There’s a wonderful organization called Feminists for Life that anyone interested in these questions should check out.

I think that being pro-life is and should be a liberal issue, because welcoming and protecting life is usually more of a liberal value. Unfortunately, for both conservatives and liberals, what has defined this issue are views on sexual morality and on the role of religion in public life. I have yet to hear a good liberal argument which denies the fetus the status of a human person, and I have yet to hear a conservative argument that deals with all the ramifications of legally making fetuses human persons.

I wonder what the circumstances were where the baby had to be aborted to save the mother’s life? I’ve had several doctors tell me that they know of no circumstances where aborting a baby would ever be necessary to save a mother’s life.

I share Will’s question. I’ve heard of these mysterious circumstances, but outside of ectopic pregnancy (where the baby is stuck in the fallopian tube), haven’t heard of any concrete examples. Is there an official list somewhere? These are very serious issues and ought to be discussed with the data at hand.

Bo: What “ramifications of legally making fetuses human persons” are you refering to? Many states already have laws on the books that state if a pregnant mother is killed then the attacker may be accused of a double homicide . . . is that a bad thing in your mind? Are you thinking of a circumstance like where a pregnant mother may be charged with child neglect if she smokes/drinks/does drugs while pregnant? Again, is that a bad thing?
Will & Andy: You are right to say that there’s never a medical reason for abortion. Unfortunately folks are usually ignorant (sometimes willfully) of the Principle of Double Effect, which means that there’s an unintended consequence to an act. When the “mother’s health” execption was formed people had procedures like a hysterectomy in mind. In that case the intention and objective is to save the life of the mother by removing a diseased uterus. It’s an unfortunate and tragic consequence that the baby dies, but since that’s not the intention it is not an abortion. An abortion is the direct assult on the innocent human being. The pro-abortion argument is (wrongly) that if abortion were illegal then a woman who develops cancer of the uterus (or some such disease) would be culpable of abortion should she receive a hysterectomy. This is false and fear mongering because nobody on the pro-life side would agree that would be the case.

The condition was reportedly severe pulmonary hypertension.

To the 2nd question: Yes; I can be a person of faith and support abortion in some cases, given that the birth of a child significantly and almost certainly threatens the life of the birth mother. The sixth commandment includes passive attempts on another innocent life.

Cases in which the life of the mother is substantially at risk are so rare that I think we can incorporate the exception into reasonable, ethical policy. My moral responsibility in a non-theocracy is to advocate policies that outlaw the vast majority of these murderous acts.
I consider myself a feminist, insofar as I believe in equal rights, and believe we should move to a more respectful treatment of women in this country. But the term is generally used as shorthand for a slate of policy initiatives, including legal abortion, quotas, and lesbian power.
So, it depends on how you are using the term. I don’t think that legal abortion represents a consistent application of women’s rights. To me, the practice undermines the fundamental principles of feminism.

Posting from sunny Phoenix where we continue to make national headlines. Good grief. The papers are filled with letters and counter letters. I volunteer at a medical clinic which is largely staffed by Catholics who work at or are retired from the hospital in question. Can’t wait til my next volunteer day to ask around as to their opinions. BTW, the clinic serves largely Hispanics, perhaps even undocumented ones, but that’s another controversy for another post.
To answer the question posed, I consider myself a feminist and prolife – opposed to abortion in all circumstances except to save the life of the mother and cases of rape/incest. I would like to think that victims of rape/incest would not abort the baby (and some don’t), but I can’t imagine asking anyone to do that. However, I don’t believe in criminalizing abortion.
I agree with Bo #2 that the issues of sexual judgment/non judgment on the mother are often so deep so that the question of the baby gets lost in the tangle.
As a nurse, I agree that there are certainly very very few cases where the life of the mother is truly at stake in any pregnancy. However rare is not never. This poor woman will undoubtedly need a lung transplant to save her life. To add a pregnancy to severe pulmonary hypertension is undoubtedly to condemn both the mother and baby to death. The mother, to gradually suffocate from her body’s inability to oxygenate herself, and the baby, to wither in the womb as the mother is unable to oxygenate her baby. And to imagine the horror of the mother to know that while she faces certain death, she is also unable to prevent death from coming to her baby. No greater good from her own death. What an unimaginable nightmare. IMO, there is no good to be done here by just doing nothing. To stand by and do nothing seems to me the greater evil. And in some sense, easier. Easier, because it is black and white. No discernment needed. You don’t actually have to look at the living breathing people involved here. Just say “no”.
Jeff address it well in #5. If the baby-inhabited uterus also contains cancer, one can remove or irradiate the uterus in order to remove the cancer. Oops – it also removes the baby? Well, that’s ok, because it’s not the intended consequence. This seems to me like the most disingenuous of technicalities. I’m sure that the more theologically able here can supply all sorts of scenarios that make this absolutely unconscionable.
BTW, one interesting letter in this morning’s paper about the Sister involved -
“Thousands of young children could have been saved from pedophiles if brave, intelligent Sr. Margaret McBride had the authority to excommunicate them.
Instead the all-knowing men of the cloth merely moved them to other parishes.
I hope I live long enough to see the Catholic Church come out of the dark ages.
Thank you, Sr. McBride, for having the strength to make the right decision.”

“I’ve had several doctors tell me that they know of no circumstances where aborting a baby would ever be necessary to save a mother’s life.”
I have a personal friend who is a doctor. She is pro-life. We have had a discussion on this subject a few times. Yes, there are most definitely circumstances where the pregnancy can and does put the mother’s life in jeopardy. To say otherwise is being deceitful. There are a whole host of problems that can arise in the mother that can cause the baby to become a medical issue. Pulmonary Hypertension is just one of them.

“Oops – it also removes the baby? Well, that’s ok, because it’s not the intended consequence. This seems to me like the most disingenuous of technicalities. ”
How is it disingenuous? Divining intent is important in both the legal and ethical definitions of murder.

DianneP. Thank you for your insite on the situation with Sister McBride and her decision. I felt even before I read your post above that she, after careful thought, made the right decision. Brave woman.
Will: I don’t know what doctors you may have talked to, but I am surprised that they claimed that they knew of NO circumstances where an abortion would save the life of the mother. Obviously the situation that caused Sister McBride to make her decision must be an exception. Perhaps your doctor friends have never faced that situation.

IMO, yes, you can be a person of faith and support abortion in some circumstances.
What is the definition of “feminist”? IF it means equal rights for women…then I think it could be hard to be against abortion in all circumstances.

My brother is Downs. Most Downs babies are aborted these days. Depending on how you look at it, either we are making the world a better place for saving it from the blight of these flawed humans…or, we are making it a worse place because we are ending viable lives, to our shame and loss. For me, it’s an issue of speaking up on behalf of humans that cannot speak for themselves. This is an important similarity to our responsibility to victims of sexual slavery or any other kind of abuse: it is right to be a voice for the voiceless. Is this not also a value of feminism, giving a fair chance to those who were rendered less powerful by society? Seems to me the same should apply to babies.

Thank you for your post, Dianne. Every comment I received to this article from women, pro-life, Christian friends supported Sr. McBride in her difficult decision, too.
@MatthewS #20 — what about the voices of the 4 children this woman already had? They’d all be motherless had the Bishop made the decision. What about the voice of the mother – powerless in the face of her condition? No one is saying that the baby is irrelevant and has no value, here. Consider the whole picture, please, with all the relationships which could bear the cost of the decision. Someone was going to die.

Ann,
Yes, the other 4 children matter deeply and anyone who pretends these aren’t hard questions is just being facile.
A somewhat similar situation occurred in a church we attended a number of years ago. The mom was hit with cancer while she was pregnant. She had a number of other kids (at least 5 but I forget the exact number). The choice was between the life of the mom or the life of the baby. She chose the baby and died soon after childbirth, leaving her children motherless. The dad remarried soon after (it’s quite a story – he married a lady that was friend to both him and his wife; his wife encouraged him that this person should be the mother of her children after she was gone).
What of the other kids – don’t they matter? Yes, but this was not a choice between their life and death. You say “what about the voices of the 4 children” but it isn’t the same question. In the case I personally witnessed, the children suffered (which sucks, to be sure), yet they also thrived. I hate that this happens in this life – that moms and dads and kids would be faced with such a choice. The family I know considered the whole picture and decided for the life of the baby.
Dianne describes this case as “And to imagine the horror of the mother to know that while she faces certain death, she is also unable to prevent death from coming to her baby. No greater good from her own death.” Truly worst case and my heart breaks for all involved. Perhaps some cases are like the hypothetical cases where a mom must choose one child over another, letting one fall from the cliff or whatever. Perhaps this was one of those. What concerns me deeply is that these very few edge cases are so often hijacked as stalking horses for abortion in general, which gets back to the entire group of people like my brother whose lives are being ended for completely untenable reasons.

I think the Pro-life movmement and overall ‘all-or-nothing’ stance has been extremely unfortunate and unproductive. If 95 percent of abortions are done for convience and the hard cases make up only 5 percent or less, why not make laws that save the 95 percent and then fight against the 5 percent after that?

The questions get really muddled and complex when it is a life and and life. That’s when we are required to do much discernment and prayer. There are few easy answers.
On another note… I am not sure how far along the prenancy was… but sometimes the child can be delivered early instead of aborted and medical professionals (with God) may be able to sustain the life of the child as well.
I am sad that feminism has aligned itself with abortion.
I think their fear of being owned by spouse or state goes deep due to the centuries that women were owned–sold for a dowry–in bondage to a family structure that denied them their full humanity. Abortion represents not being owned or having one’s body owned.
(while not embracing abortion) I wonder sometimes if we addressed some of the fears of being owned, that the grasping for abortion would go away or lose strength. I wonder what would happen if feminist saw the people of God really addressing their concerns, if they might be more open to God.
it’s something to think about.

Agree with all of Matthew’s sentiments. It’s a terrible, complicated situation.
However, circumstances such as these are used by the pro-choice side to advocate legal abortion in all circumstances. It would be easier to generate genuine sympathy and nuance in these instances if they were not used to the end of empty demagoguery.

@Chris
“If 95 percent of abortions are done for convience and the hard cases make up only 5 percent or less, why not make laws that save the 95 percent and then fight against the 5 percent after that?”
The vast majority of pro-lifers would happily enact such a compromise. There are a few problems.
First, the Supreme Court has essentially written into the Constitution an absolute right to abortion. That’s why the battle over nominees is so important to pro-life groups.
Second, legal abortion is the number one political issue for the Democratic party. Consider that we just elected a president who supports legal partial birth abortion, and that the Democrats were willing to risk the success of their health care bill over taxpayer funding of abortion. Those are the two most extreme pro-choice positions, and the Democrats are implacable, so a 95-5 compromise isn’t going to happen.

Will #3
A friend of mine was diagnosed with cancer while pregnant. Without treatment the mother would have died (and the baby too), and with it the baby would die. With much sadness and grief she had the abortion, but still knew that she was chosing life.

@ Faith
The pregnancy was 11 weeks along. The child was not far enough along to take via C-section and at least another 12 weeks before it could.
@kevin s
Both Republicans and Democrats have used this as a political football. Which is what I believe is part of the problem. More than anything else it is a moral and religious issue that cannot be solved in the political arena. The more we try, the more messed up things get.

Kevin, what SCOTUS ruling made abortion an ‘absolute right’? Since it wasn’t Roe v. Wade, which only covers abortion under the ‘right to privacy’ for the first (and perhaps somewhat into the second) trimester, I’m wondering if you could enlighten me here.
For a middle class, educated and informed white woman in this country to abort a third-trimester fetus is generally speaking tragic and unnecessary, in my view. But I’m fairly sure most abortions don’t fall under that description. What we have are generally poorer women, who aren’t as educated and informed, typically aborting first-trimester fetuses. That’s somewhat unfortunate, on my view. But if that’s unpalatable to you, work to educate and empower women. Self-knowledge and meaningful work for women (and perhaps also men) are the road away from the worst kinds of abortions.
Dogmatic opposition to abortion, on my view, hinges on the conflation of the value of biological life with that of biographical life. Pro-lifers view the value of life as attaching to biological life (or perhaps, what is worse, to the non-material ‘soul’ God supposedly gives to each human conceptus). Pro-choicers, such as myself, view biological life as valuable only to the extent that it supports a meaningful biographical life. Of course ‘biographical life’ is a fuzzy concept, but that seems appropriate given the continuum of biological development that grounds it. We judge the ‘moral weight’ of the fetus, so to speak, to grow as the fetus grows. I see no reason such a view should be off limits to Christians.
Best,
-Daniel-

to Kevin S at #11.
Disingenuous because it ignores the obvious and unavoidable consequences of the decision. I didn’t say that intent wasn’t important. Intent is crucial. However, one can’t dismiss an action that directly causes harm by simply claiming that one didn’t intent to harm, especially (and this is the case here), if one KNOWS full well that the outcome of one’s actions is indeed harmful.
When one KNOWS that radiating or removing a uterus will without doubt kill the baby which inhabits the same uterus, I find it disingenuous to excuse that act simply because it will also kill the cancer. I admire the Catholic teaching that the baby is not a disease to be treated, but they undermine their moral authority here, imo, by treating the baby as a side effect of a medical intervention.
And while much discussion here has focused on having to choose between a mother and a baby, which is a moral conundrum on many levels, the Phoenix case quite clearly is about a choice between an abortion versus the certain death of BOTH mother and baby.

“Kevin, what SCOTUS ruling made abortion an ‘absolute right’? Since it wasn’t Roe v. Wade, which only covers abortion under the ‘right to privacy’ for the first (and perhaps somewhat into the second) trimester, I’m wondering if you could enlighten me here.”
Follow up rulings have expanded upon that right, including Casey, and another case in the 1970s whose name I am too lazy to Google right now. That said, I meant the term “absolute” to refer to the fact that no state my infringe upon the right.
“But if that’s unpalatable to you, work to educate and empower women. Self-knowledge and meaningful work for women (and perhaps also men) are the road away from the worst kinds of abortions. ”
First of all, I think legal abortion disempowers women. It creates a cultural expectation that they will terminate motherhood, a crucial part of their femininity, out of fealty to cultural standards.
But yes, I am all for empowering women. I am also all for banning the practice, because it violates the basic constitutional right of human beings in this country to live.
“Pro-lifers view the value of life as attaching to biological life (or perhaps, what is worse, to the non-material ‘soul’ God supposedly gives to each human conceptus).”
You contradict yourself. You are accusing the pro-life side of hair-splitting over the biological definition of life AND of embracing the nebulous concept of “ensoulment”, to borrow Hillary’s odd term.
“Pro-choicers, such as myself, view biological life as valuable only to the extent that it supports a meaningful biographical life. Of course ‘biographical life’ is a fuzzy concept,”
And a lousy concept upon which to craft law that impacts the life or death of 1.3 million per year.
“We judge the ‘moral weight’ of the fetus, so to speak, to grow as the fetus grows.”
Why? Does a fetus add to its biography as it grows? If so, at what point has it established a sufficient resume so as to merit constitutional protection? What a mother believes that point comes after the age of two? It’s not as though a toddler has accomplished much.
“I see no reason such a view should be off limits to Christians.”
Christians embrace all manner of fuzzy, illogical, tragically flawed ideas, so I suppose you’re right. Every component of your argument could apply to infanticide, and, frankly, were it not for the pro-life movement, it probably would by now.