Well. I’m glad to see the Catlicks coming around on such an important issue to women and their rights. This is an object lesson for the deluded pro-life movement. Your fetus worshipping is useful for whipping up the frenzy and getting people all frothy, but when serious issues come, its time for you to sit the frack down and shut the frack up on cue while the adults talk about the serious issues.
From the Alter.net article –
[…]
And all of this—all of it—goes back to the Church’s insistence that life begins with your very first hell-worthy dirty thought and must be protected at all costs, despite all consequences, including, of course, the consequence of dead women, whose lives are not nearly as valuable as the “life” of an unborn fetus. In just the past year, the Church has called upon its faithful followers to march, to starve themselves, to go to jail, to even take up arms—all to protect those fetuses. No exceptions. None. Not if the fetus is already dead inside the womb. Not if the fetus is going to kill the actual living woman carrying it. No goddamned exceptions EVER.
Well, except for one: when it’s going to cost the Church money.
Turns out, when a man sues a Catholic hospital for malpractice because his wife and the twins she was carrying inside her died when she turned up in the emergency room and her doctor never bothered to answer a page—well, things get a little tricky. Yes, the Catholic hospital adheres to the strict Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Church, as set forth by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. And yes, those directives include the claim that “[t]he Church’s defense of life encompasses the unborn” and a mandate to uphold “the sanctity of life ‘from the moment of conception until death.'” But come on. That obviously does not apply when Catholic Health Initiatives, the Church-affiliated organization that runs the Church-affiliated St. Thomas More Hospital where a young woman and her two unborn fetuses died, is the lead defendant in a lawsuit:
Instead, they are arguing state law protects doctors from liability concerning unborn fetuses on grounds that those fetuses are not persons with legal rights.
As Jason Langley, an attorney with Denver-based Kennedy Childs, argued in one of the briefs he filed for the defense, the court “should not overturn the long-standing rule in Colorado that the term ‘person,’ as is used in the Wrongful Death Act, encompasses only individuals born alive. Colorado state courts define ‘person’ under the Act to include only those born alive. Therefore Plaintiffs cannot maintain wrongful death claims based on two unborn fetuses.”
Thank you, counselor, for totally undermining everything the Catholic Church has ever said about women and health care and fetuses and the “sanctity of life,” just to save a buck, thereby confirming how very empty and meaningless all that rhetoric really is. Praise the Lord.
5 comments
January 28, 2013 at 11:31 am
syrbal
Wasn’t that a special sort of lovely cake to be had AND eaten, too? I’m going to love watching as the inconsistency shown in their “following the money” comes back to bite them in the ass!
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January 28, 2013 at 11:57 am
The Arbourist
@syrbal
I would be more assured if the CC had more respect for consistency with regards to their positions. The whole condom/Africa debacle, outside of debates, is never mentioned. Their flip flop on this issue (do what we say, not how we act) will probably get the same treatment.
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January 28, 2013 at 12:35 pm
syrbal
The fact that such lousily consistent inconsistency keeps flying on no-logic engines makes me wonder, from time to time, whether the entire populace of the planet suffers from some kind of attention deficit disorder.
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January 28, 2013 at 1:58 pm
bleatmop
Religion has a logic suppression mechanism built in. Socially instituted, demanded and expected cognitive dissonance is a powerful force.
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January 28, 2013 at 1:59 pm
another lurker
I saw this story on CNN. The church made the poor widower pay for their legal fees. 100k+, now his wages are being garnished
After they killed his wife and two babies…
The hypocrisy and greed is truly breathtaking here.
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