Category: Pro-Life

John Mallon of Inside the Vatican sent this appeal the other day:

As Father’s Day is celebrated today, “Inside the Vatican” brings you a way to help a young Catholic father save the life of his unborn child by keeping alive his wife, who lies in a permanently brain dead state after collapsing 6 weeks ago.
On May 7th, 2005, the day before Mothers’ Day, Susan M. (Rollins) Torres, 26, a pregnant mother with a two-year-old son, Peter, collapsed in her home. She was rushed to the Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, VA, where she has been diagnosed with stage four melanoma and is brain dead with no hope of recovery.
Susan was 17 weeks pregnant at the time, and although the doctors have given her no hope of survival, they are fighting to keep her unborn child alive until at least July 11 where he or she will have a viable chance at life.
Her husband Jason, a devout Catholic, has quit his job and divides his time between Susan, sleeping at the hospital room every night, and his young son.
Mr. Torres faces a crushing debt because of his decision to keep his wife alive in order to save the life of his child. Susan’s medical insurance leaves $1,500 a day to be paid by him out of pocket, not to mention the expensive care that the baby most likely will need in the neonatal ward if he is born.
The plight of the Torres’ family has recently received wide media coverage, following an op-ed piece written by Jason’s brother Justin for the Dallas Morning News, in which he discusses the way the abortion culture has negatively affected even his devoutly Catholic family, causing them and the doctors to wonder for a moment if they were doing the right thing in sacrificing so much for the life of an unborn child.
However, both the Torres and Rollins family are determined to do what it takes to try to save Susan’s unborn baby’s life, which they are convinced would be Susan’s desire as well. Jason says his decision to try to save his unborn child’s life at enormous financial cost is also very much based on his Catholic faith. The Torres family, which has seven children, are devout Catholics, and Susan converted while she was a student at the University of Dallas, where she and Jason met.
In an effort to escalate the awareness of their situation, and to help raise additional funds, friends of the Torres family have established The Susan M. Torres Fund to help defray the $1,500 a day ICU medical costs that insurance does not cover.
Please help this family by sending a donation. Any amount is appreciated and it is tax deductible. Donations can be made online through PayPal at http://www.susantorresfund.org, or sent to:
The Susan M. Torres Fund
c/o Faith and Action
P.O. Box 34105
Washington, D.C. 20043-0105
For more information, please visit http://www.susantorresfund.org

This case reminds us of the limitations of the concept of “brain death”; there are three main systems in the body, and it seems arbitrary to make one of them the sole criterion of life and death. In spite of what legal definitions may provide, it’s arguable that a human being is not dead until all three of the body’s main systems (brain, lung, heart) have stopped.
Would you take a moment to do what you can for the Torreses?
There’s good news today: the baby kicked!

What else but the blindness caused by sin could lead officials of the University of Western Ontario to offer this man an honorary degree? They want to give the title “Doctor of Laws” to an illegal abortionist, a man who scoffed at laws, a doctor of death who survived the Holocaust in Europe only to add to another one in North America.
What is the University’s attempt to make this acceptable? Officials offer to give the same title to the president of the University of Notre Dame at the same event: to put a Catholic priest on par with a mass-production abortionist. News (and an on-line petition form) can be found on-line. Also, the Catholics for Life site has more information: scroll way down to the “Background Information”.

This notice comes from a reader — we’re not endorsing it, but the event sounds like something we would like to attend:
TWENTIETH ANNUAL BALL FOR LIFE
Benefiting Good Counsel Homes which serves women and their children in crisis pregnancy situations.
HONORING
Peggy Noonan and Ambassador Faith Whittlesey
Honorary Co-chairmen Larry Kudlow & Sean Hannity
Black tie
Friday, June 3, 2005
8:00 pm – 12 midnight
New York Athletic Club
180 Central Park South
New York City
Order tickets here NOW – limited space!
www.ballforlife.org

Father James Poumade, priest of Christ, godfather of my younger son, and a Catholic Light reader, gave this homily today at our church. Read past the continuation — it’s worth your while.
I assume that almost everyone by now has heard of the passing of our Holy Father Pope John Paul II. Most likely, among other things, the Holy Father will be remembered for his dedication to the sanctity of life and his insistence upon the beauty of the truth, whether it was popular to do so or not in a world that questions, like Pontius Pilate, if truth even exists.
One of the Holy Father’s last appeals to the world was for the life of Terri Schiavo, an appeal that seemed to have been as much shown by the way the Holy Father carried out his last days as by his words. Like her, he was fitted with a feeding tube, although of a less serious type; like her, he asked for no extraordinary medical treatment. It was the Pope himself who declared that although one can legitimately choose not to use ventilators, heart-lung machines, CPR, and so on (although once one begins to use them, they cannot be lightly removed) food and water are not medicine and are not optional, no matter if they are delivered by a fork and cup or by a tube, and it was the Pope, true to form, that showed the world that he could practice what he preached.

…when you get arrested for taking a crippled woman a bottle of water. Reader Julianne Wiley writes:

I know this brave, gutsy lady Lana Jacobs. She is indeed a grandmother, also the mother of two disabled daughters. She and her husband and kids are from the St. Francis Catholic Worker house in Columbia, MO, a place where they try to LIVE what Jesus said in Matthew 25: you know, you encounter the person who is hungry, thirst, naked, sick, in prison, and you do— what? And then Jesus says, “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, you do unto Me.”
Let’s send her a bit of support (she’ll have legal expenses):
Lana Jacobs
St. Francis Catholic Worker
901 Rangeline Street
Columbia, MO 65201
BTW, she’ll face charges of trespass or whatever, I dispute the idea that what she did is illegal. Every state makes provision for what is called a “necessity” defense, based on the fact that you were doing something urgent to save somebody’s life (or even to save a valuable piece of property, or a pet, by the way!)