Connecticut Bishops Should Reconsider: Russian Roulette with the Lives of Babies is Unacceptable
Fri, 28 Sep 2007
The Catholic Bishops in Connecticut yesterday reversed their position and now say that Catholic hospitals there will comply with a new state law mandating that they dispense “emergency contraception” to rape victims even if a victim might have an embryo inside her. I respectfully suggest their position is gravely flawed, because it explicitly allows an action that has a reasonably possible chance of achieving its goal of killing a human embryo. Christian doctors across the country are resisting an onslaught of laws trying to force them to kill people, and yesterday’s statement will make their resistance harder.
Catholic teaching generally disallows contraception, but allows it in the case of rape as an act of self defense against the attacker’s sperm.Yet Catholic teaching prohibits harming an embryo as an end or means, and also prohibits taking an action that might reasonably do so. This makes sense. It is similar to saying that a gun can be fired in self defense, but cannot be fired into a crowd of innocent people, even if only one chamber of the gun is loaded. For years the pro-life movement and the Catholic Bishops correctly argued against full-scale abortion in part on the basis that even if we’re not sure the fetus is a person, it is wrong to kill it because we must err on the side of life.
The preceding moral principles cannot be applied precisely to “emergency contraception” such as “Plan B,” because we don’t have tests to show whether an embryo is present in a woman, and therefore whether a drug actually kills an embryo. All we can test for is whether ovulation has occurred (which releases the ovum to a place where sperm can reach it), and whether an approximately week-old embryo is present who can emit enough HCG hormone to show up on a “pregnancy test.” As a result, if a woman has sperm inside her and has recently ovulated, but a pregnancy test is negative, an embryo might be present anyway or might soon come into being.
Administering Plan B at that moment is basically the equivalent of shooting a partially loaded gun into a crowd. Plan B can function by preventing ovulation, or by slowing the sperm from getting to the ovum, or after an embryo is present by preventing its implantation into the woman’s uterus, thereby killing it. Plan B’s label affirms this latter effect, and recent studies (see also) confirm its real, non-negligible possibility. Perhaps more importantly (and more obviously), if a woman has already ovulated Plan B cannot function to prevent ovulation, and the chance of sufficiently slowing down the sperm at this point is remote.
Enter the Connecticut Bishops’ latest statement, which says, in relevant part, (copy and paste full URL ending with doc, direct click will not work http://www.connecticut.nasccd.org/bins/connecticut/templates/splash.asp?resolutionfile=ftppath|documents/Statement re Plan B 9 27 07 (2).doc)
[T]o administer Plan B pills in Catholic hospitals to victims of rape[,] a pregnancy test to determine that the woman has not conceived is sufficient [moral precaution]. An ovulation test will not be required. The administration of Plan B pills in this instance cannot be judged to be the commission of an abortion because of such doubt about how Plan B pills and similar drugs work and because of the current impossibility of knowing from the ovulation test whether a new life is present. To administer Plan B pills without an ovulation test is not an intrinsically evil act.
Let’s break this down.The bishops say that Catholic health care providers will administer Plan B if a pregnancy test is negative, even if an ovulation test would be positive. How do they justify this, since in that circumstance Plan B might kill a human embryo (what else could it do)? First they say it’s not “abortion.” Strictly speaking, so what? Other things besides abortion are morally evil, like for example Russian roulette. Doing something that by design might kill an embryo, and that has a reasonable chance of doing so, is morally evil (and is awfully similar to abortion). This distinction is insufficient to prove the act’s moral acceptability.