Posted on 12/15/2010 12:58:50 PM PST by NYer
PHOENIX, December 15, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Catholic bishop of Phoenix has warned that a local hospital where doctors directly killed an unborn child late last year will lose its status as a Catholic institution unless it submits to a review to ensure it will comply with Catholic church teaching.
Bishop Thomas Olmsted issued the warning to Lloyd Dean, president of the San Francisco-based Catholic Healthcare West (CHW), in a November 22 letter obtained by The Arizona Republic. CHW is the parent company of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, where the abortion was performed.
The conflict began in May of last year, when Olmsted announced that Sr. Margaret McBride, then the hospital’s vice president of mission integration, and any other staff member that directly facilitated the murder of the unborn baby had automatically excommunicated themselves from the Church by doing so.
Hospital officials claimed that killing the unborn child at 11 weeks gestation was necessary to save the life of its mother, who was suffering from pulmonary hypertension, a condition that can be aggravated by pregnancy.
Though the details of the case remain confidential, other experts deny that it would be necessary to perform an abortion even in the case of severe pulmonary hypertension, and say that the mother should have been able to remain stable at least until the baby could be prematurely delivered.
The Catholic Physicians Guild of Phoenix came out in support of Olmsted the same month, and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops supported Olmsted’s assertion that a direct abortion - unlike forms of therapy that may indirectly lead to the child’s death - is always a grave transgression of Catholic moral guidelines.
Olmsted’s letter, which copied San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer, warned Dean that he expected allowance to oversee the Catholic identity at the hospital in his diocese, and that, “Until this point in time, you have not acknowledged my authority to settle this question.”
“There cannot be a tie in this debate,” the bishop wrote, according to The Republic. Olmsted said he “must act now” to prevent further abuses and “repair the grave scandal to the Christian faithful that has resulted from the procedure.”
Olmsted said that, in order to remain in good standing with the diocese, the hospital would have to backtrack on its endorsement of the abortion, submit to a diocesan review and certification for compliance with Catholic moral teaching, and agree to ongoing training for medical staff on the U.S. bishops’ Ethical and Religious Directives.
Both the hospital and CHW have yet to respond publicly to the letter.
Ping!
The question here is who to believe? What was the real risk to the mother’s life? I’d really like to see an unbiased medical opinion on this particular case, but that will never happen.
Where is that spine jpeg?
That isn't the question... risk to the mother? EVERY pregnancy is a potential risk to the mother. Before modern medicine, women died regularly in childbirth. If we start using that criteria in ANY pregnancy, it can be used in every pregnancy. The question is do we value innocent life or don't we?
The life of the mother should never be a consideration in killing an innocent child. No one forced her to get pregnant.
There’s no question of who to believe. Prenatal hypertension can be a killer, but in this case there’s no way it was an emergency operation. She could have had it done somewhere else.
A Catholic hospital doing abortions. What next? Orthodox Jews having pig roasts?
>>The life of the mother should never be a consideration in killing an innocent child.<<
There’s where you and I part ways. If the mother is going to die and there isn’t a chance of saving the baby, save the mother. You want two people to die when only one death is necessary.
By the way I am firmly against abortion but after watching so many men, women and children die in Viet Nam I understand that each life is precious.
Regardless of whether the abortion was indeed medially necessary, it still should not have been performed in a Catholic hospital. The Catholic Church allows a woman to receive medical treatment that could have the unintended second effect of causing fetal demise — e.g., a pregnant woman with cancer receiving chemo — but the Church never approves of direct abortion, even if the mother’s chances of life would improve on account of an abortion. I understand why people may disagree with this hard-line, but it is a fact that that is what the Catholic Church is teaching and an ostensibly Catholic hospital had no right to authorize that abortion. The nun who approved the abortion excommunicated herself by so approving. If the hospital doesn’t repudiate its actions in this case, it should be stripped of the adjective “Catholicâ€.
The doctors could have transferred the patient to another hospital for the abortion. I assume there’s a medical reason they didn’t.
Nope, sorry, but that's a line that I cannot and will not cross. I'm absolutely immutably on the points of rape, incest, and life of the mother.
I had my wife take a look at this, and she explained that in advanced cases of PIH, transport would be unadvisable. She could easily be on the verge of renal or liver failure. Also learned that PIH is difficult to treat, because the more effective BP meds are contraindicated with pregnancy.
Who owns the hospital? I thought that all Catholic properties within a Diocese were pretty much the property of the bishop.
I think the real problem is that hospital could not admit its mistake and tried to justify its decision on moral grounds. Triage is inevitable, but the unanswerable question is whether the abortion was absolutely the only choice. In a struggle options are not always clear even after the fact.
Well, I don’t by that either, but I wasn’t there. A judgement call is a judgement call. Sometimes you don’t do the right thing.
Regardless of whether the abortion was indeed medially necessary, it still should not have been performed in a Catholic hospital.
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You Sir are right on!
Just before I was born my mother had some medical problems. The priest and doctor at the Catholic hospital explained to my father that since there were likely going to be serious complications that they would save my (new born) life instead of my mother.
My father said the hell you will. He called another hospital and said he was on his way with an emergency admittance. He picked up my mother took her to his waiting car and took her the other hospital. It turned out that while I was very premature I was healthy and so was my mother. I think my father did the right thing. But I don’t fault the Catholic hospital. Their thinking is that my mother had her chance. She was baptized and I wasn’t, I needed to have my chance. It was all done in love, my father just didn’t agree and went somewhere else. People have the right to make decisions, at least they used to.
Bishop Olmsted, there are several Archdioceses north of you that will have vacancies in a few years. Consider yourself invited!
So it's okay to kill a child depending on who its parents are? Really?
Agreed. I believe the world record for a premature birth is at 21 weeks although generally a baby has a 50% chance after 24 weeks.
This baby was at 11 weeks so if the doctors were right about the mother it stood no chance of survival. When the choice is between saving one or neither then there is no choice. And I don’t understand how a rational person can see otherwise.
This is just one more case of testing the limits and hoping that citizens and non citizens will get up in arms and knock off the largest impediment (Catholic Church)to establishing a totally secular New World Order.
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