American Bishops Order Hospitals to Let Women Die

I wrote last year about how St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona, lost its "Catholic" status because it allowed an abortion to be performed -- an abortion that was the only way to save the woman's life. New information has come out that reveals that the official position of the bishop of Phoenix, Thomas Olmsted, is little more than "let the woman die."

Even worse, the entire US Conference of Catholic Bishops agrees.

Ophelia Benson quotes part of a letter which Thomas Olmsted sent to the hospital as part of their discussions about whether CHW could retain its "Catholic" status:

I now ask that CHW agree to the following requirements by Friday, December 17, 2010. Only if all of these items are agreed to, will I postpone any action against CHW and St. Joseph's Hospital. Specifically, I require the following in order for me to postpone any further canonical action directed against St. Joseph's Hospital:

1. CHW must acknowledge in writing that the medical procedure that resulted in the abortion at St. Josephs' hospital was a violation of ERD 47, and so will never occur again at St. Joseph's Hospital.

Just to be clear, so nothing is missed: the "medical procedure that resulted in the abortion at St. Josephs' hospital" was an abortion that saved a woman's life. Had the abortion not been performed, both the woman and the fetus would definitely have died. The necessary and unavoidable conclusion here is that Thomas Olmsted is demanding that St. Josephs' hospital let women die. According to Bishop Thomas Olmsted, women who will die without an abortion must be left to die.

And this isn't just my personal spin on the Olmsted's words. It's the official position of the Diocese of Phoenix:

It is not better to save one life while murdering another. It is not better that the mother live the rest of her existence having had her child killed.

This is the Catholic position: it's immoral to perform an abortion to save a woman's life even if the fetus will die anyway. It's immoral to cause a woman to live knowing that she owes her life to getting an abortion. It's immoral for her to continue living and raising any children she already has (the patient in the St. Joseph's case already had four children who would have lost their mother if Bishop Thomas Olmsted had had his way).

And, apparently, if she isn't moral enough to want to die with her fetus then it's up to Catholic priests and bishops to ensure that she's forced to do so anyway. Why don't they just station a priest with a gun next to every bed to make sure that people die when they are supposed to?

This isn't just something that Bishop Thomas Olmsted thought up for the Diocese of Phoenix. It's also official policy for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops:

Surgery to terminate the life of an innocent person, however, is intrinsically wrong... Nothing, therefore, can justify a direct abortion. No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the Law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the Church.

So "no circumstance" includes "even when the fetus is going to die anyway and there is still a chance to save the woman." The Catholic bishops call this a "pro-life" policy, but it's not -- it's pro-death and anti-woman.

You can prove this, too, by one simple fact: the Catholic Church doesn't require or expect funerals or last rites for every miscarried fetus. They do, however, expect this for adult Catholics who die -- including women who die from a problematic pregnancy which could have been stopped.

What does this tell us? It tells us that the Catholic Church doesn't actually view the fetus and the woman as exactly equal. It tells us that the Catholic Church does recognize that there are differences between the two -- fundamental differences, even.

This is further demonstrated by the fact that the Catholic Church does not consider abortion to be murder. You won't find the word "murder" anywhere in their official documents and doctrinal statements. If I stabbed the woman in her hospital bed, they'd agree that that's murder; if I perform an abortion procedure on her, that's not murder of the fetus. There's a difference between the two act and they know it.

Ergo, this tells us that the policy dictating that women must die rather than have abortions which would save them isn't based on any doctrine about the lives of women and fetuses being equivalent. No, it's about controlling and harming women. It's about killing and even murdering women. That's what passes for "pro-life" and "moral leadership" in today's Catholic Church.

St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center refused to give in to Thomas Olmsted's demands. They decided to put the life and health of patients -- even women! -- ahead of the demands of a Catholic hierarchy that is far more interested in protecting child rapists than in protecting women.

I'd say that dropping the "Catholic" status represented a massive ethical step forward for St. Joseph's.