Yes, it’s the Mater Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, a Catholic hospital that I wrote about two days ago for trying to prevent the dissemination of birth-control information to women undergoing chemotherapy trials. Now they’re screwing up again, but this time over abortion.
A piece by Mark Coen in the Irish Times notes that the Mater is poised to contest Ireland’s already restrictive abortion law, the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act of 2013. That act allows abortion in Ireland only under dire circumstances, when the mother’s life is proven to be at risk. Now some board members of the Mater don’t even want to abide by this, for it offends their religious (i.e., Catholic) sensibilities:
Wikipedia summarizes the provisions of the Act
The Act specifies the number and specialty of medical practitioners who must concur that a termination is necessary to prevent a risk of death. These criteria differ in three scenarios:
- Risk of loss of life from physical illness. Two physicians, one an obstetrician and the other a specialist in the field of the relevant condition, must concur.For example, if the woman has cancer, the two physicians would be an obstetrician and an oncologist. Where relevant, the specialists must also consult the woman’s general practitioner (GP). The termination would be an elective procedure performed at an appropriate institution.
- Risk of loss of life from physical illness in emergency. In a medical emergency, a single physician must both provide the diagnosis and perform the termination.
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- Risk of loss of life from suicide. Three physicians must concur; an obstetrician, a psychiatrist with experience treating women during or after pregnancy, and another psychiatrist. At least one of them should consult the woman’s GP with her consent. The termination would be an elective procedure performed at an appropriate institution.
The physicians’ diagnosis must be “an opinion formed in good faith which has regard to the need to preserve unborn human life as far as practicable”. Normal informed consent is required. Medical personnel with conscience objections to abortion will not be required to participate in terminations, but must transfer care of a patient in such cases.All terminations must be notified to the Minister for Health within 28 days.[16] The Minister will make an annual report of such notifications.[1
This law was passed in deference to Irish courts, who said that, in response to women being refused abortions when their lives were in danger, that something had to be done to protect the right to life of the mother, a right specified in the Irish constitution.
Unless their situation conforms to the new stipulations, a woman in Ireland still can’t obtain an abortion. Those who want one have historically flown to England, where abortion is legal; but the law also creates a new offense of “destruction of unborn human life”, with a maximum penalty of 14 years imprisonment. Abortion was illegal before, but no penalty was specified.
Finally, polls repeatedly show that 60% of the Irish public favor abortion legislation far more liberal than the 2013 law, but the legislature, heavily lobbied by the church, won’t bend.
But even despite the draconian regulations given above, the Mater hospital is objecting to these provisions. They want the right to refuse an abortion to a woman whose life is in danger because it violates their “freedom of religion”. (Note that the Mater formally “belongs” to the Catholic church, it is funded by the Irish government and taxpayers.) From the Times:
In recent days it has been reported that the board of governors of the Mater hospital plans to meet to formulate its position on the hospital’s inclusion in the Act as a centre for the performance of terminations. Two members of the board have indicated publicly that they feel that the legislation conflicts with the religious ethos of the institution.
This could herald a constitutional challenge to the Act on the basis that it violates the freedom of religion of the owners of the hospital, the Sisters of Mercy. The Act also designates St Vincent’s hospital, which is owned by the Sisters of Charity, as an institution at which abortions are to be performed.
And it looks as if religion could win, particularly in the case of suicide, when there’s time to move the mother to another, non-Catholic hospital.
The constitutional case law of the Irish courts emphasises that religious institutions, even if publicly funded, may not be forced to act in a manner which conflicts with their ethos. The fact that the pregnant woman has a constitutional right to a termination in certain circumstances does not necessarily mean that that right would trump the very strong constitutional right of an institution to freedom of religion.
Read that last sentence again.
If this legislation is deemed to be unconstitutional, it will give Irish hospitals the legal right to allow a pregnant woman to die—against her wishes and those of her doctors—rather than have a life-saving abortion. How the Irish government manages to flout the wish of its own citizens, pregnant women, and the policy of its fellow EU countries (the EU allows this draconian law on the grounds that it protects Ireland’s “public morals”) is beyond me.
Actually, it isn’t, for it demonstrates the power and the warped “morality” of the Catholic Church. Can you imagine letting both a mother and her fetus die when you could have saved the mother’s life, because of some warped interpretation of an ancient book? I guess they think things will be made right in Heaven.
h/t: Grania Spingies
Using the warped logic of the catholic church, one would think that they would favor abortion in the case where the mother’s life is at risk, because saving the mother’s life at the expense of the fetus at least maximizes the chance that the mother will produce additional little catholics in the future.
Hey RC Church, the Mediaeval period called, they want their values back!
Sub
Re: last line.
“Kill them all, God will take care of the rest.” The advice of the Pope’s legate to the army commander outside the gates of Béziers, before the massacre of the Cathars.
Plus ça change…
//
‘Danger, Free-Will Adamson! Does not compute!’
I wonder how the legislation tried to define that nonsensical idea (if it did)?
Don’t blame the Church – they are only doing what we expect – blame the Irish for allowing themselves to be treated like serfs. I thought the Irish might have wakened up after allowing the Church to fuck their kids and kill their mothers.
Shame on Ireland.
Bullshit. Encouraging the Irish people to give the catholic church the boot is one thing. Absolving the catholic church of blame and placing it all on their victims is another, not so nice, thing.
As I’ve said before, the Pope could make this all go away. Popes seem to prefer suffering.
Like any other large organization, the RCC has lost the ability to make any meaningful policy changes.
After 2 millennia it’s bureaucracy is so entrenched that no one person could ever effect any meaningful reforms.
The pope has about the same power as the monarch of Britain or the president of the US, none to speak of, acting mainly as a figurehead.
I anticipate something similar to Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden, where someone internal to the RCC bureaucracy can no longer stomach the monstrous evil of this organization and releases internal church documents to Wikileaks on a massive scale, exposing the rot and corruption of this institution on scale that simply can not be ignored.
My suggestion to up and coming humanities students is, take a lot of Latin electives, your services will be in high demand when this happens.
Latin wiki leaks. Maybe I should brush up my Latin for future exciting employment opportunities. 🙂
I heard on Radio 4 the most surprising interview I’ve ever heard. Every single answer he gave was startling.
It was with the guy who translates the Papal Encyclicals into Latin; he lives, rather amazingly in Chicago.
He was asked about his meetings with Pope Benedict. He told the interviewer that the Pope’s servants insisted on his dressing up formally for encounters with il Papa.
The latinist refused absolutely; he went on to explain that he hated the formalism and atmosphere of the Vatican, couldn’t bear being in that environment and disagreed fundamentally with most of Catholic doctrine.
Asked why he did the job, he explained that he just happened to be really good at classical languages, and that he had to earn a living somehow.
Some people are genuinely surprising and charming; he was one…wish I could remember his name.
The Church obviously deserves blame for its teachings, but Ireland is a democracy and the ultimate responsibility for its laws rests with the Irish people. I don’t think they can plead ignorance or incapacity. The other industrialized democracies liberalized their abortion laws decades ago. Ireland’s wretched abortion laws persist because so many of its voters are willing accomplices of the Vatican on this issue.
@ Gary W
Posted August 9, 2013 at 9:43 am
Once again, Gary, you posit, in classic liberal fashion, a straight line between the political culture of a country’s inhabitants and its official politics and government. There has barely been a case in history when a liberal democratic government has obtained a 50%+1 mandate at the first time of asking. All transferable vote systems (and I would include in that the U.S. presidential elections) implicitly recognize that.
Your view of political change is formalistic, astonishingly naïve – voters think this, this is the government we get, come on! – essentially incremental and incapable of taking into account sudden shifts in public mood and determination.
For example, your dismissal of Irish regression overlooks the fact that it was this backward, semi-feudal, Catholic, colony which kicked off the wave of European revolutions in the 1910s and 20s; Lenin averred that the Russian revolution would not have happened without the Easter Rising. And, in parentheses, Russia introduced the most ‘liberal’ abortion laws in history, soon after 1917.
The point is that political history, usually conducted at an evolutionarily glacial pace, can suddenly jump forward, and just as easily fall back. How else can you explain, in literary history, the efflorescence of the modern in writers such as Shaw, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett from the bud of such a semi-medieval society as Ireland?
Grania has explained the local political difficulties with which the modern Paddy in the Republic has to grapple; Jared Diamond has illustrated perfectly in bio-geographical terms, the Marxist aperçu that man deals with the problems he is faced with.
Would that you had the grace and understanding to demonstrate a little solidarity with her position.
Slaínte.
That’s really unfair. People in Ireland have been protesting and lobbying on this issue for a long time.
The problem is a little bit more complex than Irish people not expressing their wishes. They also have to deal with two rather conservative major opposition parties who have made a point of dragging their heels on legislating for this issue for decades. Vote the one party out, and the replacement is essentially the same.
You can’t be suggesting, Grania, pacerevjimbob, that Irish people have differing opinions on the matter?
Good gracious, it must be clear that the entire adult population was happy to allow (rjb) the priesthood to fiddle about with their kids.
We Irish really are that stupid. What we need is a modern modest proposal to sort us out.
My advice to the Irish is, don’t put all your potatoes in one basket.
Given the slightest chance, religion will with out fail poison anything. I’ll stop now before I start cussing. Ben will come along and say it better than I could anyway.
Fucking murdering, child raping barbarians and their lackeys and toadies, the lot of ’em.
…and that’s probably plenty from me, too.
b&
🙂 those are swears I was looking for! Well sajd!
Thanks.
I swear, it’s like they’re trying to become parodies of the most evil villains imaginable. They run an international child rape racket for themselves, they’re waging genocide in Africa, they’re killing pregnant women…really, about all that’s left to them is to start biting the heads off of kittens as part of their weekly ritualized cannibalism fantasy.
b&
Part of the issue here is allowing religious institutions to govern healthcare. I suppose that if Ireland is going to allow for hospitals with a religious administration it should also provide for hospitals with a non religious administration for those patients who wish not to be treated by witch doctors. Pro Choice and Pro Life hospitals? Sets an unfortunate precedent though. You would then need Protestant Hospitals, Methodist hospitals, the of course Muslim, Mormon, Scientologist and Jehovah’s Witness hospitals, each having its own subtle shade of morality. Each person could have his own hospital. There problem solved
What Ireland needs is balls! Balls to pass legislation expropriating all religiously run schools, hospitals, and similar and bringing them under secular state control. (The US and Canada could use this too.)
While they’re at it, they should also seize every last penny in church bank and investment accounts. The archbishops of Ireland can thing sell off some of their bling to pay the bills for running their churches.
Your proposals are unconstitutional and absurd. “Expropriating all religiously run schools” would be a violation of the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom, and “seizing every last penny in church bank and investment accounts” would be a violation of the Fifth Amendment’s protection of private property rights. We should tax the churches, yes. But “seizing” their assets is a ridiculous idea.
We’re discussing Ireland here, not the US, and the First Amendment doesn’t apply.
And why not seize all their assets? That happens to other types of criminal organizations.
We’re discussing Ireland here, not the US, and the First Amendment doesn’t apply
Ireland’s constitution also protects religious freedom. And if it didn’t, it should. Parents have a broad right to educate their children in the religion of their choice. Not an unlimited right, but a broad one. Your proposal would trample on that right.
And why not seize all their assets? That happens to other types of criminal organizations.
You don’t seem to have much respect for due process and the rule of law. In a liberal democracy, the government cannot simply declare an organization to be “criminal” and seize its assets. It has to make a legal case against the organization and persuade judges and juries that the organization broke the law. And any penalty imposed on the organization also has to be consistent with the law. The Catholic Church has in fact been forced to forfeit some of its assets as penalties in sex-abuse cases.
I do t know I’d it is like this for Ireland bit Canada has the catholic school business built into the constitution. This makes it hard to change and it was originally put there as part of French relations.
Catholic hospitals I don’t think cause issues in Canada like Ireland. My dad was in a catholic hospital for his cancer surgery and they even let you take down the Jesus cross.
Exactly. I’d even say that’s the core of the issue. There is a constitutional right to freedom of religion, but no religious institution has a constitutional right to run hospitals. They should be allowed to do it only if they follow the law of the land (and also meet accreditation standards).
Y’all ought to look into the purchase of hospitals in the USA over the previous few years by the US RC Church. Note the religious strictures imposed upon employees & doctor-patient relationships, where a third party now abrogates for itself insurance coverage proscriptions and the final say in patient care options re human reproduction — well, in the case of the feminine gender, at any rate. This acquisition campaign, and the opportunity it enables forced imposition of Catholic dogma onto an all-too-unwitting secular client base whose hospital care options frequently are either the one or none (same goes for staff employment), is a trend gaining momentum.
unbelievable! i mean, i believe it, to be clear. i’m just astonished that this isn’t the sort of thing that people like Ross Douthat, etc. aren’t writing in opposition about.
Part of the issue is that abortion has always been relatively easy for Irish women – they just got the ferry to Liverpool. This allowed the Catholic Church the delicate hypocrisy that abortion is illegal in Ireland in the full knowledge that in reality it is actually freely available. British abortion clinics (such as Marie Stopes) actually give advice for Irish women as to how to get terminations.
http://tinyurl.com/bts4zqj
sub