Moral issues in the news again

A few days ago, I wrote about the conflict of moral principle versus hard reality. I'm very sad to see that it's hit the news again, in a very tragic episode in Brazil.

Briefly, a nine-year-old girl was found to have been sexually abused by her stepfather since the age of six. She was taken to hospital complaining of stomach-ache, where it was found that she was pregnant. Her father has been arrested, and it's emerged that he probably also abused her fourteen-year-old sister, who is physically handicapped. One can only hope he'll face appropriate justice . . . either inside or outside the legal system.

Doctors determined that the girl met both legal conditions for abortion in Brazil: her health was endangered by her pregnancy, and it was the result of rape. As a result, yesterday they terminated her pregnancy - but now there's fresh controversy. According to the BBC:

The Catholic Church tried to intervene to prevent the abortion going ahead but the procedure was carried out on Wednesday.

Now a Church spokesman says all those involved, including the child's mother and the doctors, are to be excommunicated.

The Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, told Brazil's TV Globo that the law of God was above any human law.

He said the excommunication would not apply to the child because of her age, but would affect all those who ensured the abortion was carried out.

However, doctors at the hospital said they had to take account of the welfare of the girl, and that she was so small that her uterus did not have the ability to contain one child let alone two.

There's more at the link.

Personally, based on my moral theology training, I'd say that this 'abortion' was, in fact, not so much an abortion as an inevitable consequence of an operation necessary for the mother's survival. It's similar to the case of a woman diagnosed with uterine cancer, early in a pregnancy. In order to remove the cancer and save her life, the doctors must remove her uterus: but in doing so, they will unavoidably terminate her pregnancy and kill the foetus. This is known as the 'principle of double effect'. The evil of killing the foetus is not the primary intention or focus of the surgery, but is an unavoidable and secondary consequence of it. As such, it's not considered to be deliberate abortion, and is not classified as such by moral theologians.

However, the local bishop has chosen to take a stand on the Catholic Church's principle that abortion is always murder. He's chosen to ignore or downplay the threat to the mother's life, which in the case of a nine-year-old girl is very real. I can understand where he's coming from, in terms of a 'moral absolutist' viewpoint: but I think it's absolutely tragic in human terms, and shows the incredibly hard choices that must sometimes be made in morally complex situations. I don't blame the doctors, or the girl, or (presumably) her mother, for going ahead with an abortion in this particular instance. I don't see that they had any real alternative, if what the doctors say about the girl's bodily ability to cope with the pregnancy is correct.

I'm not saying that abortion is somehow morally correct. Far from it. I continue to regard abortion as murder in virtually all cases. However, there's a countervailing evil in this situation, equally grave, equally sinful - to force the child to suffer physical harm, perhaps even death, in order to try to preserve the life of her foetus. One evil meets another. Action must be taken: but whatever action is chosen will inevitably harm one or the other life, the mother or her child. There are times when one has to grit one's teeth, make a choice, and pray for God's mercy. This is such a situation.

Quite frankly, the local Bishop's dogmatic insistence on moral purity is one of the reasons I'm no longer active in organized religion to any great extent. When 'the system' or 'doctrine' or 'dogma' demand observance of such stratospherically high moral standards that they lose sight of human reality, and can't acknowledge the very real dilemma in such a situation, they become irrelevant to our existence. They demonstrate only that those espousing them have lost touch with the real world. Life is seldom 'black' or 'white'. It's messy, and awkward, and difficult. We have to muddle through as best we can, guided by our conscience, and sometimes that involves tragically hard choices, as in this situation. No-one's happy about this mess - but the Bishop has just made it much, much worse for everyone by his intransigence.

Peter