By Mike Appleton, Weekend Contributor
“In this case, a young woman in a crisis situation was put at risk because religious directives were allowed to interfere with her medical care. Patients should not be forced to suffer because of a hospital’s religious affiliation.”
-Kary Moss, executive director, ACLU of Michigan (quoted in the Detroit Free Press, December 2, 2013)
“The Church holds that all human life, both before and after birth, has inherent dignity, and that health care providers have the corresponding duty to respect the dignity of all their patients. This lawsuit argues that it is legally ‘negligent’ for the Catholic bishops to proclaim this core teaching of our faith. Thus, the suit urges the government to punish that proclamation with civil liability, a clear violation of the First Amendment.”
–Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, president, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (quoted in the National Catholic Register, December 7, 2013)
Tamesha Means was only 18 weeks pregnant when her water broke. A friend rushed her to the emergency room at Mercy Health Partners in Muskegon, Michigan. She was examined and sent home with instructions to follow up with her regular doctor at her next scheduled appointment. The following morning she returned to the hospital, bleeding and having painful contractions. She was given pain medication and again sent home. That very night she returned for the third time, in great pain and with an elevated temperature, suggestive of an infection. As the hospital was preparing paperwork to send her home yet again, Ms. Means went into labor and delivered a baby who survived fewer than three hours. She was then informed that she would need to make funeral arrangements.
Those are a few of the allegations contained in a new lawsuit that has outraged conservatives and the Catholic hierarchy by advancing traditional negligence principles as a basis for imposing liability against a surprising group of defendants.
The suit alleges negligence, but the targets are not the hospital, the treating physicians or the medical staff. Instead, the named defendants are the current and two former chairpersons of Catholic Health Ministries, an unincorporated association formed pursuant to Catholic canon law, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, a non-profit corporation whose members include all Catholic bishops in the United States and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Ms. Means claims that Catholic Health Ministries and the USCCB effectively prevented her from learning the truth about her medical condition, the consequent risks to her health and to the development of the fetus, and the treatment options lawfully available to her. More specifically, she asserts that she was not informed that the premature rupture of her membranes had made it virtually certain that the fetus would not survive, that continuing her pregnancy increased the risk of serious bacterial infection, possibly resulting in infertility or even death, or that inducing labor and terminating the pregnancy is a medically acceptable treatment under such circumstances. Lab tests performed following the miscarriage in fact confirmed that Ms. Means had developed acute chorioamnionitis and acute funisitis prior to going into labor.
The complaint reads much like a standard claim of medical malpractice. So why did Ms. Means elect not to sue the medical providers? And how can she link her unnecessary suffering and mental anguish to Catholic Health Ministries and the USCCB? In response to the first question, it has been suggested that the relevant statute of limitations barred a malpractice suit. But that explanation does not address the second question. And the critics have been harsh. The editors of National Review Online labeled the case “a gross violation of the First Amendment and a despicable political gambit” by the ACLU “to force Catholic organizations not only to subsidize abortions but to perform them as well.” Writing in the Washington Times, Robert Knight made the same accusation, but added, “Since only the Catholic Church bothered to build a hospital within 30 minutes of Ms. Means’ home, the ACLU contends that the facility should operate without religious principles guiding it or simply switch to the ACLU’s brand of moral relativism, where unborn children are merely options.” And in an opinion piece in the New York Post, Seth Lipsky declared, “Welcome to the next front in the war against religion.” He also suggested that perhaps the ACLU should sue the pope.
Either the critics have not taken the time to thoroughly review the lawsuit or they are merely repeating the frequently heard but nonsensical accusation that disagreement with the actions or policies of a religious organization is an assault on religious freedom. Or perhaps it’s both. In any event, the critics are wrong.
In order to understand the case, it is necessary to understand the relationships among the defendants and the impact of a document entitled Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, a set of written directives published by the USCCB and revised from time to time. Catholic Health Services is the Catholic sponsor of Trinity Health, a Catholic healthcare system that assumed the operations of Mercy Health Partners in Muskegon following a merger in 2008. Trinity’s corporate governing documents provide that it will conduct its business in accordance with Catholic teaching, including the USCCB directives.
The USCCB directives, now in their fifth edition, describe the role of the Catholic Church in its “ecclesial mission of health care” and set out 72 directives in 6 sections for making spiritual, pastoral and medical decisions in the provision of health care services. And, as one would expect, the directives are intended to be binding on Catholic hospitals. The preamble calls the directives “prescriptive.” Directive 5 should eliminate any confusion in that regard. It reads, “Catholic health care services must adopt these Directives as policy, require adherence to them within the institution as a condition for medical privileges and employment, and provide appropriate instruction regarding the Directives for administration, medical and nursing staff, and other personnel.” Directive 9 states in part, “Employees of a Catholic health care institution must respect and uphold the religious mission of the institution and adhere to these directives.” There are no exceptions for non-Catholic employees.
In sum, the USCCB has promulgated a set of rules intended to be binding on all Catholic health care facilities and all of their employees. Physicians who fail to comply risk the loss of admitting privileges. Employees who fail to comply risk the loss of employment. And the penalties have been enforced. Several years ago Sister Margaret McBride, the administrator at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, was declared excommunicated by her bishop for approving an ethics committee recommendation to terminate the pregnancy of a 27-year-old mother of three diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension. She was 11 weeks pregnant when she was admitted and her death was deemed a virtual certainty should her pregnancy continue. A cardiologist at a Catholic hospital in Durango, Colorado was disciplined last year for merely discussing the possibility of an abortion with a pregnant patient who had a serious cardiovascular condition known as Marfan syndrome, a disorder which can cause an aorta to rupture.
Of special significance in the Means case are Directives 27 and 45. Directive 27 appears in a section devoted to the professional-patient relationship. That section acknowledges the critical importance of “mutual respect, trust, honesty, and appropriate confidentiality” as elements of that relationship. Directive 26 stresses the necessity of “free and informed consent” to all medical procedures. Directive 27 provides, “Free and informed consent requires that the person or the person’s surrogate receive all reasonable information about the essential nature of the proposed treatment and its benefits; its risks, side-effects, consequences, and cost; and any reasonable and morally legitimate alternatives, including no treatment at all.” The operative phrase here is “morally legitimate.”
Directive 45 is a restatement of the Catholic position on abortion. “Abortion (that is, the directly intended termination of pregnancy before viability or the directly intended destruction of a viable fetus) is never permitted. Every procedure whose sole immediate effect is the termination of pregnancy before viability is an abortion, which, in its moral context, includes the interval between conception and implantation of the embryo.” It is when Directives 27 and 45 are read together that the conflict at the heart of the Means case becomes clear. It was not the refusal of Mercy Health Partners to provide abortion services that constituted the breach of duty alleged in the complaint, but the failure to inform Ms. Means of the option of abortion. Although responsive pleadings have not been filed to date (a motion for change of venue is pending), the bishops will undoubtedly argue that the duty alleged by Ms. Means does not exist because a Catholic hospital may not be compelled to provide information to patients regarding treatment or procedures which are not “morally legitimate” or which would violate the moral principle of “material cooperation.”
Directive 27 turns the notion of freedom of religion on its ears because it means that a patient in a Catholic hospital is required to abandon his or her own religious views on the floor of the admissions office. But don’t non-Catholic patients in Catholic hospitals understand this? I doubt that the subtleties of “informed consent” are explained in the emergency room. So why not go to a different hospital? In its retort to the audacity of the ACLU, National Review Online made that point. “But it does not seem to have occurred to them that if they don’t like Catholic hospitals, they should go somewhere else.”
That observation is long on snark and impertinence, but short on reality. There are two hospitals in Muskegon County, Michigan providing acute care and emergency room services: Mercy Health Partners-Mercy Campus and Mercy Health Partners-Hackley Campus. Following its merger last year with Catholic Health East in Pennsylvania, the Trinity Health system is one of the largest in the country, with a presence in 21 states. According to the 2011 American Hospital Association Annual Survey, there were 630 Catholic hospitals in the United States. Catholic hospitals care for one out of every six patients in the United States, and account for 16.5% of Medicare discharges and 13.7% of Medicaid discharges. Moreover, perhaps as a consequence of the traditional commitment of the Church to the poor and the uninsured, 32% of Catholic hospitals are located in rural counties. For these patients, as for Ms. Means, the invitation to “go somewhere else” is meaningless.
And this brings us to the issue of proximate cause. Assuming the truth of the allegations in the complaint, it is clear that Mercy Health Partners failed in its obligation to furnish Ms. Means all of the information to which she was lawfully entitled in order to make an informed decision concerning her own medical treatment. But what duty, if any, did the USCCB owe to her? Prof. Cathleen Kaveny, an acknowledged expert in law, moral theology and medical ethics, contends that there is no causal relationship whatsoever between the USCCB’s adoption of the directives and the injuries suffered by Ms. Means because they are enforceable only to the extent a health care facility contractually undertakes to comply with them. Under this view, the USCCB occupies a position similar to, say, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. It makes proposals, but lacks the legal authority to impose them.
I disagree with Prof. Kaveny because her opinion on the issue of proximate cause ignores the compelling moral force of the directives for any health care facility that wishes to declare itself Catholic. Moral theology is not an abstract academic enterprise; it is intended to inform real life decisions about real life problems. Furthermore, it cannot be seriously disputed that the directives have been promulgated with the expectation that they will be accepted and followed as the authoritative teaching of the American Catholic hierarchy. In issuing the directives, the bishops certainly knew that they would be formally adopted by Catholic hospitals and that the patients in those hospitals would be subjected to their requirements. Having determined to draft and publish the directives, the USCCB assumed a duty of care toward those who would forseeably be directly affected by their implementation. That duty extended to Ms. Means. (Prof. Kaveny also believes that the hospital misinterpreted the directives in the Means case, but that is a separate topic for another time).
Regardless of the outcome of the Means case, it properly focuses attention once again on taxpayer support of religious institutions in the performance of ostensibly secular functions. In Bradfield v. Roberts, 175 U.S. 291 (1899), Congress appropriated $30,000.00 for the construction of two isolation wings at Providence Hospital, a Catholic facility operated by the Sisters of Charity. The units were intended for the care of indigent patients under a contract between the hospital and the District of Columbia. The issue was whether the appropriation violated the Establishment Clause. It did not, declared the court, because the hospital was a secular corporation rather than a religious body. “It is simply a case of a secular corporation being managed by people who hold to the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, but who nevertheless are managing the corporation according to the law under which it exists.” 175 U.S. 298-99. The decision was unanimous.
We have come a long way since the Bradfield decision, the first case to test the constitutionality of public funding of a sectarian hospital. And the issues are now far more complicated. The Means case questions the extent to which religious doctrine may permissibly govern the performance of a secular function by a health care facility supported in part by public funds before the Establishment Clause is implicated. But perhaps we should be asking a different question. If the Catholic Church defines the operation of hospitals as “the ecclesial mission of health care,” can any public funding of those facilities satisfy the tests in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971)? Perhaps there is truth in the observation of Dr. Marie T. Hilliard of the National Catholic Bioethics Center that ” there is a need to correct the misperception that the delivery of health care is a secular endeavor.” If that is the case, the Means case could be significant indeed.
davidm:
I can’t tell if you are just being bullheaded or actually do not grasp the point of my comment. The Means case is not about abortion; it is about informed consent. That is why your question about my religion is irrelevant. I am a Catholic, but that does not mean that I would support a statute compelling you to show up at Mass next Sunday.
And I am quite familiar with the Directives, thank you. Here once again is the problem. There are certain types of medical procedures that are entirely lawful but that run afoul of Catholic moral theology. Abortion is only one of them. If you have read the Directives, you are aware that Catholic hospitals will also not perform sterilization procedures or certain forms of artificial insemination. No one, including the ACLU, has suggested that Catholic hospitals should be compelled to provide medical treatments that are contrary to Catholic doctrine. However, all patients are legally entitled to know what procedures are available to treat their particular conditions, the risks and benefits of those procedures and the approximate associated costs. Hospitals and physicians have a duty to disclose that information. A regulation which prohibits a physician from revealing the availability of a treatment to a patient interferes with the requirements of the physician-patient relationship and the patient’s right to the information necessary to make an informed decision. The Means case is an attempt to correct this problem, and it is a perfectly rational approach.
With respect to the problem of proximate cause, I think it important to remember that the Catholic Church is not a democracy. Catholics do not elect their bishops or their local pastors. If parishioners do not like their pastor, they cannot call a meeting of church elders and fire him. Likewise, the teaching authority of the Church is not to be questioned. Therefore, when the USCCB issues the Directives, they are not to be treated as suggestions for making your hospital stay a pleasant one. They are issued with the expectation that they will be implemented as binding rules. The bishops know that, and that is their intent. Accordingly, it is certainly forseeable that patients in Catholic hospitals will not given material information which might have a bearing on the decisions they make in concert with their treating physicians. This, as they say, is not rocket science.
Finally, you stated earlier that, “It is immoral for her to trust a hospital and then sue them when she feels that her trust has been misplaced.” That is a complete misstatement of the law governing fiduciary relationships. The common law for hundreds of years has imposed liability for the breach of such relationships. In fact, an intentional failure to disclose material information when there is a duty to speak is a species of fraud and may form the basis for an award of both actual and punitive damages as an intentional tort. Perhaps the ACLU should seek leave to amend.
Mike Appleton wrote: “I can’t tell if you are just being bullheaded or actually do not grasp the point of my comment. The Means case is not about abortion; it is about informed consent.”
I’m not being bullheaded. I disagree with your perspective. Informed consent is a pretext for the bigger objective of secularizing health care and promoting a culture of death for the unborn.
What is the informed consent about? ABORTION!!! It is like an elephant standing in the room that you refuse to acknowledge.
Consider the following “informed consent” issues from the ACLU complaint:
22. MHP did not raise or discuss with Plaintiff the option of terminating her pregnancy, despite the risks to her health of continuing the pregnancy, nor the fact that the fetus she was carrying had almost no chance of survival.
23. MHP did not inform Plaintiff that MHP’s policy does not permit it to help Plaintiff complete the miscarriage, e.g., by inducing labor and terminating the pregnancy, as long as there is a fetal heartbeat.
24. MHP did not inform Plaintiff that if she desired to terminate her pregnancy she would have to go to another hospital.
Clearly, the ethics of abortion is central to this case.
What makes the ACLU death-to-the-unborn culture better than the religious life-for-the-unborn culture? Is it because that culture provides the best protection for the mother? Is a mother-selfish culture really the best ethics by which doctors should guide their moral choices in health care procedures? Are these ethical questions really suppose to be discussed in detail with every patient like Tamesha Means? Are the doctors suppose to take a time-out and say, “we don’t know how you feel about abortion, but you know, you could go to another hospital and kill your baby. We don’t believe in doing that, nor do we advise it, but some doctors would advise it because it offers you better protection from the harm that might come to you from infection.” Really? They are suppose to abandon their ethical values just because the ACLU thinks it is an inferior ethical value?
Mike Appleton wrote: “I am a Catholic, but that does not mean that I would support a statute compelling you to show up at Mass next Sunday.”
This case is not about compelling Tamesha Means to attend Mass next Sunday. This case is about compelling Tamesha Means to consider going to a non-Catholic hospital to have an abortion. This is about purging the current religious ethics of the hospital and replacing it with a secular ethic that disregards any right of the unborn to continue living.
As a Catholic, do you support the right of the hospital to have a Catholic pro-life ethic guiding its health care decisions, or do you side with the secular ACLU standards and favor the pro-abortion ethic? What makes the side you choose the correct side?
David,
Logical thinking has been proven repeatedly to not be your strong point. This was about deliberate withholding of critical health care information from a competent patient.
The reasons for withholding that information had nothing to do with health care and everything to do with the religious dogma of a single sect of the religious community at large. Got that? The RCC is a single sect of Christianity, not Christianity as a whole, which has thousands of sects, some large and some small. As I have pointed out here and other places, it is medical malpractice for a doctor or a health care provider such as a hospital or clinic to go along with any religious or secular person interfering with the private communication between a physician and his or her patient. Especially considering those people are not physicians.
Charlton Stanley wrote: “Logical thinking has been proven repeatedly to not be your strong point. This was about deliberate withholding of critical health care information from a competent patient.”
Ironically, your statement here is clearly among the most illogical post made in this thread. This case is about NEGLIGENCE, not a deliberate withholding of information. The complaint filed by the ACLU starts out in the first sentence with the following:
“Plaintiff Tamesha Means brings this negligence action against the United States Conference for Catholic Bishops and others for promulgating and implementing directives that cause pregnant women who are suffering from a miscarriage to be denied appropriate medical care, including information about their condition and treatment options.”
https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/complaint_final_1.pdf
Throughout the complaint, the terms negligence and omissions is the substance of the complaint which they claim are caused by the Health Care directives that provide the moral and ethical medical philosophy of the hospital.
Furthermore, directive 27 of the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services says very plainly:
“Free and informed consent requires that the person or the person’s surrogate receive all reasonable information about the essential nature of the proposed treatment and its benefits; its risks, side-effects, consequences, and cost; and any reasonable and morally legitimate alternatives, including no treatment at all.”
http://www.usccb.org/about/doctrine/ethical-and-religious-directives/
Charton Stanley wrote: “The reasons for withholding that information had nothing to do with health care and everything to do with the religious dogma of a single sect of the religious community at large. Got that?”
Now you are being quite ridiculous. Exactly what religious dogma prohibits doctors from sharing information with a patient? Furthermore, the religious ethics under question here is embraced by more than just one religious sect. There are virtually thousands of religious sects that embrace an ethics of an equal right to life for the unborn. The ACLU is not stupid about this. They clearly do not hide the broader implications of this case when they refer to the directives with the general term “religious” rather than the specific term “Catholic.” The complaint reads on page 3, “As a direct result of these religious Directives, Ms. Means suffered severe, unnecessary, and foreseeable physical and emotional pain and suffering. She seeks both damages and a declaration that Defendants’ actions were negligent, not only to provide a remedy for the trauma she suffered, but also to prevent other women in her situation from suffering similar harm in the future.”
This case is just another attack in the culture war between religious ethics that protects the life of the unborn, and secular ethics which treats the unborn as a mere piece of tissue in the woman’s body which she can excise at will with flagrant disregard for its potential human life.
The ACLU seems to ignore directive 47 in their complaint, which clearly states:
“Operations, treatments, and medications that have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman are permitted when they cannot be safely postponed until the unborn child is viable, even if they will result in the death of the unborn child.”
The ACLU contradicts itself concerning the facts of this case. In paragraph 38 of their complaint they say, “At the time MHP sent Plaintiff home, Plaintiff’s treating physician suspected she had chorioamnionitis, a significant bacterial infection that can cause serious damage to a woman’s health, including infertility and even death. However, MHP did not inform Plaintiff of this possible infection.” Then immediately following in paragraph 39 they state, “Before the discharge, MHP told Plaintiff that if her temperature went back up, she should return to the hospital because she may have an infection.” Well, which is it? Did they inform her of the possible infection or not? It sounds to me like they did inform her.
The bottom line is that Tamesha Means was not harmed at all by the care provided her, and the outcome is the same as it would have been if a secular hospital advised Tamesha Means to induce labor and intentionally kill her unborn baby. This lawsuit is completely without merit. It is political judicial activism at its worst.
The topic of my comment was not abortion. I was attempting (obviously in vain) to initiate an exchange of views on the increasingly murky jurisprudence on the Establishment Clause. However, since any mention of abortion immediately redirects attention, I feel compelled to weigh in to correct what I perceive to be a rather ham-handed hatchet job by davidm.
When I was a baby law review editor at the University of Texas in the fall of 1970, my first job was wading through advance sheets in search of decisions that the case notes editor might find worthy of examination. One afternoon I came across a decision out of the Northern District of Texas that immediately struck me as highly significant and likely to generate a great deal of controversy. A three-judge panel had ruled that the Texas abortion statute, which prohibited all abortions other than those necessary for “saving the life of the mother,” unconstitutionally infringed on a woman’s Ninth Amendment right to choose whether to bear children. The case was Roe v. Wade, 314 F.Supp. 1217 (N.D. Tex. 1970). I decided to write a note on the decision myself. For those of you who are prepared to endure the analysis of a second-year law student, you can find the note at 49 Tex. L. Rev. 537 (1971).
Over the course of the next several months I did a great deal of research on the history and legal treatment of abortion. I also had the opportunity to discuss the case in depth with Sarah Weddington, who was also in Austin at the time. She was and is a highly intelligent and caring individual and a very fine lawyer. Her efforts in the case are praiseworthy and are recognized to be by those who lived through the ’60s and ’70s and understand something about the social, cultural and legal status of women at the time.
(to be continued)
Mike Appleton wrote: “The topic of my comment was not abortion. I was attempting (obviously in vain) to initiate an exchange of views on the increasingly murky jurisprudence on the Establishment Clause.”
Of course this case is about abortion. The premise of the ACLU is that the religious pro-life / anti-abortion paradigm guiding hospital policy resulted in bad health care for Tamesha Means. They argue that because she was not given the option of abortion by the hospital, that her life was put at greater risk. Their view is that if the hospital were guided by the secular pro-abortion / anti-fetus paradigm, it would result in better health care. It doesn’t seem to matter to the ACLU that Tamesha Means was not harmed by the pro-life hospital policy. The Establishment Clause argument is just a pretext for the progressive anti-traditional purging of religion from all public institutions.
Mike, aren’t you Catholic? Do you disagree with your church on this issue? Do you believe that your church policies cause bad health care?
===============
The USCCB directives are now in their fifth edition, approved by the U.S. bishops in 2009, and are available at http://www.usccb.org. The 43-page document includes 72 directives.
They “urge respectful and compassionate care for both mothers and their children, both during and after pregnancy,” Archbishop Kurtz said. They “restate the universal and consistent teaching of the Catholic Church on defending the life of the unborn child,” he added, a teaching he noted “also mirrors the Hippocratic oath that gave rise to the very idea of medicine as a profession, a calling with its own life-affirming moral code.”
“A robust Catholic presence in health care helps build a society where medical providers show a fierce devotion to the life and health of each patient, including those most marginalized and in need, he said. “It witnesses against a utilitarian calculus about the relative value of different human lives. And it provides a haven for pregnant women and their unborn children regardless of their financial resources.”
================
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1305147.htm
No David, I googled her name and hit a nonright wing uunbiased source.
And why do you seem so hung up on lesbisanis. She has also been reported as bisexual and had 3 children (the “normal” way)
So because she was a drug addict lesbian, that made her seek out an abortion? Is it a possibility that women who are not lesbians or drug addicts have had abortions? Really, what do these traits have to do with a woman who is pro choice? There are lesbians who actually chose to have children. Women who are upstanding citizens have found themselves in the sad position of getting an abortion. Life isn’t black and white, it’s shades of gray.
Ask McCorvey what her dreams for the future are, and the first thing she says is she’d like to take a public-speaking course. She plans to talk a lot more.
Ask ( McCorvey ) if, knowing what she does now, she would have had the abortion in 1969 had it been available, and she is equally as adamant.
“In a heartbeat,” she says. “Sure I would.”
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19940703&slug=1918616
(Their “legal perspective” is that women should have control over their bodies. They were right then, they are right now. If you don’t want to have an abortion no one is forcing you to have one, but if you can’t go forward with a pregnancy, no one should be able to force you to go forward with it. (and esp in cases of incest, rape, health of the woman, visability of fetus, emotional/physical.)
leejcaroll – 1994? Really? You must have had to search really hard for that old interview. Try to keep up. This statement you quote was back when Norma McCorvey was a drug addict lesbian. Now as an ex-lesbian, she believes abortion is immoral and that it should be regulated by the States. She petitioned the SCOTUS in 2005 to overturn Roe v. Wade based upon the harm that it causes women.
Nick
Caring is absence of money?
Oh! is that your fear of “having to pay for someone else” through taxes?
Nick, No but sometimes money means (is the means) to caring for those who need help
leej, Caring is money?
Samantha s ometimes life of the mother may not mean her physical life but her psychiatric life, My mother had to go before a male judge, not a medical person, and let him decide that her mental state was such that he would let her have the abortion her doctors knew she needed. This is a medical decision, not a legal decision. Abortion is between, and should remain between, a woman, and her doctor. The church has repeatedly shown that once you are alive, your life is not so important. The “conservatives and right wingers” by reduction of food stamps, and other safety nets have shown their disdain for those already alive and in need.
“….taxpayer support of religious institutions….”
Some people don’t read carefully.
I will source the statistic (so as not to be guilty of diversion), but of the 100s of millions of abortions in the world so far, how many had been performed to save the life of a mother? Would one out of a thousand be a fair and plausible stat?
Samantha, We discussed “The shameful debacle” mentioned here previously. This is the Munoz case and it was established the hospital is PUBLICALLY funded. “We are entitled to our own opinions, not our own facts.”
Samantha, You can debate w/ focus and openness. You merely need to learn w/ whom to debate and ignore. I think you’re seeing on this thread and others the folks who fall into both categories.
Samantha, this is the good old US of A last I looked. Has China bought us lock stock and barrell without me noticing?
Samantha: ‘…never mind that a woman’s life is never in danger in 99.999 percent of all abortions’
Citation, please.
Obviously, annieofwi hasn’t been to China, much less read about it.
Obviously David you’re not very familiar with Muskegon, Michigan…. It’s fairly conservative…… Michigan has one of the strictest abortion laws of any state….I know Sarah weddington that represented Norma….. She only changed her mind after the case was decided…..
AY wrote: “you’re not very familiar with Muskegon, Michigan…. It’s fairly conservative…”
Of course it is, which is why it is a target of the ACLU which is not conservative. Do not forget that the ACLU has filed this lawsuit. They found a poor black woman to provide the standing they need to make their case, which is similar to what happened in Roe.
AY wrote: “I know Sarah weddington that represented Norma….. She only changed her mind after the case was decided…”
Right, but Norma was never that interested in the legal case. She was basically a lesbian who wanted an abortion. She was interested in herself at the time. Ask Sarah how many times Norma went to court with her. The answer is zero. Sarah and her friends persuaded Norma to sign papers which she did not read. Norma says that she thought they were insurance papers. Norma begged them to help her get an abortion, but Sarah told her they needed a pregnant woman for their case. So the truth is that “Jane Roe” never had an abortion. She gave up her baby for adoption. The lawyer on the case, Sarah Weddington, was the one who had had an abortion.
Sarah Weddington and her group of graduate student activists at the University of Texas were working on this case long before they ever met Norma McCorvey. They had gathered information on States where abortion was legal and States where it was not so they could advise women where to go for safe abortions. The background of Sarah was typical of what many label as a rebellious woman. She was a 1960’s feminist. Sarah was a Methodist preacher’s kid who had become pregnant out of wedlock. So she went to Mexico and had an illegal abortion. Wanting to change the laws and foist their legal perspective upon everyone in the nation, her group was looking for someone to file an abortion case. Norma McCorvey happened along who gave them the legal standing needed to present the case. Now the fruit of her legal work on this has divided our nation for over 40 years. Nice friend you have there.
Norma McCorvey says she was used as a pawn by the lawyers. Sarah Weddington has said that she wishes she had picked someone other than Norma McCorvey as the plaintiff in the case. These are clear signs of judicial activism, changing the law through the judiciary rather than the legislative branch of government. I don’t think this kind of legal practice is good for the country. This case by the ACLU seems like more of the same of this kind of judicial activism being used to persecute religious institutions involved with health care.
The notion that any entity is forcing abortions on women is ludicrous, yet women would be forced to give birth, even after death.
I wish there was a review and edit function.