The Register reports that Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, a Catholic hospital, has been performing “early induction” procedures to terminate pregnancies of children with unsurvivable abnormalities.
The president of Alaska Right to Life, Ed Wassell, contacted the hospital about what appears to be a form of abortion.
The only therapeutic reason given by hospital officials for early induction was “to relieve familial distress,” according to Wassell.
Providence officials did tell Wassell that if Archbishop [Roger] Schwietz told them to stop performing the procedure, they would.
From then on, Wassell said, Right to Life stopped talking with the hospital and started talking with the archbishop to persuade him to take action.
Abp. Schwietz asked the hospital to suspend the use of the procedure and, with the help of Boston’s National Catholic Bioethics Center, got the hospital to tighten up its policy somewhat. He thinks the new policy is in compliance with the bishops’ medical-ethics directives.
These directives say (among other things):
49. For a proportionate reason, labor may be induced after the fetus is viable.
Is the reason sufficient?
Perhaps all “Catholic” in name only hospitals should be given to the Missionaries of Charity. I’d sure feel a lot safer.
this was being discussed on the Theology of the Body listserv.
The intent was to allow women carrying anencephalic babies to have labor induced somewhere close to the due date, as anencephalic pregnancies will often go on seemingly forever (the fetal chemicals that trigger labor are missing).
With intensive care, some babies will survive as early as 24 weeks, but I think that this definition of ‘viability’ needs a close and careful look. I think that a better definition would be ‘that gestational age at which most infants will survive with fairly routine care’ – and the earliest age for that is around 34 weeks – and the ACOG statement on elective induction of labor recommends that it not be performed before 39 weeks (as most babies will do OK at 37 weeks and there is a 2 week margin of error in most gestational dating practices).
My most recent patient with a fatal fetal anomaly had given birth to her other children around 36 weeks gestation, and that is when this baby was born also. Anyhow, for a first person input, go to The Carrying to Term Pages