Nun excommunicated over abortion
PHOENIX – A nun who concurred in an ethics committee’s decision to abort the child of a gravely ill woman at a Phoenix hospital was “automatically excommunicated by that action,” according to Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix. Mercy Sister Margaret Mary McBride also was reassigned from her position as vice president of mission integration at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix after news surfaced about the abortion that took place late last year. The patient, who has not been identified, was 11 weeks pregnant and suffering from pulmonary hypertension, a condition that the hospital said carried a near-certain risk of death for the mother if the pregnancy continued. “If there had been a way to save the pregnancy and still prevent the death of the mother, we would have done it. We are convinced there was not,” said a May 17 letter to Bishop Olmsted from top officials at Catholic Healthcare West, the San Francisco-based health system to which St. Joseph’s belongs. But the bishop said in a May 14 statement that “the direct killing of an unborn child is always immoral, no matter the circumstances, and it cannot be permitted in any institution that claims to be authentically Catholic. We always must remember that when a difficult medical situation involves a pregnant woman, there are two patients in need of treatment and care, not merely one,” Bishop Olmsted said. “The unborn child’s life is just as sacred as the mother’s life, and neither life can be preferred over the other.”
From May 21, 2010 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
