Thursday, November 15, 2012

THE CASE OF SAVITA HALAPPANAVA

In the news is a story about a pregnant Indian woman named Savita Halappanava, who was reported to have died recently in an Irish hospital due to her allegedly being denied an abortion.


This is an important story because Americans have just re-elected the most pro-abortion President in history who ran on a platform of "reproductive rights", a platform which would find major justification if this woman's death is found to be the direct result of having been denied an abortion.

I say "found to be", because the case is still under investigation and the actual account of the events leading up to the woman's death which we have thus far do not show that she asked for an abortion.

This story from the Daily Mail, even though it joins the "abortion" chorus in its headlines, shows - in the  body of the article in which the events are retold - that the woman found that she was miscarrying and that it would be over in a few hours.

Anyone familiar with miscarriages knows that this is normal. She had been examined and re-examined, and if the hospital is to be faulted, it is for not detecting the onset of septicaemia which is alleged to have killed her.

However - and as can be expected, the pro-aborts aren't waiting around for facts, nor would they matter. The narrative is that the Catholic Church killed this woman, since Ireland is a "Catholic country" and abortion is still mostly banned there.

But for those who actually care about facts, here's a few.

1. The Daily Mail story reports that the fetus was determined to be inviable.

2. If that was the case, the Catholic moral principle of "Double Effect" may have applied.

3. The principle states that certain actions which would otherwise be considered evil, are not considered so when the intention is not to commit the evil.



An example of this is the situation presented by a tubal pregnancy which would most likely kill both the  mother and the baby. The removal of the tube will result in the death of the baby but the intention is not to kill the baby. The same is true in certain cases of ovarian cancer in which if left untreated, both mother and baby would die.

Thus, if in fact the fetus was deemed to be inviable -as the story says - then it may have been licit to remove the fetus, as this would have been similar to the situation presented by a tubal pregnancy.

However, all the facts from inside the story simply show that this was a miscarriage gone bad. If the investigation eventually proves that an abortion was denied and the woman's death was a direct result of that decision, then the issue is a matter of the hospital not understanding Catholic moral principles in regards to Double Effect.

This would not be a surprise. Catholics the world over, including doctors, are poorly formed in even the basics of the faith let alone finer points such as this.

In the end, the facts won't matter. The pro-aborts already have their narrative: The Catholic Church killed this woman. Remember: "You will be hated..." - Jesus

Below is a definition of DOUBLE EFFECT as found in the Modern Catholic Dictionary edited by Fr. John Hardon, S. J.

The principle that says it is morally allowable to perform an act that has at least two effects, one good and one bad. It may be used under the following conditions: 


  1. The act to be done must be good in itself or at least morally indifferent; by the act to be done is meant the deed itself taken independently of its consequences; 
  2. The good effect must not be obtained by means of the evil effect; the evil must be only an incidental by-product and not an actual factor in the accomplishment of the good; 
  3. The evil effect must not be intended for itself but only permitted; all bad will must be excluded form the act; 
  4. There must be a proportionately grave reason for permitting the evil effect. At least the good and evil effects should be nearly equivalent. All four conditions must be fulfilled. If any one of them is not satisfied, the act is morally wrong.

An example of the lawful use of the double effect would be the commander of a submarine in wartime who torpedoes an armed merchant vessel of the enemy, although he foresees that several innocent children on board will be killed. All four required conditions are fulfilled: 

  1. He intends merely to lessen the power of the enemy by destroying an armed merchant ship. He does not wish to kill the innocent children; 
  2. His action of torpedoing the ship is not evil in itself;
  3. The evil effect (the death of the children) is not the cause of the good effect (the lessening of the enemy's strength); 
  4. There is sufficient reason for permitting the evil effect to follow, and this reason is administering a damaging blow to those who are unjustly attacking his country.
Also see http://www.lifenews.com/2012/11/19/changing-irelands-abortion-law-will-not-save-womens-lives/





Wednesday, November 14, 2012

2012: AN ELECTION POST-MORTEM


Darn. I should have put money on this one. Last November I penned a column entitled “Obama’s Catholic Strategy for 2012: Brilliant”. In it I all but predicted Obama would win the 2012 election regardless of who he was up against. I knew Obama would win because Obama knew he would win.

How’s that? It was simple math. Obama knew that in addition to having the black vote, the latino vote, the youth vote, and the Left vote, he had the biggest vote of all: the Catholic vote. Catholics represent 25% of the population and even if Obama could carry half that, it was still more than the entire black vote.

As it turned out Obama did carry exactly half the Catholic vote. True, it was down 4% from 2008 when he carried 54%, but 50% is 50% too much when you consider that Obama obstinately advocated for three major Catholic non-negotiables (abortion, contraception, and same-sex marriage), not to mention his much ballyhooed attack on religious freedom.

In my “Obama Strategy” article of a year ago, I ranted loudly that Catholics would once again go for Obama if the bishops did not get off their “religious freedom” kick and start warning Catholics - not about the consequences of losing their religious freedom - but about the consequences of losing their souls, and NOT because Catholics would vote for a man who embraced these non-negotiables, but because they themselves did!

In the column I noted polls showing 40% Catholic support for abortion, 98% for contraception, and 75% for same-sex marriage. Obama simply had to stand with the Catholics to get their vote. It was easy. The fact that he was able to stuff Cardinal Dolan and humiliate the whole U.S. episcopacy was an added bonus, and he got wined and dined at the Al Smith Dinner to boot.

In the end, the election was not about “jobs, jobs, jobs.” That was just a foil, and the Republicans took the bait. Obama knew he had no record to run on when it came to the economy, and he really didn’t try other than to say he needed more time. Obama knew that Americans were not interested in “jobs, jobs, jobs”, but “sex, sex, sex”, and more sex, and sex without consequences.

This is why the contraceptive mandate was the first thing out of the Obamacare box of goodies. It served a double purpose. With the mandate Obama knew he could both neutralize the U.S. bishops and frame opposition to it as a “War on Women”. Neutralizing the Church is always the first step of dictators...and usually long before we realize they are dictators.

Obama knew he could get away with this because he had learned well the moral innards of the Catholic electorate while working for the late Cardinal Bernardin as a community organizer in Chicago (during which he drew a paycheck from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development - thank you for your donations).

Bernardin, as head of the then National Council of Catholic Bishops, had been instrumental in taking any mention of the evils of contraception off the pulpit in the post-Humanae Vitae mayhem. And it was Bernardin who relegated the intrinsic evil of abortion to the moral status of a soup kitchen with his infamous “seamless garment” ideology.

The “seamless garment” thing - in blatant contradiction to Catholic teaching - basically said that all evils are equal and we cannot speak of one evil as greater than another. The “seamless garment” approach to morality essentially gave license to Catholics - already morally softened by two decades of the sexual revolution and doctrinal silence from the pulpit - to contracept, abort, and engage in their sin of choice so long as they cared about immigration reform.

It was a perfect stage for the rise of a man like Obama who knew how to manipulate those who would compromise with evil. This is why at the Democratic National Convention, in which speaker after speaker spoke of the glories of abortion, contraception, and same-sex whatever, Obama sealed the deal and assuaged the hurting consciences of even the most liberal Catholics with a speech by a nun who wiped the floor with Paul Ryan and redefined “pro-life” to mean concern for the uninsured.

The fact that Obama trotted out Cardinal Dolan at the end to give the final prayer was seen - despite Dolan’s few requisite pro-life remarks - as nothing more than an ode to Obama’s big-mindedness and another stamp on his Catholic passport.

Maybe it’s just me, but something tells me that at the Judgment, Christ is not going to ask us about religious freedom.

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