My Daily Domestic Clips 10/16/2010 (p.m.)

• Colleen Hammond | Pro-life News | Difficult Pregnancies, Precarious Choices, and the Absolute Value of Innocent Lives | 2010-10-15 10:29:19 – Annotated tags: abortion Catholic prolife
  • An April 2010 research study showed impressive survival rates for pregnant
    mothers with pulmonary hypertension. This was achieved by combining
    multi-specialty collaboration with planned and managed delivery. The results,
    published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (BJOG), indicated
    that all nine of the patients in the small study group survived along with their
    unborn children.
  • As the fire pulses dangerously around them, it becomes apparent that the only
    way the firefighters might be able to quickly pass would be to take a saw and
    cut the body of the collapsed man into pieces, causing his death, and then pull
    out sections of his body until a passage large enough for them to pass through
    had been opened up. Clearly, the firefighters would be obligated to try
    everything else to save the child and the collapsed man (shifting his body this
    way or that, trying to rouse him from his unconsciousness, etc.) but they could
    never choose to directly kill him by cutting up his body, even for the very good
    reason of gaining access to the next floor and saving the trapped child.
    This example points towards an old adage sometimes cited by
    moralists: Better two deaths than one murder. Some might say
    that  “murder” would not fit here, given that the term generally connotes a
    callous, wanton, and premeditated act of killing, instead of an urgent,
    emotional and difficult decision in the face of few or no alternatives. But even
    the strongest emotion and the greatest difficulties surrounding such cases must
    be focused through the lens of a similar affirmation: Better two deaths than
    the direct taking of an innocent life.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.