By the kind of curious reasoning that this slogan has encouraged, the Supreme Court of the United States legalized murder when it legalized abortion in the first trimester. In this curious view, legalized abortion in the first trimester is murder.
I, for one, commend Bishop Olmsted for NOT referring to the abortion in Phoenix as murder.
For my standpoint, we are definitely making headway when we can agree that the abortion in Phoenix did not involve murder.
Next, we need to consider the hospital's claim that the abortion was carried out to save the mother's life. In the judgment of the medical professionals involved, the mother would have lost her life had the abortion not be carried out.
But let us be clear here. Had the mother lost her life, the fetus would have not survived, because the fetus was in the first trimester and not viable outside the mother's womb.
There should be no ambiguity about this case. The medical professionals at the hospital, the moral professional at the hospital, and the mother herself, who was consulted and who did agree to have the abortion, made the right decision under the circumstances. Bishop Olmsted has no business second-guessing them and excommunicating the Catholics involved.
Bishop Olmsted is being simple-minded if he thinks that he is qualified to second-guess the professional medical judgment after the fact and declare the act of abortion to be immoral, as he has declared. Moreover, he is abusing his power as a bishop by excommunicating the Catholics who were involved in the decision.
Perhaps another analogy will help clarify the issues involved in the Phoenix abortion case. Today the American military refers to "collateral damage." I, for one, detest this term because it is such an impersonal way to refer to the loss of innocent human life. Non-combatants represent innocent human life. Unfortunately, American military action has often resulted in the killing of non-combatants in Iraq, for example. But we Americans usually do not consider the military actors to be murderers and prosecute them for murder. As a result, the term "collateral damage" is used to refer to non-combatants who are killed by American military actions.
In those cases, the primary reason for undertaking the military action is to kill combatants. Nevertheless, it is understood that certain non-combatants will probably also be killed. But this likelihood is so predictable that the killing of such non-combatants should not be considered to be accidental. Their being killed is not accidental, but is not the primary aim of the military action.
By analogy, the abortion carried out in Phoenix was done to save the mother's life. That was the primary reason for the abortion. Thus the killing of the fetus in the abortion in Phoenix was not accidental, but it was not the primary reason for undertaking the abortion in Phoenix.
POSTSCRIPT AND UPDATE: After I had submitted this piece for consideration for publication at OpEdNews, Bishop Olmsted proceeded to carry out his threat, as I had expected him to. I have seen news stories about his official announcement published online by the NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER (ncronline), the NEW YORK TIMES, the LOS ANGELES TIMES, and the GUARDIAN in the United Kingdom. On December 23, 2010, the NEW YORK TIMES published an editorial about the abortion controversy in Phoenix. NCR has run an article about the analysis that was prepared by a moral theologian; a pdf file of the full document is available online; see ncronline. The moral theologian prepared the analysis at the request of the president of Catholic Healthcare West, the parent company of the hospital in Phoenix. Bishop Olmsted had requested the analysis from Catholic Healthcare West, and he had stipulated a number of points that he wanted to see discussed in the analysis. In preparing the analysis, the moral theologian covered in detail all of the points that he had mentioned that he wanted to see discussed. The president of Catholic Healthcare West submitted the analysis to Bishop Olmsted as the bishop had requested. But Bishop Olmsted has in effect rejected the moral theologian's analysis. However, as far as I know, he has not issued a detailed critique of the analysis.
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