Clin Path is over: thus end the dreaded Part I modules. Most of the year is out having a celebratory curry, but since I (accurately) predicted I'd be exhausted and feeling like crap afterwards, I didn't sign up for it myself and so I'm at home catching up on news stories instead.
Which brings us to the main topic of this post.
This story made me feel slightly physically sick. I don't really know how to talk about things like this without getting worked up, so I would settle for:
1) You want to preserve life = what any "good" person wants.
2) You want to preserve potential lives wherever possible = I can agree with that (although I doubt I'd use it as justification for telling others what to do).
3) You decide there is no grey area where choosing to abort could be considered not damning, and would confidently risk someone else's life and wellbeing on this opinion regardless of circumstances = ... wait, what?
So, in summary, my stance is neither "ABORTIONS YAY" nor "YOU BETTER HAVE THAT BABY YOU HEATHEN OR GOD WILL KNOW".
Despite a Catholic upbringing, I had still somehow always thought that the Catholic Church accepted that abortion was sometimes medically necessary, since I think it had been presented to us in school as, "We're not stupid - if it's an ectopic pregnancy the mother will die otherwise, so the Church wouldn't oppose a doctor trying to fix that."
Having attempted some basic research on this now, I found that the Evangelium Vitae Encyclical barely seems to touch on the - admittedly fairly specific, but not that uncommon - occurrence of pregnancies which would kill the mother without intervention. All I could actually find were generalisations* like:
"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."
And, intriguingly, this interpretation would seem to suggest that the only way terminating a pregnancy that would kill the mother is even allowable is if the doctor has some reason to call the foetus/baby's death a "secondary effect". I'd like to assume this means "secondary to keeping the mother alive", but I still have an uncomfortable feeling about it.
Whatever the official doctrine on this is, I still find the linked story hard to stomach. I'm also pretty sure that public opinion is not going to side with the Church on this one - and this probably also includes many of its members.
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*If I have missed a specific reference, which I could well have done since I was scanning rather than analysing every line, I apologise and would be sincerely happy to have it pointed out to me.
4 comments:
ell I'm not out at the curry either. I needed to attempt to organise things plus I am a cheapskate.
Anyway. I did see that story and it also made me feel a bit sick (this was even before I read Uzumaki!)
Ha, yeah - I just read the first two chapters online and then realised my tea mug had a spiral design on it!
Unfortunately Argos don't seem to sell them anymore or I'd link to a picture.
Spirals are everywhere! It's a sign!
Haha actually that manga creeped me out the most during the first 2 chapters then the 2 chapters with the mosquitoes/evil placenta growing babies so if you've got that far you might as well keep going
I just realised how odd it is to be talking about "evil placenta-growing babies" given the topic of the original blog post.
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