Posted on 12/21/2010 12:30:48 PM PST by marshmallow
The question was: was the procedure expedient or necessary? The Church thinks they acted without all due care; they think they were careful. It may be that the hospital has a cultural clash, that they have doctors who really don’t think that the unborn child—especially at an early age— is a person. Or maybe it boiled down to this: if they let the mother die, they probably would get sued—and lose—in a secular court. or Kill the baby, and know they probably would not be sued or if they did get sured, that a secular course would not convict. Bet there were lawyers involved in this “medical” decision, or at least behind the protocol they followed.
The Bishop has been agonizing over this for quite some time, so I don’t think this was a snap decision. St. Joe’s is an enormous hospital.
What was the hospital response?
From what I’ve read in the local papers (AZ Republic), they told him to stuff it, they don’t need him or the Church.
if the woman was this sick, they should have transferred her to a larger tertiary university hospital for treatment.
and they “lost” their Catholic affiliation not because of this “mistake” but because when confronted with the fact that Catholics don’t allow killing babies, they refused to acknowledge they were wrong.
This is the way that liberals will eventually take over all Catholic hospitals in the near future.
It’s the Washington ComPost. What do you expect? They’re inveterate, pathological liars.
So basically the Church didn’t give the hospital operation money or any support other than the name?
Whether or not the post partum deterioration happens after miscarriage is not mentioned in the medical literature. We don't know if mom is still alive, or died anyway.
But the case is rare, and by not transferring mom to a better hospital, they ignored that experimental treatment, including a heart lung transplant or extracorporal circulation, could have saved both.
As I recall, it was not a doctor who made the decision for the abortion, it was an administrative nun who gave “permission” for the procedure to be performed there.
What was the time element involved? Could they have rushed the woman to a better hospital in time? Seems the hospital she was in was a pretty good one.
I suppose that the right to call itself a Catholic hospital would be meaningless to you, anyway.
For me, it's important, because the pro-life position of the Catholic church means that the life of ALL patients is more important than anything else. I'd just feel safer being a patient there, or having a loved one be a patient there.
When "death panels" become more ubiquitous, that may be an important distinction. In the future, the doctors may decide that neither the baby NOR the mother can/should be saved/can be treated within financial parameters.
No, I was simply asking a question. Did the Church support the hospital or just allow the hospital to use the name? Did it support it with funds and supply personnel from the Church? Then they'd have a vested interest to see that the hospital conformed to Catholic philosophy.
the hospital was a secondary hospital.
She needed a tertiary (often university) hospital.
Phoenix is a middle sized city.
When I worked in Oklahoma, they had good hospitals in Tulsa and OK City, but for really worrisome cases, we sent them to Texas (e.g. for complicated transplants or cancer surgery).
The prognosis for pulmonary hypertension is three years, and the cure is a heart lung transplant.
Mom could have been carried to 28 weeks and delivered, although the many of the deaths occur post partum. These hospitals had access to experimental treatment. And yes, they could transplant her when pregnant (although one article about liver transplants does point out that only 30 percent of the kids survived, still it’s better than zero percent).
And from a practical matter, if you don’t do a procedure at the hospital, you refer. There was no “emergency” in the abortion. They could have transferred her to a “higher” center, a non Catholic one, which could then decided if she needed an abortion.
probably most of the women faced with dying in pregnancy abort, but a lot more than you think refuse the abortion.
but the reason the bishop took their Catholic status away was not just the abortion, but because the board of the hospital refused to admit they were wrong...which means they will refuse to follow Catholic ethics in the future...
Sounds reasonable to me considering.
For a Catholic hospital, support is more than financial. Catholic nurses would be less inclined to work there, after the decision, due to the fact that they may find no protection with the “conscience clause.”
I suspect that the hospital decided they could make it, financially, without the Catholics. Good for them. I still don’t want to have a loved one be a patient there.
True considering the way they shot from the hip on this. There’s more to the story I guess than what we’re able to read about; what the press will write.
I must admit I don’t know the specifics of that. They have areas of the hospital that are specialties such as the “Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center” and the like, but I don’t know how much funding was flowing from the Church to the hospital, nor how this story affects that flow. I just know this issue has been simmering with the Bishop for awhile.
Seems like this has been an on-going thing and just now surfaced.
Phoenix is top ten (and probably top five) city by population in the USA.
If the baby will die either way, simply to move him (gently, without further harm) from inside his mother’s body to outside, would be neutral with respect to his survivability. So in a very small number of extreme cases, the intact, live delivery of the pre-viable child can be morally permitted if the intent is not to harm the child.
In other words, in the womb, he is doomed to die; delivered prematurely, he is still doomed to die (no real change in life expectancy, which is slight in either case) but, live and intact, the dying child could still benefit in real ways: the child could be held and loved by his mother and father, even if very briefly; the child could even be baptized; and the mother can survive.
This seems to be the position taken by Germain Grisez, an eminent and very pro-life Catholic moral theologian, here: http://tinyurl.com/not-to-shorten-babys-life.
Delivering a baby very prematurely but intact and alive is not, then, an intrinsic moral evil: because in the above case his life expectancy is unaffected (since death is imminent in either case), and he can derive benefit from being alive outside the womb.
This would not be the case if the baby was killed and removed by a D&C or a D&E. This is what the Diocese of Phoenix implied happened: see http://tinyurl.com/Diocese-of-Phoenix-Q-A. Obviously if you dismember the baby, you are directly intending his death, and this is murder.
Dr. William Chavira, a pro-life physician and member of the Diocesan medical ethics board, apparently thinks it would have been morally permissible for them to induce labor in a way that didn't directly kill the child. See the highlighted section Here (Link) .
Putting it all together, it looks like the Bishop and the Catholic ethics people would not have objected, in extremis, if further delays would be fatal, and after all other options proved futile, had they delivered the baby alive, even if it were to perish within minutes. What they objected to was the direct slaying of the child by dismemberment.
The delivery would have been treating the baby respectfully as a dying person. Dismemberment is treating him like butchered meat.
Does this make sense?
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