A nun and administrator at a Catholic hospital in Phoenix has been reassigned and rebuked by the local bishop for agreeing that a severely ill woman needed an abortion to survive.Sister Margaret deserves the consequences. While people may debate over married priests, Latin vs. vernacular, or what the Pope knew, one teaching of the Catholic Church is clear - abortion is a grave and mortal sin. In her vows when she became a religious, she made an oath to uphold the teachings of the Church which, presumably, she meant.
Sister Margaret McBride was on an ethics committee that included doctors that consulted with a young woman who was 11 weeks pregnant late last year, The Arizona Republic newspaper reported on its website Saturday. The woman was suffering from a life-threatening condition that likely would have caused her death if she hadn't had the abortion at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center.
Why I am coming down hard against Sister McBride is not because I have no sympathy for the mother, but rather the idea that the pregnacy would have caused her death if she had not gotten an abortion at St. Joseph's Hospital.
The last time I checked, Phoenix is a large metropolitan center. This means there are numerous places at which a woman can procure an 11th week abortion. By allowing the abortion to take place in a Catholic hospital, Sister McBride not only completely contradicted the mission of the hospital and the ethics upon which it rests, but brought the occasion of sin to the staff who performed the abortion, staining their souls.
2 comments:
Thank you for pointing this out. It's exactly what I thought when I read the story. Really? There was not another place she could have gone? My understanding was that Catholic hospitals did not do any abortions at all, so why did they not transfer her to another facility?
I thought about the "transfer her to another facility" thing too. But wouldn't that constitute material cooperation with evil?
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