This is the kind of situation I think about when cautioning people to
educate themselves and others about this evil (abortion) that we fight.
Not all measures taken to end a pregnancy would qualify as an
abortion in the normal Catholic sense of the word. The situation described by this guy shouldn’t even come up in the pro-life debate because it falls in a different category all together.
This is similar (in my opinion) to ending a pregnancy in the tubes; something (as far as I know)
not condemned by the Church. In both situations you may have a pregnancy with a heartbeat which obviously cannot proceed normally. To take the comparison further, the pregnancy in the tube if allowed to continue, would cause the mother to bleed to death (at this stage, if mother dies, baby also dies); the situation with this woman bleeding severely enough to need a transfusion, is the same.
For someone bleeding severely at the end of pregnancy, the decision would be simpler: deliver the baby (care for preemies is excellent) and solve the problem.
Sorry, but I really think the only dilemma here was the guy having to make a decision under extreme stress. It’s clear that the baby could not have been saved apart from the mother and as such there was only one choice: to save the mother by ending the pregnancy. It should have been explained to him that this wasn’t “abortion” in the common meaning of the word. Maybe scientific use of the word abortion (it’s used to refer to any pregnancy loss - induced or natural) in the hospital is what confused the poor guy.
What does that have to do with people killing babies simply because they don’t want them?
What complicates the matter more is that the procedure in “abortion-on-demand” is often identical to the procedure used in the case we are discussing. That’s the reason, abortion can’t be stopped by banning a particular surgery: there are other situations is which those procedures are genuinely necessary.
See
this discussion.
