Responses to excommunicated nun story
Written by Tom Beasley in News at May 31, 2010
The NYTimes had a well written op-ed article about the nun who was recently excommunicated from a hospital for deciding to terminate an 11 week pregnancy to save the life of the mother and likely the child. We originally posted the article here. Some of the responses are a little shocking and disheartening. John L. Stehn, for example, writes (the italics are my own):
The sad case of Sister Margaret McBride illustrates how moral confusion can have tragic consequences, in this case the death of an unborn child. Yet if the Catholic Church’s teaching on the sanctity of life is true, then Bishop Thomas Olmsted’s excommunication of Sister Margaret is just. // Rather than an intellectual challenge to the church’s reasoning, upon which the teaching is based, Nicholas D. Kristof offers ad hominem attacks on the church hierarchy for their age and their clothing. Is this what informs his opinion? Should we dismiss Brown v. Board of Education because it was written by “detached, pampered” Supreme Court justices, dressed in “robes on a balcony high above the rest of us”?
Daniel S. Hamilton seconds the notion:
…The medical facts in every such hard case are crucial to a right solution. Taking them as given, we must still say that the solution authorized was wrong.
What, you say you would let the mother and the nonviable child die? Unintended physical death is not the greatest of evils, since we will all ultimately die. But directly killing an innocent person is a grave evil.
The compassionate Sister Margaret undoubtedly thought she was making the right decision. But she erred in her judgment. The mother and the child in utero deserved the finest continuing medical treatment available. The child did not deserve to be killed. Indeed, we may not do evil that good may come of it.”
[...] and the church still excommunicated her (Nun demoted for participating in a life saving abortion, Responses to excommunicated nun story). One can only hope that there is a greater movement towards reason and sanity in this country [...]