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.
-- From "Hospital nun rebuked for allowing abortion in Phoenix" by Associated Press 5/18/10
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 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.
Hospital officials defended McBride's actions but confirmed that she has been reassigned from her job as vice president of mission integration at the hospital. They said in a statement that saving the mother required that the fetus be aborted.
Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, head of the Phoenix Diocese, indicated in a statement that the Roman Catholic involved was "automatically excommunicated" because of the action. The Catholic Church allows the termination of a pregnancy only as a secondary effect of other treatments, such as radiation of a cancerous uterus.
"I am gravely concerned by the fact that an abortion was performed several months ago in a Catholic hospital in this diocese," Olmsted said in a statement sent to The Arizona Republic. "I am further concerned by the hospital's statement that the termination of a human life was necessary to treat the mother's underlying medical condition.
"An unborn child is not a disease. While medical professionals should certainly try to save a pregnant mother's life, the means by which they do it can never be by directly killing her unborn child. The end does not justify the means."
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From "Sister Margaret's mercy" by Sophia Deboick, UK Guardian 5/26/10
It might be said that the diocese's reaction is unsurprising – indeed it is the fact that their actions are in perfect accordance with church law that is so concerning. Recent church history has seen an increasing emphasis on the absolute prohibition of abortion. In 1886 Leo XIII explicitly prohibited it, even where the life of the woman concerned is threatened, and in 1930 Pius XI stated that "however much we may pity the mother whose health and even life is gravely imperilled in the performance of the duty allotted to her by nature, nevertheless what could ever be a sufficient reason for excusing in any way the direct murder of the innocent?"
. . . The church's commitment to an absolute ban on abortion in all cases was underscored in 2004 with the canonisation of Gianna Beretta Molla. An Italian paediatrician, Gianna was two months pregnant when she discovered she had a uterine tumour. Rejecting a hysterectomy, she continued with the pregnancy, and her daughter was born on Good Friday 1962. Gianna died a week later, aged 39, leaving behind three other young children. Beatified in 1994 – the International Year of the Family – a prayer to Saint Gianna contains the lines "Jesus, I promise you to submit myself to all that you permit to befall me, make me only know your will."
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