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“(1) “Life of the mother.” No law, moral or legal, from Church or State, forbids medical procedures to prevent a pregnant woman’s death, even if those procedures would result in the (unintended) death of the baby she is carrying. This is true even at times and in places where abortion itself is strictly illegal.”

This is not true. When my kids were born in the sixties, The Catholic Church made it very clear that the child should be saved instead of the mother if a choice had to be made.

There is virtually never a clear "baby or mother" medical choice, especially one in which the baby would be considered to have a better chance of survival than the mother. I am not an obstetrics expert, but I am relying on the testimony of people like Dr. Jose Espinosa, Dr. Carolyn Gerster and others who said they had been delivering babies for decades and had never seen, nor have their colleagues seen, any such straight up-and-down "choose-one" cases.

They were of the opinion that you always try to save both; and that some babies die by chance, but no baby should die by choice.

? I did hear of two cases that might be enlightening to discuss. One was my friend Connie, who while standing on a street-corner was hit by a drunk driver and suffered multiple broken bones from her rib-cage to her kneecaps, plus internal soft organ damage, while she was in early pregnancy. Abortion was recommended for her but she refused it (she is an M.D.) and she did the pregnancy in a body cast (which had to be re-made several times as her abdomen grew) and delivered by C-section. Her daughter Esperanza ("Hope") is now, herself, a doctor.

The other was a case I heard of where the mother was only 11 weeks pregnant with a baby she very much wanted, but was hospitalized with pulmonary hypertension with right heart failure. The doctors thought it was related to a placenta malfunction of some sort (abnormal gas and fluid exchange,abnormal hormonal levels.) Continuing the pregnancy would be dangerous for the woman, but abortion would be dangerous too.

In this case, the Catholic Hospital Ethics Committee approved, not abortion, but a pre-viability early delivery of the baby.

This was controversial at the time but the Ethics people (in consultation with the bishop) finally determined that there was no question of whether the baby would die, there was no chance; and they were only, in effect, moving the doomed baby from one location to another.

In other words, the survival of the baby was impossible; and something that is literally impossible is never morally obligatory. Their obligation was to treat the dying baby in a dignified manner (not to just go in and kill it but to deliver and handle respectfully) and try to stabilize the mother.

In this case, the baby died but the procedure (delivery) did not cause its death. The tiny boy was dying; he would have died whether inside or outside the mother. Delivering him did not kill him it just changed his location; neither environment (intrauterine or extrauterine) could have sustained his life.

That is the key. He died by chance, not by choice.

By the way, whoever told you that "the child should be saved instead of the mother if a choice had to be made," was in error, if by this they meant that one could be deliberately killed as a means to an end. Here's the thing: neither is to be intentionally killed for the sake of the other. According to Catholic ethics, the baby and the mother have an exactly equal right to life.

Everyone --- the drunk in the gutter, the President in the Oval Office, the dying vet in the VA hospice, the embryo in the IVF lab, Jesus Christ crucified --- has an equal right to life. There are no gradation on this one.