Intents and purposes
Okay...I'll state right now that this is going to be pretty politically and religiously charged. I'm just saying that so you can skip it if you so desire.
I've been reading a lot of discussion about the nun in Phoenix who was excommunicated for allowing the abortion to save a critically ill woman at a Catholic hospital. Even after everything I've read, I guess I still can't understand the bishop's stance on this. Here's why:
If a doctor performs an operation on a person and that person dies, the doctor is not guilty of a mortal sin. The doctors who performed the abortion, as well as those who gave their consent, are, according to Catholic theology.
But let's examine the first situation: a doctor performing a surgery on a patient. Now what if I told you that the doctor was a Nazi doctor and he was conducting some hideous experiment. No, he doesn't intend for the patient to die, but if they do so as a result of this awful experiment, the doctor technically is less culpable than the doctors that saved the woman because of his intent not to kill. And in my mind, this is very hard to distinguish this scenario from the "it's okay to take out a fallopian tube and have the baby die because of it but it's not okay to remove the baby (and hence kill) the baby directly".
And before you tell me I'm being melodramatic or must not understand something critical, I would like to remind you that while the Catholic church has been very vocal in its opposition to abortion, it turned a blind eye to the holocaust (not apologizing for its lack of action until fifty years later).
Let's make the assumption that God exists and is an omnipotent being. Therefore, God can tell if a person is committing an action because of love and respect and basic humanity or if they are performing an action with evil intentions. He/She can see the whole picture. Which means I'm fairly certain that the people involved in performing the abortion have not committed a mortal sin because they did so with the intent to preserve a woman's life, while the holocaust 'doctors' have committed that sin, many times over...regardless of what Catholic doctrine says.
So this brings me back to the abortion issue in general: if a woman is using abortion for birth control versus having some real valid concerns about her and the child's potential life, God should know which reasons are 'valid' and which aren't. As long as they are not doing anything illegal (which is then a problem about which society has a right to be concerned), then the issue is really between them and God. And really, if one thinks that one should 'let God's will be done' (as in it's apparently alright to let a woman die as a result of a pregnancy complication because it is apparently God's will), then why are these the same people who are so anxious to legislate their religious beliefs onto the rest of us? If God doesn't want someone to have an abortion, wouldn't he do something to prevent it, just like he would heal the woman if he wanted to? Or is God not moving fast enough?
I've been reading a lot of discussion about the nun in Phoenix who was excommunicated for allowing the abortion to save a critically ill woman at a Catholic hospital. Even after everything I've read, I guess I still can't understand the bishop's stance on this. Here's why:
If a doctor performs an operation on a person and that person dies, the doctor is not guilty of a mortal sin. The doctors who performed the abortion, as well as those who gave their consent, are, according to Catholic theology.
But let's examine the first situation: a doctor performing a surgery on a patient. Now what if I told you that the doctor was a Nazi doctor and he was conducting some hideous experiment. No, he doesn't intend for the patient to die, but if they do so as a result of this awful experiment, the doctor technically is less culpable than the doctors that saved the woman because of his intent not to kill. And in my mind, this is very hard to distinguish this scenario from the "it's okay to take out a fallopian tube and have the baby die because of it but it's not okay to remove the baby (and hence kill) the baby directly".
And before you tell me I'm being melodramatic or must not understand something critical, I would like to remind you that while the Catholic church has been very vocal in its opposition to abortion, it turned a blind eye to the holocaust (not apologizing for its lack of action until fifty years later).
Let's make the assumption that God exists and is an omnipotent being. Therefore, God can tell if a person is committing an action because of love and respect and basic humanity or if they are performing an action with evil intentions. He/She can see the whole picture. Which means I'm fairly certain that the people involved in performing the abortion have not committed a mortal sin because they did so with the intent to preserve a woman's life, while the holocaust 'doctors' have committed that sin, many times over...regardless of what Catholic doctrine says.
So this brings me back to the abortion issue in general: if a woman is using abortion for birth control versus having some real valid concerns about her and the child's potential life, God should know which reasons are 'valid' and which aren't. As long as they are not doing anything illegal (which is then a problem about which society has a right to be concerned), then the issue is really between them and God. And really, if one thinks that one should 'let God's will be done' (as in it's apparently alright to let a woman die as a result of a pregnancy complication because it is apparently God's will), then why are these the same people who are so anxious to legislate their religious beliefs onto the rest of us? If God doesn't want someone to have an abortion, wouldn't he do something to prevent it, just like he would heal the woman if he wanted to? Or is God not moving fast enough?