Just as you should not allow your child anywhere near a Catholic priest, you should also avoid seeking medical care at a Catholic-run medical facility, lest you be sacrificed to their god in the name of defending life.

First came the pharmacists who won’t fill your prescription if they have a moral objection to the medication you need. Now comes this: In Phoenix last year, a woman who was 11 weeks pregnant was in St. Joseph’s hospital suffering from pulmonary hypertension. Doctors determined that she would probably die if the pregnancy continued. The patient, her family, her doctors, and the hospital’s ethics committee made the sane decision: to abort the pregnancy and save the mother.

But Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted and the defenders of life at the Catholic church don’t see it that way:

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.

That’s right: rather than save the mother by aborting the fetus, doctors should have left the mother and her fetus to die in accordance with Olmstead’s god’s plan. Further, any Catholic who participated in this medical decision is “automatically excommunicated” for being an abortionist.

Though the hospital should be commended for making the right decision and for challenging Olmstead’s idiocy, they have reassigned Sister Margaret McBride, a nun who served on the ethics committee, to other duties.

Strangely, this Arizona Republic article asked James J. Walter, a bioethicist from Loyola Marymount University, for an opinion, as if we hadn’t already heard the Catholic church’s doctrinal stance on the matter. But still it was surprising to hear someone who calls himself an “ethicist” say that the mother should have just taken her chances:

Asked if the church position prefers the mother and child to die, rather
than sparing the life of one of them, Walters said the hope is that
both would survive.

It’s all part of god’s plan, sweetie.

Reading through comments to other posts on this story it’s refreshing to find that most people side with the doctors and patient. But there are also a disheartening number of comments showing that not all the laity are more reasonable than the church hierarchy. For example, this:

Thanks be to God that there is a Bishop who knows when his episcopal authority must be used. A life outside of the womb is no more valuable than a life still in the womb. As i have often said, it is the actions of the person (in this case the nun) that ex-communicates herself, not the Bishop, he just acts on their actions. Bishop Olmsted, i know this must not have been easy for you, i will keep you in my prayers. Just as i will pray for Sr. McBride to repent and be cleansed in the Divine Mercy of our Lord.

or this:

…What level of respect does he have? The utmost. He supports the right of the mother to do the most unselfish thing she can do, give her life for her child. Unless you happen to think that isn’t the most unselfish thing a mother can do for her child….

These are particularly obnoxious, given that the fetus was not going to survive either way, and no one was trying to take away any “right” of the mother.

It all makes me wonder, yet again, why these people don’t get themselves similarly lathered up about, say, childhood poverty, or lack of access to health care, which kill far more people than abortion does. Sure, I know, lots of churches and religiousy people do care about these issues, and some even do Good Works along these lines. But you don’t see them marching on Washington, screaming at politicians, and willing to kill people to protect those lives.

In this case the hospital did the right thing. But next time, at a hospital where James J. Walter is on the ethics committee instead of Margaret McBride, the outcome could be far different: another life sacrificed to appease a god who is the biggest abortionist of them all.

Fortunately I don’t have to worry about being killed to protect the rights of something growing inside me (at least, not until someone realizes that a tumor is a beautiful little gift from god, too), but I think it’s time to update the ID tag that I wear while bicycling, just to be safe: