...But, it’s also true that doctors are leaders, and they possess critical information and experience that the patient lacks. Most of the time, the patient pays close attention to what the physician recommends and follows our guidance.Good medicine follows good morals. You can’t have good medicine without good morals. Life is a gift, and doctors and nurses are called to protect and preserve human life from conception to natural end.
While acknowledging the lack of specific information regarding the Phoenix case, I cannot recall any similar situation in which abortion was advised to treat pulmonary hypertension. In my experience, when you think your way through a medical problem, you come up with solutions that provide better treatment for the mother, and these solutions allow the baby to grow large enough to survive outside the uterus...
Things are different: Every 20 seconds abortion kills a baby in the United States. That fact has influenced our nation’s culture and has shaped medical ethics, though most doctors do not participate in abortions.
Some physicians use the “principle of double effect” to defend direct abortion when pregnant patients face a life-threatening condition. But I don’t think the principle of double effect applies at all in a case like this. What you have is the mother and the baby: two patients. If you perform an abortion on the baby, you don’t have two effects (such as implementing a medical treatment that indirectly kills the patient’s unborn child); you just have one effect: killing the baby. Some physicians and ethicists are confused. Everyone should just say: “We don’t do abortions; we treat the mother and the baby.”...
Many physicians and patients are products of an educational system that excludes God. If you acknowledge that God exists and that he is the Creator and we his creatures, you accept the dignity of all human persons in a world governed by a stable moral order. Without that awareness, there is the threat of moral disorder and tyranny by the powerful...
In the National Catholic Register, Joan Frawley Desmond talks to neonatalogy pioneer and "brain death" expert Dr. Paul Byrne about the abortion recently performed at a Catholic hospital in Phoenix as well as changing attitudes in the medical field. Read the whole article here.
