Sr. Carol Keehan
Posted on 12/23/2010 1:59:01 PM PST by NYer
.- The Catholic Health Association has once again found itself at odds with Church authority– this time, over Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted's decision to revoke the Catholic status of a hospital that admitted to serious ethics violations, including a highly-publicized abortion.
“Catholic Healthcare West and its system hospitals are valued members of the Catholic Health Association,” said that group's president, Sister Carol Keehan. Her remarks came less than 24 hours after the Bishop of Phoenix stripped one of those hospitals, St. Joseph's in Phoenix, of its Catholic affiliation.
The Bishop of Phoenix announced his decision on Dec. 21, after negotiations with St. Joseph's hospital, and its parent company Catholic Healthcare West, ended without an agreement. Their main dispute concerned a November 2009 incident, in which medical ethics advisers at St. Joseph's authorized an abortion for a pregnant woman who was seriously ill.
Bishop Olmsted, in consultation with his own diocesan medical board, concluded that the abortion was a direct violation of the Church's ethical health care guidelines. He also accused the hospital and its parent company of “formally cooperating” in the management and administration of a government program that offers abortion, birth control, and sterilization procedures at other hospitals.
Sr. Keehan, however, opined that Catholic Healthcare West facilities were “well-known” for a “long and stellar history in the protection of life at all stages.” Her brief statement did not address the company's alleged cooperation with government-funded abortion and sterilization.
But she did defend St. Joseph's decision to perform the abortion. “They had been confronted with a heartbreaking situation,” she stated. “They carefully evaluated the patient's situation and correctly applied the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services to it, saving the only life that was possible to save.”
Sr. Keehan is not a physician, although her official biography mentions “more than 35 years” in “administrative and governance positions at hospitals,” as well as her bachelor's degree in Nursing.
However, two obstetrician-gynecologists from the Diocese of Phoenix's Medical Ethics Department said Sr. Keehan was misrepresenting both the facts of the St. Joseph's Hospital case, and the ethical principles of Catholic health care.
According to those principles, doctors may perform a necessary and non-abortive medical procedure in order to treat a serious illness, even if it has the secondary effect of harming or killing an unborn child. However, the pregnancy itself can never be regarded as an “disease,” nor may a doctor perform an abortion as a means of treating a different condition.
“It goes back to the basic issue that you can never do an evil, to achieve a good,” Dr. William Chavira told CNA on Dec. 22. “The act is inherently evil.”
Dr. Chavira is a practicing obstetrician and gynecologist who also serves on the Phoenix Diocese's medical ethics committee.
Although the hospital maintains that the abortion occurred as part of a “placentectomy” – the removal of the placenta that connects a developing fetus to the mother's uterus – Dr. Chavira explained that the placenta of the woman in the St. Joseph's case “was not diseased,” though it may have been producing hormones that aggravated the woman's heart and lung condition.
“If something's not diseased,” he explained, “then we can't act on it – as opposed to a cancerous uterus, or an infected placenta.”
Nevertheless, Dr. Chavira stated, the “placentectomy” – which killed the woman's child– could not be regarded as a necessary medical treatment. The medical condition threatening her life was not the pregnancy, but the preexisting heart and lung condition.
The removal of the placenta, he explained, could not have been intended to treat that condition. Rather, it was intended to mitigate the effects of the woman's heart and lung disease – by ending her pregnancy through an abortion.
As such, he said, the abortion was direct and intentional, and could not be compared to other necessary medical procedures that might cause the death of an unborn child.
Dr. Clinton Leonard, another OB-GYN who belongs to the medical ethics board in Bishop Olmsted's diocese, stated to CNA on Dec. 22 that Sr. Keehan and other defenders of St. Joseph's were attempting to distract the public from a fundamental moral principle.
“They're making it too complex,” he said. “It's really a simple issue: the ends never justify the means. And the means that they used was a direct abortion,” Dr. Leonard stated. “That's not a treatment for pulmonary hypertension.”
“I would do everything possible to offer her cardiac support,” Dr. Leonard said, when asked what he would regard as an appropriate treatment under the circumstances. “If it's pulmonary hypertension, generally you use medications that are going to reduce the work that the heart has to do.”
In response to the assertion of Sr. Keehan and others, who regard the woman as having been on the brink of death, Dr. Leonard said it was “in debate, whether or not her life was at that point.”
But, he clarified, even under those circumstances, authoritative Catholic teaching would not have permitted the hospital to consider abortion as a form of necessary medical treatment. Pope John Paul II's encyclical “Evangelium Vitae” stated that “the deliberate decision to deprive an innocent human being of his life is always morally evil and can never be licit ... (even) as a means to a good end.”
Previously, Sr. Keehan and the Catholic Health Association sparred with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the question of health care reform, which the bishops criticized for funding abortion. Some observers have noted the critical role that she played, along with a social justice lobby of sisters called Network, in the bill's eventual passage.
In his farewell address before resigning the presidency of the U.S. Bishops' conference this fall, Cardinal Francis George – who directly opposed the health care bill, for its abortion funding – spoke of unnamed groups he said wanted to “remake the Church according to their own designs or discredit her as a voice in ... public discussions” such as the debate over abortion and health care reform.
As for who truly “speaks for the Catholic Church,” the cardinal left no room for doubt: “The bishops in apostolic communion and in union with the successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome, speak for the Church in matters of faith and in moral issues and the laws surrounding them.”
Ping!
And why hasn’t this woman been excommunicated?
What makes you assume she hasn't been excommunicated? If she is a Catholic, she has already been excommunicated latae sentenciae -- she and every other Catholic who was an accomplice in this abortion, as the Bishop of Phoenix made clear. If she is not a Catholic, she cannot be "excommunicated" because eshe is not in communion with the Church to begin with. As she has never been identified --- due to a completely proper respect for her privacy --- the possiblility that you would know who she is, and what her ecclesial status is, seems vanishingly remote.
By her actions, she has excommunicated herself. Any Catholic who obstinately denies that abortion is always gravely immoral, commits the sin of heresy and incurs an automatic sentence of excommunication. Abortion and Excommunication
Not that I want her to, but she can and will if she supports the killing of babies, facilitates the corruption of Catholic institutions, and does not repent.
A faithless traitor, she is.
Because the Catholic Church has forgotten what the Catholic religion stands for. Just ask Nancy Pelosi.
Oh here come the experts. Everyone (who doesn't go to Mass) is an expert in Churh matters.
Nancy Pelosi may have forgotten. It doesn't follow from that, that The Church has forgotten.
What on earth are you talking about? The she I was referring to was “Sister” Carol Keehan, head of the CHA.
Doctors, including pro-life physicians, concluded that this young woman (in her 20’s) suffered from a serious, pregnancy caused high blood pressure condition that was expected with 100% certainty to kill the mother unless an abortion was performed. The hospital and doctors concluted that they had a duty and obligation to save the mother’s life.
Most pro-life people I know who are familiar with these facts are less quick to condemn a first trimester abortion under these circumstances.
As far as I can see, Keehan is "based out of" Washington, D.C. That means it's Cardinal Wuerl's job to figure out if she's excommunicated under the canon for accomplices. I certainly think so.
This whole thing makes me sick, because it is rapidly burgeoning into far-ranging, disastrous repercussions. We are witnessing the moral disintegration of Catholic Health Care in America as a whole. It is much worse than I thought it was even one year ago when the traitor Keehan endorsed Obamacare. I did not realize the rot went this deep.
It is like kicking aside a rock and discovering a hole that leads into a city of cadavers, a stinking, decaying underground necropolis. I am sick over it.
However, I am not convinced that the only choices were (1) dismember the baby or (2) face the immediate, concurrent death of both mother and child. Some say another option would have been to give the mother major external respiratory-circulatory support to take the workload off of her heart and lungs for the weeks necessary to bring the child to the point of viability, and then deliver the baby prematurely.
There are other medical and ethical perspectives here at #20 and also here at #21.
Every option entailed a risk to the mother's life, since she was in a dangerous situation where even a D&E was not guaranteed to save her. However, premature delivery of the baby either by induction or by surgical means would have terminated the pregnancy without constituting a direct assault on the baby: yet a direct assault is (from what I've been able to glean) exactly what they chose to do, killing the baby by dismemberment.
I'm not saying a premature delivery would have saved the baby's life: realistically, at such an early stage that would not have been possible. But perhaps --- this is the thought --- premature delivery would have been treating the baby respectfully as a dying preemie, rather than just extacting him in pieces as if he were medical rubbish.
If what I have written has any factual errors, which is entirely possible, I would very much appreciate any correction you can make. Thank you.
“Any Catholic who obstinately denies that abortion is always gravely immoral, commits the sin of heresy and incurs an automatic sentence of excommunication.”
Does this mean Nancy Pelosi is excommunicated from the Catholic Church?
indeed
So why hasn’t she been excommunicated?
The only medical "facts" we have at this point is what has been released (or leaked) by the hospital. There's been some very selective editing and a lot of opining, probably at the insistence of their legal department. But if you look at the surrounding facts as opposed to the doctors' CYA opinions, it tells a different story.
The dirty little secret here is that this woman was seen several weeks before all this came down. She had a pre-existing condition which had nothing to do with the pregnancy. Pregnancy related pulmonary hypertension typically does not kick in until the 2nd or 3rd trimester. When she showed up the first time, the hospital immediately recommended an abortion, which she refused. They then sent her home.
Why? Here's the problem: she was on Medicaid. Medicaid would not pay the hospital for the treatment she really needed, which was bed rest, extensive (and expensive) treatment to alleviate her heart condition, and a Caesarian section once the baby could survive outside the womb. That would add up to $$$$$$$ most of which the hospital would have to eat. Medicaid would, however, pay for an abortion. And that's why the hospital went to that as the first choice, when the woman's life was not even arguably in danger.
But she showed back up in several weeks and her condition was much worse since the pulmonary hypertension had gone completely untreated for several weeks. At that point the doctors insisted on the abortion.
They could well be looking at a lawsuit for neglecting to care for the woman for several weeks while her hypertension reached boiling point.
So this is simply another case of "defensive medicine". If the hospital couldn't afford to pay for all that extensive medical treatment, the right thing to do would have been to appeal to the Catholic community to help this woman save her baby. Apparently that never occurred to them.
This is not by any means the first abortion performed at a CMW facility. The bishop's investigation uncovered multiple abortions, as well as contraceptives, sterilization, and other procedures that violate Catholic teaching. The bishop gave the hospital multiple chances to repent and promise to adhere to Catholic teachings in the future. It refused. Clearly the hospital prefers to continue in its ways more than it wants to remain Catholic. And that is, after all, its choice. But you can't have it both ways.
And just how do you know all of these “facts”?
I do not work for CHW, but I do know people directly involved, and I do clearly know that finances had absolutely nothing to do with the decision making. To assert otherwise without knowledge would be dishonest in my view.
It came down to having a choice between a dead mother and a dead baby, or a dead baby and a living young woman.
Sending her home was inexcusable.
It's a fact that Medicaid will not pay for extensive medical treatment and a long hospital stay, while it will pay for an abortion, which is cheap by comparison.
You tell me why they recommended a cheap procedure when her life was not in danger, then sent her home to get worse.
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