I am really struggling

[excubitor]

Your claim is incorrect. An embryo WILL DIE if the pregnancy is eptopic.

I did not say that the embryo will or will not die if the pregnancy is ectopic. What I said was that if it dies it will be by natural causes as with any other kind of miscarriage. I also pointed out that only 2.5 % of maternal deaths in the Sudan are caused by ectopic pregnancies. I notice that you provided no answer to this statistic. What I am saying is that you are relying on distorted information from medical doctors who are aborting ectopic pregnancies prematurely in order to prevent further complications later on.

The mother will most likely die if the fallopian tube is not removed before it burts. The Chuch has even given this as an example of a legitimate procedure.

Can you provide evidence of this? I provided a quote from Wikipedia which shows that it is very rare for a women with a ruptured fallopian tube to die in modern countries where high standards of medical care are available.

By your own logic a woman could not have uterine cancer surgery while pregnant. She should die first or be terminally ill before any type of intervention is allowed. This is not Catholic teaching.

I said no such thing. What I worried about was using medical procedures as excuses to abort babies. You have deliberately twisted and distorted my words.

Your creeping relativistic moralism argument is a canard.

And you sir are rude and insulting

The moral ethics are pretty sound and easy to understand. A mother is allowed to treat her body as long as the treatment is not for the express purpose of killing the child. If she is treating her illness and the death of the child is a secondary effect then it is morally licit.

The moral ethics of the Catholic church are sound. I made no judgment against them and only gave a personal opinion that I felt that the “removal of a diseased tissue” approach was against my own personal ethics. I also gave the opinion that the Catholic church in the west is labouring under misinformation from medical science which upon investigation I cannot endorse.

Any treatment for the primary purpose of killing the unborn innocent child is always immoral and considered murder. A woman’s body will sometimes abort a child while treating a bad sinus infection with Antibiotics. Would you rather the woman wait until she was on deaths bed before using any kind of life saving techniques?

A woman should avoid all medication which is dangerous to the foetus if there is any possibility of her being pregnant. Your argument is seriously flawed. Sinus is not life threatening and the womans body did not abort the child, the antibiotic did in your scenario. I never said that a woman should not be treated with life saving techniques while she is pregnant however Catholic doctrine is clear.

The Catholic web site clearly states

However, if medical treatment or surgical operation, necessary to save a mother’s life, is applied to her organism (though the child’s death would, or at least might, follow as a regretted but unavoidable consequence), it should not be maintained that the fetal life is thereby directly attacked

I uphold this moral ethic entirely. My argument is not against this moral ethic, it is against the mistaken notion that ectopic pregnancies are life threatening. Childbirth in general has a risk to the Mother’s life, there is a slim and general risk that an ectopic pregnancy may cause the death of the Mother, but I have shown that this risk is no more pronounced than is generally expected in childbirth.

I showed clearly that in the developed world only 2.5% of maternal deaths are caused by ectopic pregnancies. Given the improved medical care in the developed world I expect this ration to be no different in our society even if all ectopic pregnancies were allowed to run to their natural end as they are in the Sudan.

I also showed that if 2% of pregnancies are ectopic and that every one of these women died if there was no intervention, then that would account for the entire maternal death rate in the Sudan. In fact we know that only 2.5 percent of all maternal deaths are caused by ectopic pregnancies not 100%.

The point here is that there is a clear and well defined teaching from the Church on this topic. Many people try to twist the teaching to suite their needs. Just follow the teaching, pray about your situation and make the choice that is most in line with your comfort and the Catholic Church.

I have not altered or twisted the churches teaching in any way. I have merely stated that it is poorly applied in the case of ectopic pregnancies because of misinformation by medical doctors who give greater weight to the woman’s life than they do to the embryo.

 

[moon1234]

Can you provide evidence of this? I provided a quote from Wikipedia which shows that it is very rare for a women with a ruptured fallopian tube to die in modern countries where high standards of medical care are available.

Which is most likely from surgery being done BEFORE the tube bursts. Which is why western medicine has a much reduced maternal risk.

The Catholic web site clearly states

I think I will stick with Catholic teaching vs what a website says.

What I said was that if it dies it will be by natural causes as with any other kind of miscarriage.

An Eptopic pregnancy WILL NOT abort on it’s own. The fetus WILL DIE when the TUBE RUPTURES. Which is them an emergency that will threaten the life of the mother. ANY doctor will tell you that you DO NOT wait until this happens. The church even uses this as an example where surgery IS ALLOWED to save the life of the mother. The unborn child has zero chance of surviving. The surgery is solely to save the life of the mother from a fallopian tube that is set to explode.

And you sir are rude and insulting

The truth sometimes hurts. I can’t help that. Deal with it.

 

[St_Francis]

I am a new Catholic (less than 1 year). As I understand the Church’s position on abortion, if the only choices one has is to save the mother or the baby or lose both, the choice should be to let both die. This will never be a choice I have to make anymore but it may affect my children. I don’t think I could stand by and let my daughter die if she could be saved. I accept all the doctrines (what I can’t reason in my mind, I accept on faith). However, I don’t think I could stand by and let my daughter die if I could save her. I would have to commit myself to the infinite mercy of God. If it is not a mortal sin to take a life in war, why is is a mortal sin to save one life at the expense of another? Does anyone else struggle with this?

You ar holding your grandchild in your arms. A man comes in and says he will kill your daughter if you do not rip the child from limb to limb to kill him or her.

Because that’s what you are suggesting when you say that you would want a doctor to abort your grandchild to save the life of your daughter.

 

[excubitor]

Which is most likely from surgery being done BEFORE the tube bursts. Which is why western medicine has a much reduced maternal risk.

You are ignoring the truth. I will repeat again from Wikipedia which discusses ectopic pregnancies

The most common complication is rupture with internal haemorrhage which may lead to hypovolaemic shock. Death from rupture is rare in women who have access to modern medical facilities. Infertility occurs in 10 - 15% of women who have had an ectopic pregnancy.

Do you get it now?

I think I will stick with Catholic teaching vs what a website says.

Err. Excuse me but it was the official Catholic web site.

An Eptopic pregnancy WILL NOT abort on it’s own.

Can you provide evidence to prove this? Why then does Wikipedia say.

If left untreated, about half of ectopic pregnancies will resolve without treatment.

Now what happens to these half of ectopic pregnancies that resolve themselves. Do they go on to the womb to be born as normal babies. If so, then half of ectopic pregnancies are unnecessary abortions. And I say there is far more than half because of the statistics I showed you from the Sudan. Of course if we ALWAYS abort the ectopic pregnancies we will never know will we?

The fetus WILL DIE when the TUBE RUPTURES.

The foetus will also DIE when the tube is TAKEN OUT. The TUBE WILL be taken out even if the ectopic prenancy would have resolved without treatment.

Which is them an emergency that will threaten the life of the mother. ANY doctor will tell you that you DO NOT wait until this happens.

I know what doctors are telling people. That’s the whole issue that I am raising. Doctors are not to be trusted in this regard because they have a false ideology when it comes to the treatment of pregnant women. Their first instinct is to terminate with the abortion drug methotrexate. They have no compunction about it at all because they have saved themselves the trouble of surgery down the track. I think you are buying in to this culture of death.

The church even uses this as an example where surgery IS ALLOWED to save the life of the mother. The unborn child has zero chance of surviving. The surgery is solely to save the life of the mother from a fallopian tube that is set to explode.

Kind of dramatic don’t you think? I’ll repeat. from Wikipedia

The most common complication is rupture with internal haemorrhage which may lead to hypovolaemic shock. Death from rupture is rare in women who have access to modern medical facilities. Infertility occurs in 10 - 15% of women who have had an ectopic pregnancy.

Another interesting point I noticed on Wikipedia is that the increase in cases of ectopic pregnancy is amongst women who have had tubal ligations and have used IUD’s. Presumably this means that Catholic women have a greatly reduced incidence of ectopic pregnancy than the rest of society. One would like to think so anyway.

 

[Melchior_1]

My mother had an ectopic pregnancy back in the mid-90’s.

She almost died on the operating table when her tube burst in the middle of the operation.

People can throw down as many stats as they want; the fact is my mother almost died in the operating room. Ectopic pregnancies are a big deal and need to be treated seriously.

The issue people face now is of methotrexate, and that doctors and others advocate taking the drug in lieu of the surgical procedure.

 

[excubitor]

My mother had an ectopic pregnancy back in the mid-90’s.

She almost died on the operating table when her tube burst in the middle of the operation.

People can throw down as many stats as they want; the fact is my mother almost died in the operating room. Ectopic pregnancies are a big deal and need to be treated seriously.

The issue people face now is of methotrexate, and that doctors and others advocate taking the drug in lieu of the surgical procedure.

Yes. I know. It’s hard when it is you, or your mother, or your wife on the operating table how quickly our morality is brought into sharp relief.
I commend your mother for enduring the risks and hardships of an ectopic pregnancy. She handled the situation in exactly the way I am recommending.

Your story highlights that childbirth is dangerous. Any number of things can go wrong and cause a serious risk to the mother. Even with all of our technology women still die in childbirth. This is not a consequence of the churches arduous ethical strictures but it is a consequence of Adam and Eve’s sin in the garden whereby God greatly increased the suffering of the woman in childbirth.

Modern science seeks to overturn the entire natural order so as to reverse the curse of Adam and Eve, but it will always be unable to do so. Its every effort to alleviate suffering will only create worse suffering with the death of voiceless little babies.

From this medical web site we learn. nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000895.htm

The most common complication is rupture with internal bleeding that leads to shock. Death from rupture is rare.
And yet even though death from rupture is rare, nevertheless 2 percent of pregnancies are artificially aborted because they are ectopic, and faithful Catholic women are terrified into having their fallopian tubes removed. When we know from statistics that the vast majority of ectopic pregnancies clear themselves without any intervention whatsoever from doctors.

I ask again. What happens to those embryos that do ultimately clear the fallopian tube, do they successfully implant into the womb? I don’t know. But even if they don’t, they have died as an act of God and not as an act of Man and the womans fallopian tube is not harmed, nor has she had to undergo invasive surgical techniques which have an element of risk in themselves.

Here are some more statistics. Its utterly unbelievable how low the number of deaths per ectopic pregnancies are.
nationmaster.com/graph/mor_ect_pre-mortality-ectopic-pregnancy

Surely I am missing something here.
And yet we are led to believe that 2 percent of pregnancies are ectopic and need to be terminated. The best treatment we are told is methotrexate to “treat the condition” by which they mean “abort the embryo”.

But if our Catholic ethicists here present at Catholic Answers would have their way that would be 2 percent of pregnancies each year, that’s 1 in 50 pregnant women having their fallopian tubes surgically removed. That’s nearly 8 million surgeries every year around the world to save 208 lives. And that’s assuming that none of those 8 million surgeries themselves die from infection or some other complication of the surgery. Is that really what we want? En masse dragging out women’s fallopian tubes. I certainly don’t.

Something is very, very wrong here. There seems to be a culture of death going on here that is quite scary.

 

[moon1234]

I would not argue anymore with the excubitor person above. It sounds like he/she is content with waiting until the situation is a life or death one. We can take comfort in knowing that the Church does not require this type of extreme position. The cited statistics are way out in left field. A woman can surely wait until her tube blows up, but she does not morally have to wait for this to happen.

Catholic.com is in no way an official mouthpiece of the Church. It is a private website that has many Catholic contributors, but again it is not an official source of information. Rely on the current code of Canon Law, the Vatican’s website and official publications of the curia. Just my $.02

 

[Melchior_1]

Yes. I know. It’s hard when it is you, or your mother, or your wife on the operating table how quickly our morality is brought into sharp relief.
I commend your mother for enduring the risks and hardships of an ectopic pregnancy. She handled the situation in exactly the way I am recommending.

Your story highlights that childbirth is dangerous. Any number of things can go wrong and cause a serious risk to the mother. Even with all of our technology women still die in childbirth. This is not a consequence of the churches arduous ethical strictures but it is a consequence of Adam and Eve’s sin in the garden whereby God greatly increased the suffering of the woman in childbirth.

Modern science seeks to overturn the entire natural order so as to reverse the curse of Adam and Eve, but it will always be unable to do so. Its every effort to alleviate suffering will only create worse suffering with the death of voiceless little babies.

From this medical web site we learn. nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000895.htm

The most common complication is rupture with internal bleeding that leads to shock. Death from rupture is rare.
And yet even though death from rupture is rare, nevertheless 2 percent of pregnancies are artificially aborted because they are ectopic, and faithful Catholic women are terrified into having their fallopian tubes removed. When we know from statistics that the vast majority of ectopic pregnancies clear themselves without any intervention whatsoever from doctors.

I ask again. What happens to those embryos that do ultimately clear the fallopian tube, do they successfully implant into the womb? I don’t know. But even if they don’t, they have died as an act of God and not as an act of Man and the womans fallopian tube is not harmed, nor has she had to undergo invasive surgical techniques which have an element of risk in themselves.

Here are some more statistics. Its utterly unbelievable how low the number of deaths per ectopic pregnancies are.
nationmaster.com/graph/mor_ect_pre-mortality-ectopic-pregnancy

Surely I am missing something here.
And yet we are led to believe that 2 percent of pregnancies are ectopic and need to be terminated. The best treatment we are told is methotrexate to “treat the condition” by which they mean “abort the embryo”.

But if our Catholic ethicists here present at Catholic Answers would have their way that would be 2 percent of pregnancies each year, that’s 1 in 50 pregnant women having their fallopian tubes surgically removed. That’s nearly 8 million surgeries every year around the world to save 208 lives. And that’s assuming that none of those 8 million surgeries themselves die from infection or some other complication of the surgery. Is that really what we want? En masse dragging out women’s fallopian tubes. I certainly don’t.

Something is very, very wrong here. There seems to be a culture of death going on here that is quite scary.

My mother didn’t have a choice, as her family doctor did not notice things until far far along. She also had her tubes tied at the time, so she beat that statistics too I guess.

What I find scary is that when you look at those stats and you see a small number and try to justify no action being taken to help these mothers. When I see those stats I see that my mother was almost a part of those “small” numbers, which underscores how serious the issue is.

I assure you that if my wife’s life is threatened, I’m going to do what it takes to protect her above all else. I made a vow to do that, you know. It’s tragic if a child is involved, but the life of my wife is paramount to me.

The methotrexate issue is something worth discussing. Several doctors now support women taking this drug, and some clergy (Catholic and Protestant both) seem to support it as a last resort in the event hormone levels are acting a certain way.

 

[moon1234]

Methotrexate is a cancer drug. It’s use as an abortafacient is not what it was designed for. Keep in mind that you can NEVER under any circumstances do anything that has the primary intention of causing death to the child. Taking a drug for eptopic pregnancy would be for the primary purpose of killing the child. That is what it does.

The act of surgically removing the fallopian tube does directly kill the child. It is an unwanted secondary effect of the removal of the tube (or portion thereof).

Might be splitting hairs, but I think that it is a very important distinction.

The same idea would apply to war. A soldier could not in good conscience obey an order to destroy an enemy town if there was not the primary purpose of eliminating an immediate threat. Think about Hiroshama Japan. That was an utterly wanton act of murder. The primary purpose was not to kill enemy combatents. It was to kill civilians and shock the Japanese into surendering. Those acts were open acts of Mass murder of the innocent. It would also not be correct to kill one million innocents to get the 100 enemy combatents. Each situation will be different and the response needs to take the specific scenerio at hand into account.

 

[Melchior_1]

I’m just thinking of a friend of mine who had an ectopic pregnancy, a solid Catholic. She was counciled by several people to take the drug before things reached the point where surgery was needed. At this point the hormone levels were at a level where the baby was going to die and cause some issues. I know she’s not culpable, as she received the advice from others and acted on it under the pretense that “it’s fine to do this in this circumstance”. But it does show that education is needed.

One can say by using the drug you’re still protecting the life of the mother. I’m not condoning the use of the drug by any means, but one could easily say that despite the baby being attacked by the drug that the life of the mother is at risk, thus the drug is necessary.

 

[Justin_Mee]

You ar holding your grandchild in your arms. A man comes in and says he will kill your daughter if you do not rip the child from limb to limb to kill him or her.

Because that’s what you are suggesting when you say that you would want a doctor to abort your grandchild to save the life of your daughter.

That’s about as poor of an analogy that I have ever heard.

 

[estesbob]

I am a new Catholic (less than 1 year). As I understand the Church’s position on abortion, if the only choices one has is to save the mother or the baby or lose both, the choice should be to let both die. This will never be a choice I have to make anymore but it may affect my children. I don’t think I could stand by and let my daughter die if she could be saved. I accept all the doctrines (what I can’t reason in my mind, I accept on faith). However, I don’t think I could stand by and let my daughter die if I could save her. I would have to commit myself to the infinite mercy of God. If it is not a mortal sin to take a life in war, why is is a mortal sin to save one life at the expense of another? Does anyone else struggle with this?

The truth is a situation where you have to choose the mother of the baby never really comes up. This is because of the law of double effect. Let’s say that a mother has cancer the uterus while she is pregnant and needs radiation treatment for the cancer. As a byproduct the child will die. The church would allow this as there was no deliberate abortion-the child died as result of the treatment for cancer. Not as a direct action to kill it

 

[excubitor]

My mother didn’t have a choice, as her family doctor did not notice things until far far along. She also had her tubes tied at the time, so she beat that statistics too I guess.

I pointed out in a recent post how tubal ligations and UID’s have caused a sharp increase in the number of ectopic pregnancies. It just shows how sin causes suffering and death down the track.

What I find scary is that when you look at those stats and you see a small number and try to justify no action being taken to help these mothers. When I see those stats I see that my mother was almost a part of those “small” numbers, which underscores how serious the issue is.

The fact is she was not part of those small numbers which merely supports my claim that very few women die from tubal ruptures. However I do not deny that some few women do actually die and that is a horrible outcome and penalty of sin, either of that person herself who sinned and had her tubes tied or else merely the penalty of Adam and Eve put onto us.

In my previous post I expressed my sorrow for women who suffer and even die in childbirth. Don’t blame me though. Blame Adam and Eve who sinned. Blame God who greatly increased the pain and suffering of childbirth in punishment.
We may not take methotextrate to abort the child in an ectopic pregnancy in order to escape the curse of Adam and Eve. I freely admit that the church allows women to have their tubes surgically removed. I am allowed to disagree with the church on this point. I am not advocating abortion. What is also missing from the statistics is the wide scale suffering that occurs BECAUSE of the actual ectopic surgery to remove fallopian tubes.
lower back pain,
pain on urination
ongoing bleeding
drastically reduced fertility,
infections
painful menstruations.

Any wonder that doctors prescribe methotrexate. But the church won’t allow that. So the church allows you to suffer these painful complications of surgery, and the medical ethicists here at Catholic Answers encourage you to suffer these painful complications of surgery. And why? When the statistics show that the vast majority of these ectopic pregnancies clear themselves and also that the vast majority of those which do progress to the stage of rupture, the woman survives with adequate medical care. It seems that the destruction of the reproductive system and the embryo is OK in order to prevent the remote possibility of death. I say it is not. In my view the intent of the Catholic teaching is that surgeries to remove fallopian tubes should be delayed for as long as possible till the point where it is certain that the tube will rupture or has ruptured.

However I am confident that these kind of preventative treatments are not the intent of the Catholic church but are designed for extreme situations such as your Mother went through.

I assure you that if my wife’s life is threatened, I’m going to do what it takes to protect her above all else. I made a vow to do that, you know. It’s tragic if a child is involved, but the life of my wife is paramount to me.

You are not getting it are you? Your wife’s life is NOT threatened. You are being hocus pocused by the medical doctors. The same medical doctors who want to subscribe methotrexate for thereapuetic abortions.

 

[Melchior_1]

I pointed out in a recent post how tubal ligations and UID’s have caused a sharp increase in the number of ectopic pregnancies. It just shows how sin causes suffering and death down the track.

The fact is she was not part of those small numbers which merely supports my claim that very few women die from tubal ruptures. However I do not deny that some few women do actually die and that is a horrible outcome and penalty of sin, either of that person herself who sinned and had her tubes tied or else merely the penalty of Adam and Eve put onto us.

My mother is a walking miracle. I was just talking to her about this a week or two ago about this very topic and there was never a more close call the doctors had than with her.

You are not getting it are you? Your wife’s life is NOT threatened. You are being hocus pocused by the medical doctors. The same medical doctors who want to subscribe methotrexate for thereapuetic abortions.

I’m remembering almost losing my mother and how that felt to me as a child, and what it means to me now as an adult and the ramifications it would have on our children. I don’t need doctors and their “hocus pocus” to remind me of that.

You’re reminding me a bit of tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSpock

 

[excubitor]

I would not argue anymore with the excubitor person above.

You are a rude individual.

It sounds like he/she is content with waiting until the situation is a life or death one.
We can take comfort in knowing that the Church does not require this type of extreme position. The cited statistics are way out in left field. A woman can surely wait until her tube blows up, but she does not morally have to wait for this to happen.

I never said she did. When you say that the cited statistics are way out in left field, what do you mean? Are they incorrect? Have I lied? Do you have more correct and accurate statistics to argue your case? It seems to me that you are burying your head in the sand.
As far as I am concerned morally she does have to wait until the tube is at a dangerous point of rupture. How else can it be said to be “diseased”.

Catholic.com is in no way an official mouthpiece of the Church. It is a private website that has many Catholic contributors, but again it is not an official source of information. Rely on the current code of Canon Law, the Vatican’s website and official publications of the curia. Just my $.02

Seems to me that you are rubbishing my statistics, rubbishing Catholic.com but producing nothing of substance yourself. All you can do is mumble, the mother will always die and the baby will always die.
I did not quote from Catholic.com. I quoted from NewAdvent.com the Catholic Encyclopedia on Abortion which has an Imprimatur from John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York. if you think that Canon law teaches any different then please give us links and show what it does actually say.

However, if medical treatment or surgical operation, necessary to save a mother’s life, is applied to her organism (though the child’s death would, or at least might, follow as a regretted but unavoidable consequence), it should not be maintained that the fetal life is thereby directly attacked

This clearly shows that we MUST wait until its a life and death matter in order to save the womans life.

Another issue is that there is a chance that the ectopic pregnancy may survive to maturity and be delivered by surgery. I think this is referring to out of place pregnancies (but not in the fallopian tube, maybe in the ovary or some other place)
The Catholic encyclopedia concedes this point

Even if an ectopic child should live to maturity, it cannot be born by the natural channel — but, once it has become viable, it may be saved by a surgical operation.

Here is an example. Mother and Baby survived
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7427907.stm
I wonder what little Durga will believe about ectopic pregnancies and early termination when she grows up.

here is an angry woman who had her ectopic pregnancy terminated and is angry because there are many documented full term ectopic pregnancies which have resulted in live births. She wants more study done on these.
ectopicpregnancyfoundation.org/forums/index.php?t=tree&goto=7&rid=&S=1a7c73ee2a4d19a8cbae3aa1021354a7

And here are the many citations although I cannot access the articles.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&cmd=Link&LinkName=pubmed_pubmed&from_uid=14070111

It would be nice if ectopic pregnancies could be studied more, however that is unlikely because they are all getting terminated as soon as possible with abortive drugs and surgery.

And this account ectopicpregnancyfoundation.org/forums/index.php?t=tree&th=2&mid=136&rid=&S=57b2742a206efeb7fe8acd6864c62c21&rev=&reveal=

Just wanted to let you know I had a healthy baby boy in July, 2004 who implanted first in my ovary and then grew outside the uterus to nearly full term. I wasn’t in the same situation as you because we didn’t know about the problem until I had an emergency csection. However, this whole experience has put many questions in my mind about exactly what you’re talking about. In the end, we are so thankful no one saw what was happening with my pregnancy because we would have been strongly encouraged or even forced to abort. Now seeing our boy here and healthy it’s heartbreaking to think of that! Anyway, I know you posted a long time but just wanted to let you know of another experience.

 

[Melchior_1]

Excubitor, you didn’t need to call moon a moron. That doesn’t add any weight to your arguments at all, it just makes you look immature.

Unless the whole “Originally Posted by moron1234” thing was a typo…made twice.

 

[excubitor]

Excubitor, you didn’t need to call moon a moron. That doesn’t add any weight to your arguments at all, it just makes you look immature.

Unless the whole “Originally Posted by moron1234” thing was a typo…made twice.

Wow. Just when I thought nobody was reading my posts.

Yes in a moment of frustration I put Moron in my responses to all Moon’s posts. I removed them because I realised that it was immature. Unfortunately I neglected to remove them all. I apologise for my immaturity and for causing any offense to Moon.

I will take a break for now. I am obviously getting too emotional about the subject matter.

 

[Justin_Mee]

Think about Hiroshama Japan. That was an utterly wanton act of murder. The primary purpose was not to kill enemy combatents. It was to kill civilians and shock the Japanese into surendering. Those acts were open acts of Mass murder of the innocent.

You just lost all credibility with me.

 

[Melchior_1]

You just lost all credibility with me.

I get where you’re coming from with this, Justin. It’s a concept my wife struggles a bit with for sure.

I try to remain as consistent as the Church when it comes to life beginning at conception, which means as my wife is currently carrying our first child, to me that is my child, I am already a father. When people insist on saying “you’re going to be a dad” I get pretty belligerent, as I find it insulting towards my kid.

I am a father. The current location of my child does nothing to change this.

I treat that child already as if it (I use “it” because we don’t know the gender yet…in two weeks we will though!!) has left the womb. The womb is my kid’s crib. I talk to my kid right now, I rub my wife’s belly to try and rock the kid to sleep. I get my wife what she wants to eat because I feel that “you never eat Kraft Dinner! That means the baby wants it, which means that’s MY baby!” (side note; I love Kraft Dinner, my wife not so much).

Yet, I made a vow to protect my wife in all things, through all things. Sickness and health, richer or poorer. Children don’t change this vow.

Don’t let the semantics fool you; the Church teaches that although every effort to save the child and mother must happen,** the life of the mother is paramount**. I have already told my wife multiple times in the event something tragic happens, she wins. My duty is to God, then to my wife. Everyone else is secondary.

But the Church must remain consistent with her teachings, which is why the surgical procedure that does not directly kill the child is the method the Church “traditionally” says should be done. Because as soon as we open the doors to directly killing a life that begins at conception, it sets a potential precedent that may send us down the wrong path. I think that is what some of the people here are getting at; that directly attacking the child sets a bad precedent.

Like has been mentioned, if this is the only thing about Catholicism you struggle with you’re in great shape. Don’t let this hang you up, rather offer it up to God as a form of obedience and prayer. “Lord, I struggle with this specific belief a lot…I know I must believe this but this is hard. I believe, help my unbelief”. Or something like that.