Thursday, January 27, 2011
Abortion in a Catholic Hospital
Jerome's letter to Eustochium is one of many, many contribution of Christian thinkers to the topic of sexual ethics. According to the 20th-century principle of "double effect" in Catholic thought, an abortion with the primary intent to save the woman's life (and a secondary effect of ending the life of the fetus) was allowed. As Nicholas Kristoff's article from today's paper illustrates, this seemingly-resolved issue has again become controversial.
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This article was very confusing to me because, at my high school, the Catholic Church's position on abortion was continually drilled into our heads and one aspect we always covered was the termination of a pregnancy to save the life of the mother; it was always mentioned as the one exception. Why, after so many years of this practice being standard, has this Bishop suddenly flipped the script? Did he honestly expect the doctors to kill the mother; who is already someone's daughter, someone's wife, and the mother of four children? Her husband and children would have probably loved to have a new addition to their family, but Im sure if they had to choose, they would much rather have their wife and mother.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with Emily. How could Bishop Olmstead possibly think that murder of the mother is okay? Especially when the mother has four children. That baby would be born without a mother and would leave four children without a mother. And why does he think he has to authority to change what the Catholic church believes? I also think one of Kristof's arguments reveals a particularly ironic point:
ReplyDelete"If you look at Bishop Olmsted and Sister Margaret as the protagonists in this battle, one of them truly seems to me to have emulated the life of Jesus. And it’s not the bishop, who has spent much of his adult life as a Vatican bureaucrat climbing the career ladder. It’s Sister Margaret, who like so many nuns has toiled for decades on behalf of the neediest and sickest among us."
Sister Margaret is the one who seems to have truly immitated the life of Christ, while Bishop Olmstead is someone that people should be looking up to. I'm very frustrated with his take on this issue.
I agree with both of the previous posts. A hospitals purpose is to care for the sick and do whatever it takes to bring patients back to health. In life or death situations such as this one, I support Sister Margaret in her belief that all measures should be taken in order to save the mother.
ReplyDeleteWhat surprises me even more, though, is the fact that Bishop Olmstead took the issue to such an extreme.The article reminds me of another post regarding the Pope and his statement that condom usage is justified under special circumstances and our discussions about religion adapting to modern beliefs and standards. This article is very much the same in that there are always going to be special circumstances that are not as clear cut as the beliefs stated by the Bible and interpretations from the Catholic Church, especially as civilization progresses. For example, medicine itself is constantly advancing, and has come tremendously far as to have the ABILITY to save the life of a mother and/or the child during childbirth. With that said, Bishop Olmstead comes off a lot like Isaiah and the other post-restoration books of the Old Testament in that he's sticking to the most literal sense of laws without any exception and many times pulling them out of context.