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IT is true. The mother was in her 11th week of pregnancy when she went in. She suffered previously from chronic hypertension. Then severe pulmonary hypertension set in. Her heart and lungs were in danger of shutting down. At 11 weeks, the baby was not considered capable of living on his or her own.

Consultations between the doctors, the family and a member of the ethics team produced the same conclusion. That the mother was going to die if immediate steps were not taken.

Unfortunately, the diocesan and US Conference of Catholic Bishops public relations efforts have failed to answer the medical questions. The Catholic Church has come to understand that there is a difference between direct abortions and infant deaths that happen as the result of life-saving medical procedures can be allowed, albeit on narrowly defined medical grounds.

But the Bishop and the Bishop's conference, decided that the baby could be saved and the mother's disease healed. The doctors did not see it that way. The doctors believe that the mother's chances of dying in the then-present situation were 100 per cent.

The hospital claimed she was too unstable to be moved to a non-Catholic hospital. However, I find that hard to believe. Good Samaritan isn't far away and neither is Maricopa Medical Center.

Apparently, St. Joe's was not complying with the Diocese's other pro-life directives, so as head of the Phoenix Diocese, Bishop Olmstead was perfectly within his rights to do this. The hospital is still in business, just not as a Catholic facility. This was obviously their decision as they refused to submit to the Church's authority.

BTW, Catholic Healthcare West is headed by an avowed Obama supporter, Lloyd Dean. He's also black, gave Obama about a 100 grand during the campaign, was an enthusiastic backer of Obamacare, and isn't even Catholic. That whole chain is Catholic in name only, IMO.

Mrs. Prince of Space

Of course, all judgments depend on the actual medical details of the particular case; and (rightly) neither the hospital nor the Archdiocese of Phoenix will release details which would compromise the woman's medical privacy; so that makes discussion difficult.

However: If the baby would die either way (either in his mother's womb, or outside of it), 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 intact delivery would have been treating the baby respectfully as a dying person, and would have saved the mother. Abortion-by-Dismemberment is treating him like butchered meat.