A Catholic health system that spans several states has announced that it will provide abortions in certain circumstances, rejecting Catholic teaching on abortion.
Bon Secours Mercy Health, which announced its pledge of “continued support of doctors who conduct medically necessary abortions,” operates in Kentucky, Ohio, Virginia, and South Carolina, according to the news outlet 21 WFMJ. Mercy Health will not provide elective abortions, the news source added.
Mercy Health’s Public Relations and Communications Manager Jennifer Robinson said in a statement to 21 WFMJ, “While the legislative environment is complex, our Mission compels us to provide compassionate care for all.”
“In emergent patient care situations, when providers and medical teams prioritize patient care and follow hospital policies and medical standards of care in good faith, they can expect the support of Bon Secours Mercy Health,” Robinson added.
She also praised Mercy Health’s physicians and medical staff “for their ongoing commitment to excellent and compassionate patient care.”
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However, Mercy Health’s commitment to supporting doctors who determine that an abortion is medically necessary flatly contradicts Catholic teaching that abortion is never morally permissible.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraph 2271 states: “Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law.”
An EWTN article explores the Church’s answer to the question of the abortion “exception” to save the life of the mother, and why abortion in these cases remains impermissible.
The article first highlights the words of Pope Pius XII, who, in 1951, said, “Never and in no case has the Church taught that the life of the child must be preferred to that of the mother.”
“No, neither the life of the mother nor that of the child can be subjected to direct suppression,” Pope Pius XII added. “In the one case as in the other, there can be but one obligation: to make every effort to save the lives of both, of the mother and the child.”
Writing for EWTN in the same article, Rev. E. M. Robinson, O. P., pointed out that moral medical interventions to save the mother’s life, such as in the case of an ectopic pregnancy, do not fall under the definition of “abortion” at all.
“Both medically and legally, for the purposes of discussion, abortion is a direct and fatal attack upon the life of an unborn offspring of human parentage,” Fr. Robinson wrote.
“The only ethically justified understanding of this much-celebrated exception shows that it is not an exception at all!” Fr. Robinson wrote:
The classical example of an ectopic pregnancy or the example of the cancerous uterus, which allow the surgeon, ethically, to remove the woman’s damaged reproductive organs in order to save her life, should not be used as examples of abortion, even though a baby’s life is terminated in the progress.
Fr. Robinson stressed that both the mother and the unborn child have “equal, inalienable rights to continue living.” In the example of a woman who has a cancerous uterus, the mother has a right to preserve her life by having the diseased uterus removed. In this intervention, the death of the unborn child is not the means by which the mother’s life is saved, but instead a foreseen but unintended effect.
Fr. Robinson also wrote that given the current state of medical care and technology, “there is no justification for a direct attack on the child’s life as a means of saving the mother’s.”
“But, even if this were not so, the child may never be killed on the pretext of saving the mother’s life,” he wrote. “The human dignity of each individual does not permit that one human being may be sacrificed even to save the life of another.”
LifeNews Note: McKenna Snow writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
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