The Moral Theologian and Me

This blog almost never comments on current events.  There is no need for it.  Plenty of other blogs do, after all, and I usually find such commentary -- often no less than the current events themselves -- distasteful at best.  But I feel troubled enough by the case of Sister Margaret McBride, the Irish Sister of Mercy excommunicated for consenting to the performance of a so-called therapeutic abortion in the hospital where she was a long-time administrator, to address it here.

I have no idea what happened in that hospital, and I agree with Gerard Nadal that we don't know enough about the mother's condition to understand why Sr. Margaret thought the procedure was justified.  There is plenty of the expected hand-wringing about "liberal nuns" flying through the interwebs, and it's probably safe to assume that Sr. Margaret is one of them, but I do not think it's safe to assume that her tragic decision was guided by any political ideology.  The mother had four children at home, and someone appears to have been convinced that she would die if she continued her pregnancy.  I myself do not know if death would indeed have been the outcome; nobody does.  Nor do I know if her condition might have been stabilized to the point that her baby could have been delivered at the earliest possible point of viability and be kept in the NICU for several months.  My interest, instead, is in the misguided compassion that leads mothers, fathers, friends, grandparents, doctors, nuns, hospital administrators, and all the rest to believe, even if only for a moment, that the taking of one human life is justified in the interest of saving another.

What Sr. Margaret consented to was wrong.  We are forbidden from taking one life in order to save another (although, interestingly, this proscription is not found in Jewish theology).  But I am about to risk the sort of foaming-at-the-mouth vituperation I've received in the past when I've appeared on this blog not to take the hardest possible position on pro-life, by asking:  in this mother's situation, how many of us would have the heroic courage to leave our other children motherless?  In her husband's situation, how many husbands would willingly consent?  Exactly how many of us have the heroic virtue, faith, and selfless courage of Saint Gianna Beretta Molla (above) and her husband, Pietro?

In 2007 I had an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured.  I knew I was pregnant, but I wasn't exactly sure how far along I was, because I was nursing my baby at the time, and my cycles were all over the place.  One night I was overcome by a pain so intense that it had me first vomiting. and then immobilized; I was unable to sleep at all that night, because every breath I took sent stabbing pains up and down my spine.  It took several days, countless ultrasounds, and three emergency room visits to determine what had happened, at which point I was immediately wheeled in for emergency surgery.  In the meantime, when an ectopic pregnancy had begun to look like a likely scenario, I had gone to talk to my parish priest, to find out what treatments were permitted under Catholic moral theology.  He dryly xeroxed many pages from a book on the subject, gave them to me, and told me to call Monsignor Bill Smith, a respected moral theologian at St. Joseph's Seminary. 

Msgr. Smith died last year, and was lovingly eulogized throughout the Catholic press as a giant of his field.  I have no doubt that he was as they said.  My experience of him, however, consisted of a cell-phone call from the emergency room, during which Msgr. Smith expostulated at some length on the treatments that were and were not permissible to me.  Was I at a Catholic hospital?  I was not.  Well, then, beware of methotrexate, whose use was not permitted in the Catholic hospitals of the Archdiocese of New York, but was the subject of much controversy in other dioceses.  I could tell that Msgr. Smith was quite at home at the seminary lectern, and I supposed he had found his true calling as a scholar and teacher, because he seemed virtually devoid of any pastoral impulse whatever.  There was no condolence for a grieving mother, no prayer offered, no good luck or God bless; I was simply exhorted to do the right thing.  Fortunately for my soul, there was no need for methotrexate, as there was no trace left of my baby; the fetus had ruptured through my tube and perished.  So, while I had to have my tube and one ovary removed, no children were harmed.

What if things had been just slightly different?  What if my pregnancy had been discovered to be ectopic before it ruptured?  My OB worked at an Episcopalian, not a Catholic, hospital:  what if methotrexate had been administered, or what if the doctors had removed my tube with the fetus still in it, another treatment forbidden in that moral theology textbook that Father R. had xeroxed for me, as it directly harms the fetus?  (The fact that ectopic pregnancies are never viable doesn't count in moral theology.)  Would it have mattered to my body?  I got pregnant with the other ovary a couple more times, and lost those babies too.  Would it have mattered to my soul?  Well, yes, evidently it would have.

God, nonetheless, in His mysterious grace, allowed me to experience the loss of several of my unborn children through no fault of my own, unlike the loss of my first unborn child through my own fault.  I love Him no less for it.  As Robert Herrick's poem "To God" says:

Beat me, bruise me, rack me, rend me,
Yet, in torments, I'll commend Thee:
Examine me with fire, and prove me
To the full, yet I will love Thee:
Nor shalt thou give so deep a wound,
But I as patient will be found.

As for those who are inclined to condemn Sr. Margaret McBride, or me, or any of the usual suspects, I pray for you -- and I suggest that you pray also for yourselves -- that you will never be put to the test.  May God have mercy on us all.  May Saint Gianna Beretta Molla intercede for us. 

By the way, Bishop Thomas Olmstead of Phoenix did not excommunicate Sr. Margaret.  Canon law states that anyone who consciously participates in an abortion is automatically excommunicated (latae sententiae); Bishop Olmstead simply stated that fact.  If you have participated in abortion, please go to confession, and ask the priest to lift the excommunication from you.  Like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, God will run to you when He sees you approaching from ever so far off.

UPDATE: 
"Trying circumstances such as these are an invitation to ponder all we do not know. We believe that God wants both mother and child to live, but accept the possibility of other plans and even other—to us shocking—ideas, such as this one: What if that was all the life the mother was meant to have?"  Taking Jeremiah 29:11 as a template, Elizabeth Scalia (aka The Anchoress) explains the position of the Church quite beautifully here.