Like all major religions, the Catholic church takes a dim view
of abortion, so it may surprise you to learn that a Catholic publication just
published an article in support of abortion under certain
circumstances. The publication is the National Catholic Reporter,
and I read it occasionally, even though I do not have a paid subscription.
The National
Catholic Reporter (NCR) is a progressive national newspaper in the United States
that reports on issues related to the Catholic Church. Based in Kansas
City, Missouri, NCR was founded by Robert
Hoyt in
1964. Hoyt wanted to bring the professional standards of secular news
reporting to the press that covers Catholic news, saying that "if the
mayor of a city owned its only newspaper, its citizens will not learn what they
need and deserve to know about its affairs". The publication, which
operates outside the authority of the Catholic Church, is independently owned
and governed by a lay board of
directors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Catholic_Reporter
According
to Thomas Tweed, director of the Ansari Institute of Global Engagement with
Religion at the University
of Notre Dame, "I think the same thing that has happened in American
political life and media has happened to some extent to Catholics. Progressive
Catholics read Commonweal and the National
Catholic Reporter, and traditionalist Catholics watch EWTN and read newsletters from the Blue Army
NCR has won the "General
Excellence" award from the Catholic Press Association in
the category of national news publications six times between 2008 and 2014.
The Catholic Press Association in
June 2017 awarded former NCR editor and publisher Tom Fox its
highest honor for publishers, the Bishop John England Award.
Since I was educated in Catholic schools at both the
elementary and high school levels, I became I staunch critic of abortion for a
couple of decades after the passage of Roe v Wade. As I became more educated
over time, my position softened to the point that I now believe that strict
abortion bans now longer make any sense, especially in the states that have no
exceptions for incest or rape.
In theory, even states that prohibit abortions up to six
weeks have exceptions to save the life of the mother. However, many women have
found that the exception is only a theory – and many have died because of the
theory.
The article that recently appeared in the National
Catholic Reporter can be found at the link below:
Although I would encourage you read the entire article,
here are some of the main points:
When
Anna Nusslock showed up at her local hospital 15 weeks pregnant and in severe
pain earlier this year, she said, a doctor delivered devastating news: The
twins she and her husband had so desperately wanted were not viable. Further,
her own health was in danger, and she needed an emergency abortion to prevent
hemorrhaging and infection.
Providence
St. Joseph Hospital, in the small Northern California coastal city of Eureka,
refused to provide the care she required because doctors could detect fetal
"heart tones," Nusslock said at a news
conference Monday. California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a
lawsuit against
the Catholic hospital detailing Nusslock’s dangerous experience and alleging
the hospital violated multiple state laws when it discharged Nusslock — with
an offer of a bucket and towels — to go elsewhere for what he
described as standard medical care. Bonta also filed a motion
for a preliminary injunction in Humboldt County Superior Court, asking that it require
Providence to treat anyone with an emergency medical condition. "The need
for immediate relief is about to intensify," the motion said. That’s
because Mad River Community Hospital, where Nusslock ultimately got care 12
miles up the road, is slated to close its birth center this month.
The
case involving Anna Nusslock is similar to a situation that I wrote about in
January of 2011:
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2011/01/
Here are the main points:
The
National Catholic Reporter newspaper put it best:
“Just days before Christians celebrated Christmas, Jesus got evicted.”
Yet
the person giving Jesus the heave-ho in this case was not a Bethlehem
innkeeper. Nor was it an overzealous mayor angering conservatives by pulling
down Christmas decorations. Rather, it was a prominent bishop, Thomas Olmsted,
stripping St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix of its affiliation
with the Roman Catholic diocese.
The
hospital’s offense? It had terminated a pregnancy to save the life of the
mother. The hospital says the 27-year-old woman, a mother of four children,
would almost certainly have died otherwise.
Bishop
Olmsted initially excommunicated a nun,
Sister Margaret McBride, who had been on the hospital’s ethics committee and
had approved of the decision. That seems to have been a failed attempt to bully
the hospital into submission, but it refused to cave and continues to employ
Sister Margaret. Now the bishop, in effect, is excommunicating the entire
hospital - all
because it saved a woman’s
life.
Make
no mistake: This clash of values is a bellwether of a profound disagreement
that is playing out at many Catholic hospitals around the country. These
hospitals are part of the backbone of American health care, amounting to 15
percent of hospital beds.
Already
in Bend, Ore., last year, a bishop ended the church’s official relationship
with St. Charles Medical Center for making tubal ligation sterilizations
available to women who requested them. And two Catholic hospitals in Texas
halted tubal ligations at the insistence of the local bishop in Tyler.
The
National Women’s Law Center has just issued a report quoting
doctors at Catholic-affiliated hospitals as saying that sometimes they are
forced by church doctrine to provide substandard care to women with miscarriages
or ectopic pregnancies in ways that can leave the women infertile or
even endanger their lives. More clashes are likely as the church hierarchy
grows more conservative, and as hospitals and laity grow more impatient with
bishops who seem increasingly out of touch.
Catholic
hospitals like St. Joseph’s that are evicted by the church continue to operate
largely as before. The main consequence is that Mass can no longer be said in
the hospital chapel. Thomas C. Fox, the editor of National Catholic Reporter,
noted regretfully that a hospital with deep Catholic roots like St. Joseph’s
now cannot celebrate Mass, while airport chapels can.
Mr. Fox added: “Olmsted’s moral certitude is lifeless, leaving no place for
compassionate Christianity.
Since January of 2011, I have written two additional
articles about the topic:
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2018/07/roe-v-wade-is-in-news-again.html
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-day-of-unborn-child_3.html
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, a number of
states have passed restrictive abortion laws, and the bans in Texas and Florida
are among the most severe. Naturally, women have died because of these laws.
The link below has a graph that shows which states have limitations
or bans on abortion:
29 states (more than half of all states) have either
restrictions or bans, much to the detriment of women living in those states,
and Texas is one of the worst states.
The
number of women in Texas who died while pregnant, during labor or soon after
childbirth skyrocketed following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care — far
outpacing a slower rise in maternal
mortality across the nation, a new investigation of federal public
health data finds.
From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in
Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time
period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute. The nonprofit research group scoured
publicly available reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
and shared the analysis exclusively with NBC News.
“There’s
only one explanation for this staggering difference in maternal mortality,”
said Nancy L. Cohen, president of the GEPI. “All the research points to Texas’
abortion ban as the primary driver of this alarming increase.”
“Texas,
I fear, is a harbinger of what’s to come in other states,” she said.
The SB 8 effect
The Texas Legislature banned abortion care as early as five
weeks into pregnancy in September 2021, nearly a year before the U.S. Supreme
Court overturned Roe v. Wade — the case that protected a federal right to
abortion — in June 2022.
At the
time, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, lauded
the bill as a measure that “ensures the life of every unborn
child.”
Texas
law now prohibits all abortion except to save the life of the
mother.
The
passage of Texas’ Senate Bill 8 gave GEPI researchers the opportunity to take
an early look at how near-total bans on abortion — including cases in which the
mother’s life was in danger — affected the health and safety of pregnant
women.
The SB
8 effect, Cohen’s team found, was swift and stark. Within a year, maternal
mortality rose in all racial groups studied.
Among
Hispanic women, the rate of women dying while pregnant, during childbirth or
soon after increased from 14.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2019
to 18.9 in 2022. Rates among white women nearly doubled — from 20 per 100,000
to 39.1. And Black women, who historically have higher chances of dying while
pregnant, during childbirth or soon after, saw their rates go from 31.6 to 43.6
per 100,000 live births while maternal mortality spiked overall during the
pandemic, women dying while pregnant or during childbirth rose consistently in
Texas following the state’s ban on abortion, according to the Gender Equity
Policy Institute.
“If
you deny women abortions, more women are going to be pregnant, and more women
are going to be forced to carry a pregnancy to term,” Cohen said.
Beyond
the immediate dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, there is growing evidence
that women living in states with strict abortion laws, such as Texas, are far
more likely to go without
prenatal care and much less likely to find an appointment with
an OB-GYN.
Doctors
say the feeling among would-be moms is fear.
“Fear
is something I’d never seen in practice prior to Senate Bill 8,” said Dr. Leah
Tatum, an OB-GYN in private practice in Austin, Texas. Tatum, who was not
involved with the GEPI study, said that requests for sterilization procedures
among her patients doubled after the state’s abortion ban.
That
is, women prefer to lose their ability to ever have children over the chance
that they might become pregnant following SB 8.
“Patients
feel like they’re backed into a corner,” Tatum said. “If they already knew that
they didn’t want to pursue pregnancy, now they’re terrified.”
Because the law in Texas makes absolutely no sense, 20
women are currently suing the state:
SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP via Getty Images
Cristina
Nuñez's doctors had always advised her not to get pregnant. She has diabetes,
end-stage renal disease and other health conditions, and when she unexpectedly
did become pregnant, it made her extremely sick. Now she is suing her home
state of Texas, arguing that the abortion laws in the state delayed her care
and endangered her life.
Nuñez
and six other women joined an ongoing lawsuit over Texas's abortion
laws. The plaintiffs allege the exception for when a patient's life is
in danger is too narrow and vague, and endangered them during complicated
pregnancies.
The
case was originally filed in March with five patient
plaintiffs, but more and more patients have joined the suit. The total number
of patients suing Texas in this case is now 20 (two OB-GYN doctors are also
part of the lawsuit). After a dramatic hearing in July, a district court judge agreed
with the plaintiffs that the law needed to change, but the state
immediately appealed her ruling directly to the Texas Supreme
Court. That move allows Texas' three overlapping abortion bans to stand.
In
the July hearing, lawyers for the Texas Attorney General's office argued that
women had not been harmed by the state's laws and suggested that their doctors
were responsible for any harms they claimed.
For Cristina Nuñez, after she learned
she was pregnant in May 2023, her health quickly worsened, according to an
amended complaint filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights, the organization
bringing the case. Nuñez had to increase the amount of time she spent in
dialysis, and suffered from painful blood clots. She told an OB-GYN that she
wanted an abortion, but was told that was not possible in Texas. She called a
clinic that provides abortion in New Mexico, but was told she could not have a
medication abortion because of her other health conditions.
Her health continued to deteriorate as the
weeks went on and her pregnancy progressed. In June, when one of her arms
turned black from blood clots, she went to a Texas emergency room. She
was diagnosed with a deep vein thrombosis, eclampsia and an embolism, but the
hospital would not provide an abortion. She worried she would die, the
complaint says.
She finally received an abortion 11 days
after going to the E.R., only after finding a pro-bono attorney that contacted
the hospital on her behalf.
Also
joining the lawsuit is Kristen Anaya, whose water broke too early. She
developed sepsis, shaking and vomiting uncontrollably, while waiting for an
abortion in a Texas hospital. The other new plaintiffs are Kaitlyn
Kash, D. Aylen, Kimberly Manzano, Dr. Danielle Mathisen, and Amy
Coronado, all of whom received serious and likely fatal fetal diagnoses and
traveled out of state for abortions. The Texas Supreme Court is set to consider
the Center's request for a temporary injunction that would allow abortions in a
wider range of medical situations. That hearing is scheduled for Nov. 28.
Ever since the Supreme Court overturned
Roe v Wade, a number of states have voted on whether abortion should still be
legal. In every case, abortion rights one – even in conservative states like
Kansas.
The measure is now on the Arizona
ballot in November, as proposition 139. Since 58% of the Arizona voters support
the measure, it should pass.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/us/politics/arizona-abortion-ballot-measure.html
There is little difference between religions about abortion.
The latest survey
conducted by the Alan
Guttmacher Institute, was completed by
more than 10,000 women. Staffers in hospitals, clinics and physicians’ offices
where abortions are performed distributed the questionnaire. The Guttmacher
Institute, which researches sexual and reproductive health worldwide, says it
used the survey data along with data on the number of abortions performed
nationally to estimate abortion rates and the size of certain demographic
groups. The institute found that more Protestant women obtained abortions than
Catholics: Forty-three percent of women over age 17 in the 2000-2001 survey
said they were Protestant, while 27 percent said they were Catholic. But
Catholics were more likely to get an abortion: The abortion rate for Catholic
women was 22 per 1,000 women; the rate for Protestants was 18 per 1,000 women,
according to study author Rachel K. Jones.
Abortion has been an
emotionally charged topic for more than 50 years. For most of those years, it
has been a key issue for many voters. Even though every newspaper in the
country said Donald Trump was not fit for office in 2016, many women voted for
him because they could not support a candidate (Hillary) who felt that abortion
should be safe, legal, and rare.
This election, abortion
will again be a key issue, but this time it will work AGAINST the Republican
party, just as it did in 2022. J.D. Vance believes that women are only valuable
if they have children, and the more the merrier - an attitude of the Catholic
church from the 1950’s.
To quote Kamala
Harris, “we not going back”.
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