Of course not, but providers have to make decisions on the information they have at the time, not on the information they will have in a week. Also remember that most any interventions we make come with risks of their own. Looking at the timeline here, we MAY find that the abortive procedure itself was a causal factor in her death (Note: pure conjecture here).
This is why the Church leaves these decisions up to those doctors and patients who are actually involved: each situation is different and there are many factors involved, including the factor that apparently sometimes that type of intervention will not help.
By the time you’re done hearing her story and examining her, you MUST have a working idea of what is likely to be wrong. If she is having a miscarriage (which we are told was the case) and has signs of infection, then the clinical part is straightforward: you hasten it along. The moral aspect seems to be the only foggy part here: is it imperative to wait until the last heartbeat has faded before inducing?
Of course it made international headlines because abortion is involved. That does not make it any less true that a woman died and that medical intervention in her illness was limited by the fact that her baby had a heartbeat. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong for the docs to make such decisions, I’m simply saying it is worthy of discussion. If they had granted the patients wish, we’d still be discussing it on here, and perhaps much more passionately.
I think that you are bringing up a very good point here. What precisely is the goal of anti-abortion legislation? The goal is not to prevent *deaths, *but to prevent *murders. *The goal is to keep people’s actions within the boundaries of morality, not to save lives. Lives would of course be saved, but that would be a side-effect rather than the goal of the law, and should a completely ideal time when no one wanted an abortion, then no lives would be saved.I’m not sure if the problem was the law or not. In other countries where abortion is illegal in all cases, you hear the same arguments every time a woman dies: the doctors did not understand that the law allowed her life to be saved, the doctors did not provide proper treatment, the doctors do not understand the moral principles of the Church…seems like doc are damned if they do and equally damned if they don’t.
Which is why I DO NOT want any half-thought out personhood laws determining what decisions my doctor can take in life-threatening situations. They make the laws, but then refuse to take responsibility for the consequences. If they believe women should die to allow their babies to die naturally, what’s the problem in owning that?
The story is rather old, but here’s one of the sights which reported on it. They failed to mention the mother and father were also excommunicated, as was reported originally, for anyone who cooperates with an abortion, is automatically excommunicated.
Jim
Great points. It does raise the question then, if the law is simply about preventing murders and not saving life, then why is there so much reliance of legislation in the pro-life movement? Preventing murder is only half the equation in respecting life: the other half is, of course saving lives. That has always been the Church’s concern: protecting the right to life of both the woman and her baby.
First, we do not know that medical intervention would have helped. We simply do not know enough about the facts of the case to say one way or the other.
The problem was, the mother could not survive induced labor because the pregnancy was causing the condition, so it was either a D&C or let the mother die along with the 11 week old fetus.
Maybe the only “foggy part” you see is the moral aspect, but I can think of several other “foggy parts” in dealing with a miscarrying woman with a possible infection. What is the source of her infection? Is it the uterus, or somewhere else? How quickly does she appear to be miscarrying (subjective measurement there of course)? Prior medications? Allergies??
I agree with your analysis Jim.
I don’t know about their being charged with manslaughter, but in a nation in which the murder of innocent unborn children is illegal, as it should be, they would have been charged for that death caused by the abortion.
If they could save the mother and did not, they would be charged with manslaughter, no two ways about it.
The issue is not related to the people involved, the issue is the nature of the act. *It is wrong to take the lives of innocent people, even to save the life of another. *
That’s because you’re confusing the notion of “the value of a human life” with “the responsibilities of a particular person”. Each human life has intrinsic and equal value.
We hold on to twenty centuries of tradition that is quite exceptionally advanced, based on rock-solid arguments from the spiritual, the philosophical, and the rational standpoint, and rooted towards the holiness of life and the principle that evil can never be used to achieve good. It makes sense to me that others won’t have the same perspective we have. Surely there’s enough common ground, though
The serial killer is guilty, I (and others in the room) are innocent. I’d rather not have you kill me (and others) in order to kill him as well, if you don’t mind. I don’t want to be murdered under the excuse that otherwise the serial killer would have killed dozens more, while this way I was the only victim, and 1 < 12. That’s sort of cold. Of course, even in just war there is always an amount of collateral damage that is unavoidable, but in order to be sort of acceptable it has to be truly unavoidable.
