Thorns everywhere in abortion debate

Abortion is the moral dilemma of our age.

For most of us, it's a tangle of competing rights, like a field of thistle and roses. It's difficult to separate one from the other without encountering a thorn or two.

Consider the case of Margaret Mary McBride, a nurse, a hospital administrator and, above all, a nun in the Roman Catholic order of Sisters of Mercy.

On Nov. 27, 2009, as a member of the ethics committee for St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, she had to make this call at real-world speed.

A 27-year-old mother of four was rushed to the emergency room of the hospital with a life-threatening disease -- pulmonary hypertension. She was also 11 weeks pregnant.

The pregnancy threatened her life.

Efforts to treat mother and child proved unsuccessful, and doctors recommended a rare course of action for this Catholic hospital: Kill the baby to save the mother. Doctors told the ethics committee that the chances of the mother dying if the pregnancy continued were "nearly 100 percent."

Sister Margaret, as hospital ethicist and a nun, approved this case as a single exception to the hospital's no-abortion policy.

And so it was done. Delivery was induced and, of course, the 11-week-old baby died. The aftermath illustrates why abortion so vexes our society.

Phoenix Bishop Thomas Olmsted, who learned of the case only months afterward, reviewed the facts and, after months of back-and-forth with hospital officials, determined from a church perspective the hospital had made the wrong call.

He excommunicated Sister Margaret Mary McBride for participating in an abortion (a mandatory sentence under church rules). He then severed the relationship between St. Joe's and the church. The hospital could no longer call itself a "Catholic" hospital, it could no longer offer Mass and the Holy Sacrament was removed from the chapel.

Bishop Olmsted wrote: "I am ... concerned by the hospital's statement that the termination of a human life was necessary to treat the mother's underlying medical condition.

"An unborn child is not a disease. While medical professionals should certainly try to save a pregnant mother's life, the means by which they do it can never be by directly killing her unborn child. The end does not justify the means."

The hospital responded that while the first directive of a Catholic hospital is to never perform abortions, even to save the life of the mother, the second directive says that "operations, treatments and medications that have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman are permitted ... even if they will result in the death of the unborn child."

"If there had been a way to save the pregnancy and still prevent the death of the mother, we would have done it. We are convinced there was not."

To which the bishop responded: "You would have me believe that we will merely have to agree to disagree. But this resolution is unacceptable because it disregards my authority and responsibility to interpret the moral law and to teach the Catholic faith as a successor of the Apostles."

He goes on to tell the hospital that there cannot be a tie in this debate. The hospital wants to think of this case as morally undecidable and indicates it has "no intention to acknowledge that what happened ... was morally wrong."

So, at this moment the hospital stands in defiance of its bishop. It continues to employ Margaret Mary McBride and operate the hospital as it has in the past. It recently found support from the Catholic Health Association, a network of Catholic hospitals around the country. The Catholic Health Association says St. Joe's made exactly the right call.

Even for those passionate about the sanctity of life, abortion remains a field of roses and thistle. I don't know how the church will clear the thistle to resolve its line of authority over Catholic hospitals without damaging the roses in the form of good doctors, nurses and nuns.

I do know this: At that place where the front line of humanity intersects with dogma, Sister Margaret Mary McBride made one tough call.

Whether you judge her right or wrong, she deserves better than excommunication.

Sherman Frederick (sfrederick@reviewjournal.com), the former publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and a member of the Nevada Newspaper Hall of Fame, writes a column for Stephens Media. Read his blog at lvrj.com/blogs/sherm.