Prolife Should Mean Prolife

A friend of mine recently died of pulmonary hypertension. She was 26. I could tell you that she was a wife, a mother, funny, kind and smart, but none of that would capture the essence of the wonderful person that she was.

She found out she had pulmonary hypertension a week after she found out she was pregnant with her second child. The worst moment of her life wasn't finding out that she would die before her 30th birthday, it was finding out that in order to live a few more years, to be there long enough for her son to remember her, she would have to have an abortion because the pregnancy would kill her in a matter of weeks. My friend wanted another child, but that wasn't going to happen. The only thing my friend could do was hang on a few more years for the sake of her son. That's not selfishness, that's sacrifice.

The Catholic Church thinks my friend made the wrong choice. The Catholic Church thinks my friend should have died right then rather than have an abortion, even though the fetus would not have been able to survive. The Catholic Church thinks a dead woman is a good outcome.

Seriously, fuck the Catholic Church.

A nun and administrator at a Catholic hospital in Phoenix has been reassigned and rebuked by the local bishop for agreeing that a severely ill woman needed an abortion to survive.

Sister Margaret McBride was on an ethics committee that included doctors that consulted with a young woman who was 11 weeks pregnant late last year, The Arizona Republic newspaper reported on its website Saturday. The woman was suffering from a life-threatening condition that likely would have caused her death if she hadn't had the abortion at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center.

So, we have two outcomes here: dead woman and no baby or live woman and no baby. Baby is not an option. I could sort of see the RCC's argument if one option resulted in a live birth, but that's not the case here. The only choice is between a live woman and a dead one. Most of us see saving lives as good, but not the RCC. (For those keeping score, aiding and abetting pedophiles is good, saving women's lives is bad.)

Really, that's morality? That's god's love? I'll take hell, thank you very much.