Why the Church needs more like Sister Margaret McBride - The Excommunicated Nun

this is just another example of how religion is polluting health care. to the religious ensuring a care giver gets to force their religious beliefs on others is more important than people being able to make their own choices for their medical care. we see this too with pharmacists refusing to fill birth control prescriptions

 

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yes you're absolutely right there


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Apparently the truth is more reassuring:

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Catholic_hospitals_betray_mission

(Unless you are a devout Catholic)

 

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If she said that the abortion was a morally good and allowable act according to church teachings then I don't blame then for excommunicating her. Not only is that a downright lie, but what kind of idiot would believe the church would condone abortion under any circumstance? She's representing the church and doing a poor job at it.

Bear in mind that I didn't say I disagree with her actions...

 

That's scary. I commend that nun for doing the right thing. I pray if I ever have an accident, the ambulance doesn't take me to a Catholic hospital. Not that I'm likely to be pregnant, but fuck. They only care about your uterus.

I don't think people who hold views like that should be working in healthcare at all. Call me a fascist, but someone who would withhold an abortion or refuse to give out birth control has no place in healthcare. Those professionals like that are there to treat people not force their muddle-headed excuse for 'morality' on people.

 

I basically copy and pasted from your original post where it stated, almost word for word, that she said an abortion was a morally good and allowable act as according to the church teachings.

If that is in fact wrong then I would implore you to change your original post.

 

Disgusting that they excommicated her for that; in a situation of risk, the maternal decision is the only one that matters.

 

The quote is "the abortion": as in in this case.

 

Whether its this, that, his, her, or its abortion doesn't matter. Point of the matter is, the church would not condone abortion under any circumstance.

You guy need to stop trying so hard to find fault in what I wrote. My post was not that significant. I think its time to move on.

 

Possibly so. I guess they wouldn't condone under any circumstances. Or would they? I actually don't know. Never bothered to check.

 

Don't worry, there are more of her:

In a study of sterilization and abortion practices in Texas Catholic hospitals compiled from hospital discharge data for the State of Texas, whistleblowing Catholic medical researchers found that Catholic hospitals reported at least 9,684 cases of sterilizations and 39 legally induced abortions from 2000-2003.
{source}

 

Thank fuck for that..

 

Do any religions support abortion? I am not aware of any myself. Even according to Buddhism:

It is against Canon Law and also a mortal sin. Once proven they are all excommunicated because they broke Canon law and a law in their respective country (usually). I just learned this myself from a google search and not sure what 'Canon Law' entails. Not looking to excite people here and not saying i agree with this particular case and dont really have any steadfast viewpoint on abortion but as i said according to every religion i am aware of abortion is not permitted.

 

The Church condones abortion as the standard treatment of ectopic pregnancy, and always has.

 

The giving of the Law didn't stop with Moses, Jesus, or Paul. Nay, it continues to this very day!

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Getting down to fundamentals seems to be very difficult for the Catholic Church.

But what do I, a common mum-lizard know, being the mouthpiece of Satan and all?

 

The Update

Some months later, an update. Nicholas Kristof spells it out:

The National Catholic Reporter newspaper put it best: "Just days before Christians celebrated Christmas, Jesus got evicted."

Yet the person giving Jesus the heave-ho in this case was not a Bethlehem innkeeper. Nor was it an overzealous mayor angering conservatives by pulling down Christmas decorations. Rather, it was a prominent bishop, Thomas Olmsted, stripping St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix of its affiliation with the Roman Catholic diocese.

The hospital's offense? It had terminated a pregnancy to save the life of the mother. The hospital says the 27-year-old woman, a mother of four children, would almost certainly have died otherwise.

Bishop Olmsted initially excommunicated a nun, Sister Margaret McBride, who had been on the hospital's ethics committee and had approved of the decision. That seems to have been a failed attempt to bully the hospital into submission, but it refused to cave and continues to employ Sister Margaret. Now the bishop, in effect, is excommunicating the entire hospital — all because it saved a woman's life.

Make no mistake: This clash of values is a bellwether of a profound disagreement that is playing out at many Catholic hospitals around the country ....​

An ideological battle over health care is playing out in the Catholic hierarchy. St. Charles Medical Center, in Bend, Oregon, also lost its relationship with the Catholic church after bishops objected to the hospital's performance of tubal ligations upon request. And in Texas, Kristof writes, the bishop in Tyler has influenced two hospitals to stop performing tubal ligations.

Meanwhile, some doctors at Catholic affiliated hospitals complain, according to Kristof, "that sometimes they are forced by church doctrine to provide substandard care to women with miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies in ways that can leave the women infertile or even endanger their lives".

The thought that keeps nagging at me is this: If you look at Bishop Olmsted and Sister Margaret as the protagonists in this battle, one of them truly seems to me to have emulated the life of Jesus. And it's not the bishop, who has spent much of his adult life as a Vatican bureaucrat climbing the career ladder. It's Sister Margaret, who like so many nuns has toiled for decades on behalf of the neediest and sickest among us.

Then along comes Bishop Olmsted to excommunicate the Christ-like figure in our story. If Jesus were around today, he might sue the bishop for defamation.

Yet in this battle, it's fascinating how much support St. Joseph's Hospital has had and how firmly it has pushed back — in effect, pounding 95 theses on the bishop's door. The hospital backed up Sister Margaret, and it rejected the bishop's demand that it never again terminate a pregnancy to save the life of a mother.

"St. Joseph's will continue through our words and deeds to carry out the healing ministry of Jesus," said Linda Hunt, the hospital president. "Our operations, policies, and procedures will not change." The Catholic Health Association of the United States, a network of Catholic hospitals around the country, stood squarely behind St. Joseph's.

Anne Rice, the author and a commentator on Catholicism, sees a potential turning point. "St. Joseph's refusal to knuckle under to the bishop is huge," she told me, adding: "Maybe rank-and-file Catholics are finally talking back to a hierarchy that long ago deserted them."​

And, hey, anytime you can go from Nicholas Kristof to Anne Rice, you can call it a good day.

Er ... um ... oh, right.

Yeah. That's the news, and I am ... uh ... anyway, yeah.
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Notes:

Kristof, Nicholas. "Tussling Over Jesus". The New York Times. January 27, 2011. NYTimes.com. January 28, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/opinion/27kristof.html

 

My mother grew up in a Catholic School and she said that the fetus' life was/is always valued over the mother's even if the fetus can't survive without her. I was taught the same thing when I went to a small religious school too. I don't know why though. :shrug: Seems kind of counter productive.

 

The idiocy of the Catholic Church in these matters is fairly obvious, not just from this case but everywhere from the absurdities in its moral teachings on sexual ethics (condemning masturbation and homosexual sex as horrible sins yet protecting pedophile priests to the point of shuttling them around parishes giving them more opportunities to abuse) to the ban on contraception in an overpopulated and resource depleted world.

What is concerning is that important decisions about a patient's medical treatment are being made in these institutions which are not made according to the best interests of the patient (i.e. saving the mother's life), but according to the ethical beliefs of a religion which are not shared by all patients and apparently the whim of a non-medically qualified Church official.

Medical decisions need to have an ethical component but it is very worrying that the quality and professionalism of a patient's care in the Catholic medical system is being undermined because of questionable religious beliefs. I think the Catholic healthcare system needs to be more carefully regulated so religious beliefs don't over-ride a doctor's paramount duty to their patient and to do the best to ensure the health of their patient. It is totally unacceptable that any ecclesial official's view or decree should over-ride that of the health-care professional on the ground.