Or if the pregnancy, even without a threat to the mother's life, cannot end well for the child... as in the case of the mother with the incompetent cervix that Scotswife mentionned, or when one parent has a chromosomal translocation...tough.
I think the Church at least used to permit contraceptive pills to regulate women's irregular and unpredictable cycles - with the idea that a couple was entitled to predictability but should abstain at the times they would have if they were using NFP.... not sure that is still permitted.
Sometimes, the reasoning of the Church, as when it teaches that you may remove a tube with an ectopic pregnancy, but you may not remove the pregnancy from the tube, has me beating my head against the wall. I wonder, AFTER you have removed the tube, then can you remove the pregnancy from the tube, for the sake of science and advancing medical knowledge and seeing the baby and burying it?
It's late...
Mrs VS
"Sometimes, the reasoning of the Church, as when it teaches that you may remove a tube with an ectopic pregnancy, but you may not remove the pregnancy from the tube, has me beating my head against the wall. I wonder, AFTER you have removed the tube, then can you remove the pregnancy from the tube, for the sake of science and advancing medical knowledge and seeing the baby and burying it?"
That one always left me scratching my head as well.
It seemed to be a matter of semantics to say "we're removing the bulging tube" to make it sound like it's not aborting, even though the bulge in the tube IS the baby itself.
Removing the "bulging" tube, vs. chemically flushing the embryo through the tube are both done for the same reason and produce the same result.
The notion that one procedure is acceptable and the other is "evil" doesn't make sense.