The last two months have been a blur for me as a parish
priest. The sheer amount of liturgical celebrations and sacramental
ministry plus the preparation and leadership of the Rome Pilgrimage have kept
me barely informed of current events. I remember hearing about a pregnant
woman on life support in Ft. Worth at the end of November, and I tracked some
of this news on National and Texas Right to Life e-mail updates.
Unfortunately, this woman, Marlise Muñoz, and her unborn baby were disconnected
from life support last Sunday, January 26. Since I do not have space in
this posting to recount all the details of what happened, I direct you to an
article of The New York Times .
This case was tragic and complicated, and moral arguments were made on both
sides. However, for several reasons I believe the wrong decision was
made – both by the family and by the district judge – to remove life support
from this pregnant woman.
Firstly, the use of the term “brain dead” is ambiguous in
medicine because it has a different definition depending on the hospital or the
doctor whom you ask. (The debate of when live organs can be harvested
from “brain dead” patients has already been a long-standing bioethical issue
due to the lack of a standard definition.) According to Texas Right to
Life, Ms. Muñoz was “not experiencing multi-system organ failure or cell
disintegration, and her body [was] supporting the growth of the child within
her – all signs to indicate that her brain, though impaired or quiescent, [was]
still ordering her physiological functions at some level.” Secondly,
while it can be morally licit (and even necessary depending on the
circumstances) to remove extraordinary life support from a dying patient, the
fact that this was a woman whose body was nurturing an unborn child makes this
choice an act of direct abortion, which is intrinsically
evil. Some have tried to make the case that “disconnecting” the mother (a
shrewd way to evade the word “abortion”) was justified since the child would be
badly-deformed and mentally-handicapped anyway. How sad that we have to
remind good-intentioned people that no one deserves to die simply because he or
she is handicapped. A person is still a person even in the womb — even if
deformed in the womb. Thirdly, under Texas law, this pregnant woman was
supposed to be protected from medical officials cutting off life support.
This is just one more example of a radically liberal judge who legislated and
executed his own ideology instead of applying the law. If this were not
exasperating enough, Dallas Morning News reported a lawyer of
the family as saying, “[P]regnant women die every day. . . They die in car
accidents. They die of heart attacks. They die from head injuries. . . And when
they die the fetus dies with them. That is the way it has always been and that
way it should be.”
The coldness of the world (and of the weather!) can be
overwhelming and discouraging to us as Catholic Christians. Today on the
Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, almost two weeks since we remembered the
fateful decision Roe v. Wade (and seeing the appalling
repercussions of this law as in the case of Ms. Muñoz and her baby), we are
mindful of how much our society – even Pro-Life Texas – needs the truth and
love of Jesus Christ, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory
for your people Israel (Luke 2:32).
No comments:
Post a Comment