How Close to Death is Close Enough?
Crœsos
Shipmate
in Dead Horses
‘Not Dead Enough’
When she arrived at the public hospital in Texas, the woman was so sick she couldn’t walk. About four months pregnant, she needed an abortion to save her life. A previous pregnancy had led to heart failure. This time she faced a higher risk of death from cardiac arrest that increased as the pregnancy advanced.
But the hospital’s leadership denied her the abortion she needed.
“It was decided that she was not going to be dying at that moment,” Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, who cared for the patient, told Rewire.News. “It really was almost a cruel joke: that she wasn’t really dead enough to warrant intervention.”
Many of the poorest and sickest patients end up at public hospitals when their pregnancies go wrong. But little-known laws in 11 states — Arizona, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas — prohibit abortion care in various kinds of public facilities, according to an analysis conducted by the Guttmacher Institute for Rewire.News. Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania allow exceptions to the laws for victims of rape or incest, but the latter three states require the crime be reported to authorities. Only Mississippi and Texas make allowances in cases where the fetus can’t survive. Although exceptions exist in all 11 states if a patient’s life is in danger, hospital officials are free to interpret what that means and thereby deny abortion care to the sick and dying.
I recommend the rest of the article. It's lengthy but well written.
This seems like a common approach among those wishing to re-criminalize abortion. They'll usually include exceptions to whatever restrictions they put in place for cases where a woman's life is in immediate danger from continuing a pregnancy, but "immediate danger" is a medically imprecise term of little use to either medical professionals or hospital administrators. So how close to death is close enough, and how much risk (beyond the baseline risk of a pregnancy with no obvious complications) is risky enough for the "life of the woman" exception to kick in? And why is this a matter that's best decided by legislators and lobbyists rather than patients and doctors?
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
None of the things you mention are limited in scope to "Western society", however defined.
This also seems like a form of washing your hands of any kind of moral responsibility or empathy. For example, if we posit, as you do, that life-threatening pregnancies only happen to women who "reject . . . [ God ] and his word" then any health consequences they suffer if unable to terminate that life-threatening pregnancy are their own fault and something that could be easily averted by religious conversion. One could even argue that providing medical care to them is inherently immoral since it subverts divine justice.
Smiting people with potentially lethal medical conditions seems like a pretty messed-up definition of "reach[ ing ] out in love". YMMV, I guess.
Where do these things fit in your scheme? racism, authoritarian and police violence, training people (soldiers) to kill other people, having some extremely rich people and having some destitute and a society which considers the destitute disposable.
Are these also curses for rejection of God?
If so, how is it that those in control of western societies claim to be of God, with God and God with them?
And why are they getting worse? Even though the leaders more frequently proclaim their Chrisitian-ness?
FWIW, if you need a abortion where I live, you have your physician contact the hospital clinic, you contact the clinic or you contact one of the referral supports. You then get examined for whatever health things are needful and you have the abortion, usually within 2-3 weeks. It is covered under public health care. There are no barriers except health-related and less than 16 weeks, 6 days of pregnancy.
@Crœsos and @NOprophet_NØprofit I can see where you're coming from, and I suppose it's always possible that @MPaul may be advocating the simplistic and erroneous reverse-prosperity message that you're impliedly accusing him of. However, it does not follow from a belief that sickness, violence, social and other disorders etc are a consequence of sin, that X's gynaecological trauma is a direct targeted punishment from God, whether forensic or by an automatic cause and effect, for X's sin and personal rebellion against him.
God is good and he loves us. Yet the world is full of nasty things, nasty people and nastiness. There are nasty diseases. People are born with terrible disabilities, and suffer terrible accidents. There is both great goodness and great wickedness.
The traditional view is that this disjunction between how we believe God would like things to be and how they are, this disjunction, the rift that runs through the created order, demonstrates and is a consequence of something which has traditionally been called sin. It is of the nature of sin, at the core of how it works, how Satan is, if you are willing to frame this in personalised terms, that he doesn't do justice. It isn't his territory.
So, a man commits adultery and contracts AIDs. He infects his wife, and his wife and children who have not committed adultery, die. The leaders of ISIS go to war. So a multitude of ordinary people who have been trying to go about their day to day life some righteously and some not, lose their homes, hunger, are horribly maimed, and die. The one wholly good man there has been, is put to death in a savage and brutal way.
Can I ask people to hold off MPaul's post for the time being and not let it derail the thread, since as a host I can't pronounce on Commandment 1 issues, but have had to ask the Admins whether this post goes too far or is OK for discussion and it will take them time to get back to me.
Thanks,
Louise
Dead Horses Host
hosting off
@MPaul the admins' judgement is that this post constitutes good ol'fashioned flaming.
Which is a Commandment 1 offence.
To be clear, the offence here is not your views (although they may well be deemed offensive by many) but your attitude. We encourage opposing views to be expessed, rather than rule some views out of bounds, but we also ask for a level of civility and respect for those who disagree.
Scattergun attacks using inflammatory language encompassing everyone from Pentecostals to transgender individuals have no place here.
If you have a problem with this, take it to the Styx. If you must rant, take your chances in Hell. If you reoffend, don't be surprised if you get some shore leave without further notice.
/admin mode
Yeah, it's a little unclear when @MPaul calls abortion an "evil curse" whether he means that the human suffering described in the article from the OP was the result of an evil curse, the availability of medical procedures to save the lives of those women was an evil curse, or that the women preferring life over death was the result of an evil curse. [ tangent: don't we expect curses to be evil? Seems like a possible mention on the redundancy thread. ] The thing is that all of those interpretations seem to yield the same answer to the title question: there's no closeness to death that "close enough" under @MPaul's stated position to justify saving the life of a woman with a life-threatening pregnancy. Such an act always qualifies as "evil".
Evil, yes. But not a curse. Rather it's something freely chosen, not enforced by some super-, sub-, or unnatural force or entity.
When told to teach this with pro-life resources, I make sure I include this verse too.
Thank you, don't mind if I do. MPaul,you are called to Hell.
Well, in the circumstances set out there but not generally.
The problem I have with the Catholic position on this is that the life of the foetus is valued more highly than that of the woman. If it's a question of which life is to be saved, mother or foetus, the teaching is that it is to be the foetus. Why, I don't understand.
You aren't responsible for your visceral reactions. You are responsible for what you post.
Further attempts on your part to justify a Commandment 1 breach on this thread will result in suspension. As a minimum.
For the second time, either take such comments to Hell (where there is now a handy thread with your name on) or if you disagree with the ruling, challenge it in the Styx.
/admin mode
Perfectly biologically appropriate. It is a sad necessity that we have to facilitate as humanely as possible while we get rich and educated enough not to need it.
I think for most of us it's your attitude that sparing you a "visceral . . . reaction" is more important than saving a woman's life that's offensive.
Maybe it's a function of their "Biblical literalism"? After all, according to the Bible abortions should be performed by a priest in the tabernacle (in Christian terms a minister/priest in a church), not some doctor in a clinic or a hospital.
Yes, but that's not the question I was asking; perhaps I did not express it well. Let us assume a medical emergency in a pregnancy. The doctors can save either the mother or the foetus, but not both. AIUI, Catholic teaching is they should preserve the foetus and not the mother. Can anyone explain why?
Misogyny.
All I can think of is that the mother probably was baptised but the foetus has not.
I didn't say the position was rational.
Sorry. I'll get my coat.
I've a sort of a memory of reading a doorstopper of a not very good novel 50+ years ago which might have actually said that. It was written very much from the standpoint of 1930s/40s Catholicism, US East Coast I think. I can remember that it included a rather wild young woman who had a baby. There was a crisis in the delivery, and dutifully that was the decision. She died, and of course the baby grew up to be either a famous opera singer or a concert pianist. It therefore illustrated why this was a good thing.
The book had a rambling and complex plot, with a lot of characters in it, many of whose fate was determined by how faithfully their lives illustrated the tenets of pre-Vatican II neo-Thomism.
And of course, not all pregnancies are consensual.
Yet their intention as to the outcome does not change, proving the whole spreading-her-legs thing is just a ruse.
The notable thing about this proposed legislation (aside from the death penalty angle) is that, as described, there does not seem to be any exception permitting the aborting of a life-threatening pregnancy. Applying criminal penalties to women who get abortions (for any reason) seems like the obvious logical end point of anti-abortion rhetoric, yet it's something abortion opponents also routinely deny. Until now, I guess.
It seems to have been a best seller, but I agree, 'just plain bad' was a fairer description than mine.