A reader pointed out an article at “Catholic Health World” –
Interjection: what the hell is “Catholic health”? I know, that’s not what they mean, it’s just the name of a publication of the CHUSA, the Catholic Health Association of the US. But that’s stupid too. We’re deadened to all this because of habituation. We’re used to it so we don’t notice how ridiculous it is, let alone how dangerous it is. Catholic health? Catholic health care? What the hell, man? There is no such thing. Health is health, it isn’t Catholic or Jewish or Baptist. Health care is health care, it isn’t Lutheran or Muslim or Hindu.
An article at “Catholic Health World,” I was saying. Pregnancy complications can bring on complex ethical questions.
Well I can think of some possible ones – like what to do about a woman who wants to risk her life to try to save a fetus that can’t be saved, or even a woman who wants to give up her life to try to save a fetus that can’t be saved. That might be a complex ethical question, because there’s an intuition that it should be her decision, but it has to be horrible to let someone die when you know you could save her.
But that of course is not the kind of complex ethical question they have in mind at CHUSA.
They offer hypotheticals. This one for instance –
A second fictitious case concerned a mother at 15 weeks’ gestation whose fetus is missing part of its brain. The baby will almost certainly die within days of birth. The physician recommends that the mother terminate the futile pregnancy to avoid the psychological distress of carrying a nonviable baby to term.
Slosar said that, applying directive 47, this termination would not be justified because the mother’s life is not at risk — the condition only affects the health of the baby. Also, the reason for the termination — to relieve the psychological burden to the mother — is not considered proportionate to the effect of the act, that is, the death of the baby, within the Catholic moral tradition.
How hateful. The “psychological distress” is grief for the baby and the futility of it all. The stinking CHUSA makes it sound selfish and callous. What good does it do the baby to have a few days outside the uterus? The Catholic moral tradition is brutal.