The ACLU vs Catholic Hospitals

[Zatch]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/uc/20101224/cm_uc_crmmax/op_1916440

[jmdrake]

I got suspicious when I saw Micheal Malkin wrote this article. The background is this. A Catholic hospital performed an abortion on a woman who might have died without it (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126985072). She had a condition called "right heart failure (http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/right-sided-heart-failure/overview.html)". Apparently one of the treatments is reducing the workload in the heart. The Catholic hospital assessed that the only way to save this woman's life was to perform an abortion. Since this was only 11 weeks into the pregnancy, an emergency C-section would not have saved the baby's life. In Malkin's article she ignored any recitations of the actual facts, and instead used the every request for abortion is an "emergency" to the left straw man.

So the understory is that a Catholic hospital decided to perform the abortion to save the mother's life, and the hospital administrator was excommunicated for her trouble. That complicates the story quite a bit. Rather than this being a case of Catholic hospitals being "forced" by the state to perform routine abortions, this is a case of a Catholic hospital being pressured by the church not to perform an emergency abortion.

Now I'm personally pro life. I'm not sure when exactly a fetus becomes a person. I'm certain it is sometime before birth. And I don't by the "Property rights means you can kill a stowaway" argument. But if that stowaway is about to cause both your deaths, even if accidentally, that's a different story. For example, in WW II sailors from a ship that sank (Indianapolis) who survived a shark attack reported that wounded sailors would be pushed away from the group once the other sailors realized they were drawing sharks. Is that "murder" or an obtuse form of self defense?

Anyway, I'm sure this can be argued various ways. But the bottom line is that Ms. Malkin did not honestly portray the facts. She does not help the abortion debate by doing so.