Eye-rolling? HT, if I thought "the hospital" were saying that the unborn twins weren't in fact human, I'd be after them hammer and tongs, doing my Banshee-of-Moral-Law scream.
But that's not what they're saying. Or at least, it's not clear from this article.
Please hear me out on this one, which I've now read from several different sources.
Having been named in a lawsuit, the hospital is required to respond with a legal argument. It would have been edifying for them to have said, “As a Catholic hospital, we absolutely know that life begins at conception, but the law of Colorado does not recognize a fetus as a human being,” but the first half of that statement is not a legal argument and doesn’t, technically speaking, belong in a court pleading.
What if the hospital didn't do anything wrong? If that's the case (and we have only the father’s claim, as relayed by several inflammatory articles I've seen), then should they just skip legal argument, and pay money to the father regardless of their own innocence? Is that right and just?
Based on the information we have, it is entirely possible that the hospital did everything in its power to save the lives of the mother and the baby girls, and that it bears no fault. It is also possible that the father, wracked with grief, wants money for its known sootheing properties, or whatever. We really don’t know. If so, however, the (inevitable) millions paid by the hospital would be money not available for maintaining good treatment standards, hiring excellent doctors and staff, and so on. It would also mean that anyone, no matter how dishonest their claim, could get free millions from this hospital on demand.
It comes down to this: facts and law are not the same thing. That these twins were living human beings is a fact, but Colorado doesn’t recognize this in the law.
This is win-win (or at least, win-draw) for the pro-life cause, because if the court "finds" that the babies were "human" --- which they should --- that sets an enormously important precedent for pro-life; and even then, the hospital can still argue "on the merits" that they didn't do anything wrong, since that's the heart of their case.
If one wants to set a precedent ultimately strengthening anti-abortion legal arguments, this is the correct way to go about it. Out-of-court settlements and agreed dispositions don’t set precedent.
(This may not be what’s going on at all, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is.)
Bishops Aquila and Sheridan seized the "teachable moment" to reiterate the moral truth: they in particular actually lead the ranks of bishops whom we fully expect to Do the Right Thing. (Unlike others I could name.) (Yes, I have a "Beatus Vir" list and a "Dies Irae" list.)
We also need to see more information on what this hospital did and did not do. It can be a challenge, sometimes, to extract facts from bloggers shrieking at the top of their typeface.
For an individual Roman Catholic congregation or ministry (like a hospital) to go looey shouldn’t be a surprise to me or you. I’m not so rigid or stereotypically minded as to think that situations like this would reflect the overall “official” morality views of Rome, although it might reflect a failure of the Roman authorities to exercise their authority. If this church has a hierarchy and an authority, they ought to use it: even Scientology with all its weirdness sometimes seems better controlled from the top. Could stand to get some of the moxie of Revelation in their pens and send warning letters to badly sinning church congregations in plain English, or whatever local language they speak. But again I admit that’s an evangelical POV. (In actual evangelical situations the church supervision hierarchy doesn’t exist, so you don’t see such things. But if devout evangelicals had that sort of hierarchy that’s what they’d do with it. It’s right out of the bible.)
Of course I hope that here it’s not that bad, but it does look like a weird gotcha situation for them. I don’t even know how HARD they pushed that argument or if it was couched in terms like “for the statute’s sake.” News distortion is not rare either, sadly.