Church Versus Hospital

"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

Steven Weinberg

This is an update to this news piece I blogged about in May.

To recapitulate, it was about a young expectant mother facing death from Primary Pulmonary Hypertension (PPH) complicating her 11-week pregnancy. She must either abort the the unborn child or face almost certain death of both herself and her fetus. The ethics committee of the St. Joe Hospital convened and decided on the lesser of the two evils - and Sister Margaret McBride, who was on the committee, was excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church for her role in the lifesaving decision.

Remember that in a non-Catholic Hospital, there wouldn't be any quibble about whether the pregnancy should be terminated at all. The dictum is if a pregnant woman's life is at peril, the automatic ethical and moral course of action is to jettison the products of pregnancy. This is repeatedly hammered into me in med school. No medieval dogma cooked up by a criminal organisation of cross-dressing wankers should fucking come into the picture.

Now, the Bishop of the Phoenix Diocese (who excommed the nun who happened to have got her head screwed on right) stripped the entire hospital of its Catholic affliliation affliction for doing what hospitals do i.e. save lives.

"I like to wear dresses and make young boys wear dresses too." - Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted.

Here's what the cock-gobbling bishop had to say in this excerpt of the news article,

In a letter written last month to the president of Catholic Healthcare West, the parent company of St. Joseph's Hospital, Olmstead said he wanted more oversight of the hospital to make sure it complies with Catholic healthcare rules. He also wants to educate medical staff about those rules. In addition, he wants acknowledgment that he was right and the hospital was wrong in its interpretation of the church's directive on "indirect abortions."

"There cannot be a tie in this debate," Olmsted wrote. "Until this point in time, you have not acknowledged my authority to settle this question."

This megalomaniacal motherfucker is a nasty piece of work, but he's just a symptom of the greater rotten core of the entire Roman Catholic Church which is pathologically obsessed with being recognised as the authority for morality - when they clearly aren't. No, I'm not buying that simple-minded platitude that religion universally teaches good and that only a few bad apples are stinking up the barrel. Bishop Olmsted is merely carrying out the "directives" of his mother church and the fact that the Pope and the Vatican did not swing its gigantic crosier and smite this disgusting human shit-stain off the face of the earth makes them complicit in this entire sorry debacle - not that I really need any more convincing that Catholicism has no redeeming feature whatsoever.

If I work at St. Joe's, I'd wear the Church's disapproval as a badge of honour, but that's just me. I happen to have a conscience.

I thought the picture was missing some things, so I added them.

Anyway, here's what the hospital had to say in this press release on their website to Bishop Fuckhead,

"Though we are deeply disappointed, we will be steadfast in fulfilling our mission," said Linda Hunt, President of St. Joseph’s. "St. Joseph’s hospital will remain faithful to our mission of care, as we have for the last 115 years. Our caregivers deliver extraordinary medical care and share an unmatched commitment to the wellbeing of the communities they serve. Nothing has or will change in that regard."

"Consistent with our values of dignity and justice, if we are presented with a situation in which a pregnancy threatens a woman’s life, our first priority is to save both patients. If that is not possible we will always save the life we can save, and that is what we did in this case," said Hunt. "We continue to stand by the decision, which was made in collaboration with the patient, her family, her caregivers, and our Ethics Committee. Morally, ethically, and legally we simply cannot stand by and let someone die whose life we might be able to save."

Take that, you dogmatic sons-of-bitches.



Wants religion out of medical ethics,
k0k s3n w4i