mother’s life, and neither life can be preferred over the other,” the bishop said. “A woman is rightly called ‘mother’ upon the moment of conception and throughout her entire pregnancy is considered to be with ‘child.’”
Whether the life was conceived by incest or rape, or the pregnant mother’s life is in danger, the Church teaches the life of the child is still sacred. Circumstance does not dictate that.
But isn’t it better to save the mother’s life rather than let both mother and child die?
“No one can do evil that good may come,” according to Fr. John Ehrich, director of the Phoenix Diocese’s Medical Ethics Board. Church teaching is not guided by results, but by principles.
“We should never speak of how a mother’s life is at risk without reference to her unborn child,” Fr. Ehrich said. “Her child has as much dignity and value as she does. Morally speaking, we can never prefer one life over the other.”
An unborn child, he noted, cannot be thought of as a pathology or illness. It is not the child that threatens the mother’s life — the threat comes from the pathology or illness.
In certain cases — like ectopic pregnancies and uterine cancer — it is morally acceptable to treat the pathology even though the treatment would result in the death of the unborn child. In such cases, unlike abortion, the death of the child is a secondary and unintended effect.
Ideally, Fr. Ehrich explained, the physician would treat the mother’s pathology and hold off on more aggressive treatments until the unborn child can survive outside his mother’s womb. Labor could then be induced and the child’s life, along with the mother’s, could be saved.
Abortion is never a treatment, and, as John Paul II taught in his encyclical “Gospel of Life,” abortion “always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being.”
“An unborn child is not a disease,” Bishop Olmsted said. “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.”
Catholic News Service contributed to this report.
