Religion

Irish Bishops Issue Statement On Savita’s Death

-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger

zucchettoWe have previously discussed the case of Mrs. Savita Halappanavar, a pregnant woman in Ireland who died in agony when doctors refused to perform an abortion that could have saved her life. The Irish Catholic Bishops’ Office has issued a statement regarding Savita’s death. The statement provides no guidance that would help prevent a similar episode from occurring again.

Savita’s death has been a huge PR problem for the Catholic church and should lead a rational person to question those who claim to have the authority to determine morality for us all. A morality that cannot be sustained via rational thought should be discarded. This statement makes no attempt to rationally defend Catholic moral teaching.

The Bishops state that:

Where a seriously ill pregnant woman needs medical treatment which may put the life of her baby at risk, such treatments are ethically permissible provided every effort has been made to save the life of both the mother and her baby.

Note the use of the term “baby” to refer to a fetus. Conflating baby and fetus is a common psychological ploy to appeal to our emotional self rather than our rational self. Who do we want determining the best medical treatment, a medical professional, or a member of the Clan of the Red Beanie™?

In the real world, the choice often comes down to saving one life or the other. If an abortion is best medical treatment to save the woman’s life, the Bishops have an answer:

… abortion is the direct and intentional destruction of an unborn baby and is gravely immoral in all circumstances …

Apparently, it is not immoral to let the woman suffer an agonizing death that is easily preventable.

The Bishop’s statement also contradicts itself. On the one hand, the Bishops say that “such treatments are ethically permissible,” and on the other hand, abortions are “immoral in all circumstances.” An abortion, in Savita’s case, would have been a medical treatment that put the life of her fetus at extreme risk. Such a medical treatment cannot be both “ethically permissible” and “gravely immoral.”

The irrationality of Catholic morality is evidenced when a woman’s life is saved by an abortion. Often, she is then able to have other children that would never have existed without that abortion. A zero-tolerance of abortion alleviates the condition having to think.

H/T: PZ Myers, Dr. Jen Gunter.

Please help support our blog by going here and registering (just takes 10.3 seconds) and voting (under the News/Analysis section). Thank you.

74 thoughts on “Irish Bishops Issue Statement On Savita’s Death”

  1. “Blouise, You have a fight brewing in Ohio. ” (SwM)

    Chuckle, been following that have you? 😉

    Oh yes, it’s shaping up to be a huge battle. To take a page from Tony’s playbook, the teabaggers in power are driving a whole lot of young women and their male friends to get actively engaged in this battle who otherwise wouldn’t be paying any attention. Teabaggers are becoming more and more unpopular as their agenda is being pushed down peoples’ throats.

    2014 is going to be a very interesting election

  2. idealist707 1, December 1, 2012 at 1:27 pm

    Dredd,

    Are you pulling my leg? Beautiful stuff! That’s one of the many reasons I want to live a hundred years to encounter and contemplate such writings.

    When living on a small island with no more than 150 miles to the seashore, then one gets to be a bit crazy.
    =========================================
    Both.

    It is true history, but it is also “a bit crazy.”

  3. Dontcha love love the sick irony of man in dresses telling women——–anything?

  4. Blouise, You have a fight brewing in Ohio. The Texas legislature is back in session again and who knows what Perry and the gang have planned to further humiliate women. The dems picked up a few seats so the republicans no longer have a super majority but tea partyers have control of a lot of the committees so who knows. In 2010, they got the sonogram with the probe passed.

  5. CNN) — Savita Halappanavar died last month in Ireland after being denied a lifesaving abortion. If she had lived in the United States — where in two months we will mark four decades of safe and legal abortion on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling — she likely would be alive today.

    I was a little girl when this decision overturned state bans across the country that prevented women from access to medically safe procedures. Unlike my mother’s generation — when women often died from self-induced abortions or back-alley abortions performed by a person with no skills or training, often under unsanitary conditions — my siblings, friends, classmates and I grew up with the ability to make informed decisions when faced with an unintended or medically problematic pregnancy.

    Worldwide, many women are unable to make personal health decisions. The consequences are grave. According to a World Health Organization report, about 47,000 women die each year around the world from unsafe abortions. This accounts for about 13% of all maternal deaths. Most of these women die in developing countries, where severe legal restrictions and lack of access to modern medical care drive women to seek unsafe procedures. By contrast, abortion in the United States is incredibly safe: Fewer than 0.3% of women experience complications that require hospitalization.

    But Halappanavar died in a highly developed country. After 17 weeks of pregnancy, she went to the hospital, miscarrying and in extreme pain. Her husband says doctors denied requests for an abortion to save her life; after three days the fetus died, and after suffering for four days, Savita Halappanavar died of blood poisoning.

    Her death in Ireland serves as a stark reminder that living in a developed country does not necessarily protect us from backward health policies. Lawmakers in Ireland who defend that country’s near-total ban on abortion rely on the same politically driven arguments echoed across much of the U.S. by opponents of women’s freedom to choose, as they try to chip away at access to safe and legal abortion.

    In Ohio, for example, legislators are considering a bill that would ban abortion early in pregnancy, even before some women know they are pregnant. According to an analysis from the Guttmacher Institute, half the women in our nation live in states hostile to abortion access; and in 2011 alone, states enacted a record 92 provisions seeking to restrict women’s access to abortion.

    This is not the legacy I wish for my children. I want my son and daughter to grow up in a country where they make their own health care decisions and their privacy is respected. Unless we stand up to these attacks on women’s health and personal decision making, we are sure to hear more stories like Halappanavar’s — and this time closer to home.

    Senseless decisions do not just happen in other countries. In Nebraska, doctors refused to allow Danielle Deaver to end her pregnancy after she learned her daughter would not survive, citing the state’s ban on abortion past 20 weeks gestation. Instead, Deaver was forced to deliver an infant who died moments after birth.

    Evidence shows time and again that banning abortion does not make it go away — it merely leads to more unsafe abortions and more women dying. Some of the countries with the highest abortion rates worldwide have the most restrictive policies. On the other hand, countries with the lowest abortion rates tend to have more supportive abortion policies and strong policy support for contraception.

    Policymakers truly interested in reducing abortion should support strong investment in contraception at home and abroad. Under the Affordable Care Act, millions more Americans will be eligible for birth control coverage without a co-pay — which will have a tremendous impact for women across the country who find it a struggle to use contraception consistently because of its cost.

    The U.S. is the largest investor in global family planning and HIV/AIDS programs in the world. We need to protect these investments from budget cuts to ensure that women everywhere can plan and space their children’s births and prevent unintended pregnancy and disease. As the United Nations recently declared, access to contraception is a universal human right.

    We also need to fight for better access to safe and legal abortion at home and abroad. As Halappanavar’s case devastatingly demonstrates, even during a planned pregnancy, a woman must sometimes consider an abortion. The difficult decision to end a pregnancy, to choose adoption or to raise a child should be up to the woman, in consultation with her family, her faith and her doctor.

    On January 22, when my family honors the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I want to be able to tell my children that our country is moving forward, not turning back the clocks. We will remember Savita Halappanavar on that day and repeat the mantra echoed at vigils in Ireland and around the world honoring her wholly preventable death: Never again.

  7. Dredd,

    Are you pulling my leg? Beautiful stuff! That’s one of the many reasons I want to live a hundred years to encounter and contemplate such writings.

    When living on a small island with no more than 150 miles to the seashore, then one gets to be a bit crazy.

  8. SwM,

    What’s possible? A Class Action law suit against these legislators for violating our rights to privacy under HIPPA or our basic rights to self-determination or … you get my drift … let’s take the fight to them.

  9. Swartmore Mom,

    I can second that. At the gym yesterday, lots of old ladies and young female instructors were told by me that the younger women were the ones that got Obama elected, by ca 70 to 30 percent for Romney.

    Yeah, Obama!!! was the reply from all.

    The main newspaper Nov 7 headlined: The world breathes a sigh of relief.

  11. As this god is omnipotent, then he becomes the biggest abortionist ever existed because miscarriages happen all the times. Let’s not forget that.these same people are for the death penalty.

    Little do they understand that we as humans have to consume life in order to survive. There is no other way.Hence, life is nothing but a bacterium in different forms.

    On the side note, this unfortunate thing happened in the REPUBLIC of Ireland which is “AKIN” to the REPUBLICAN party’s platform.

  12. idealist707 1, December 1, 2012 at 10:38 am

    Can anybody quote the Bible where abortion is forbidden, or is it just an outgrowth of thou shalt not kill???
    ==========================================
    I have been reading up on ancient Irish history, specifically some Celtic ideology.

    I found that Bob Dylan descended from surfers along the Irish coast, out on highway 61 where abortion clinics were first located:

    The sea had also its beneficent aspects. The shore was “a place of revelation of science,” and the sea sympathised with human griefs. At the Battle of Ventry “the sea chattered, telling the losses, and the waves raised a heavy, woeful great moan in wailing them.” In other cases in Ireland, by a spell put on the waves, or by the intuitive knowledge of the listener, it was revealed that they were wailing for a death or describing some distant event. In the beautiful song sung by the wife of Cael, “the wave wails against the shore for his death,” and in Welsh myth the waves bewailed the death of Dylan, “son of the wave,” and were eager to avenge it. The noise of the waves rushing into the vale of Conwy were his dying groans. In Ireland the roaring of the sea was thought to be prophetic of a king’s death or the coming of important news; and there, too, certain great waves were celebrated in story–Clidna’s, Tuaithe’s, and Rudhraidhe’s. Nine waves, or the ninth wave, partly because of the sacred nature of the number nine, partly because of the beneficent character of the waves, had a great importance. They formed a barrier against invasion, danger, or pestilence, or they had a healing effect.

    (Ancient Ireland). This ritualistic song tells of other goings on out on sacred Highway 61:

  13. Great job David. It is no surprise that the Bishops would contradict themselves in their own statement. Their whole belief system is being challenged by the fact that they have broken the civil law in many countries by still hiding pedophiles and this latest atrocity is one more example that they do not believe what Christ was teaching.
    Blouise,
    I like your prostate idea! 🙂

  14. What’s wrong with these red beanie guys is that their own tribe has invested them with way too much authority. When people obsequiously agree with your bullsh*t you can get to thinking what you say has real value; otherwise, how come all the nodding solemn heads, all the respectful bows, all the bruised knees, worshipping at your royal tushie day after day? So you get to imagining that you’re really some hot stuff there, and that can give you the “I can get away with just saying anything” blues.

    Pompous asses. Will somebody please knock them off their perches?

  15. bettykath,

    I have often asked that question … they should be held legally responsible for the pain and anguish they willingly pass on to others.

  16. Bettykath boy I would love to see someone go after them for that.
    SWM with the repubs still firmly in control of the House we could still be headed down that road.

  17. nal:

    is this the sort of moral clarity you are looking for?

    “Never mind the vicious nonsense of claiming that an embryo has a “right to life.” A piece of protoplasm has no rights—and no life in the human sense of the term. One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months. To equate a potential with an actual, is vicious; to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former, is unspeakable. . . .”

    Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Letter from 1976.

    “An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).

    Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?”

    Ayn Rand, Of Living Death from the Voice of Reason

  18. Somethings wrong when old white men without medical training, whether they red beanies or sit in a legislature, proscribe medical treatment or the refusal of it. Can they be charged with practicing medicine without a license? Can they be sued for medical malpractice?

  19. lee, We were dangerously close to becoming like Ireland without the free healthcare that they get.

  20. Sickening the bill was even introduced. sickening the amount who voted for it, and especially and disheartening that 15 dems voted for it.

Comments are closed.