The Catholic hospital and its lawyers here exhibit the kind of reprehensible hypocrisy which gives all people of faith a bad name. Shame on them.
Lori Stodghill was 31-years old, seven-months pregnant with twin boys and feeling sick when she arrived at St. Thomas More hospital in Cañon City on New Year’s Day 2006. She was vomiting and short of breath and she passed out as she was being wheeled into an examination room. Medical staff tried to resuscitate her but, as became clear only later, a main artery feeding her lungs was clogged and the clog led to a massive heart attack. Stodghill’s obstetrician, Dr. Pelham Staples, who also happened to be the obstetrician on call for emergencies that night, never answered a page. His patient died at the hospital less than an hour after she arrived and her twins died in her womb.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, Stodghill’s husband Jeremy, a prison guard, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on behalf of himself and the couple’s then-two-year-old daughter Elizabeth. Staples should have made it to the hospital, his lawyers argued, or at least instructed the frantic emergency room staff to perform a caesarian-section. The procedure likely would not have saved the mother, a testifying expert said, but it may have saved the twins.
The lead defendant in the case is Catholic Health Initiatives, the Englewood-based nonprofit that runs St. Thomas More Hospital as well as roughly 170 other health facilities in 17 states. Last year, the hospital chain reported national assets of $15 billion. The organization’s mission, according to its promotional literature, is to “nurture the healing ministry of the Church” and to be guided by “fidelity to the Gospel.” Toward those ends, Catholic Health facilities seek to follow the Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Church authored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Those rules have stirred controversy for decades, mainly for forbidding non-natural birth control and abortions. “Catholic health care ministry witnesses to the sanctity of life ‘from the moment of conception until death,’” the directives state. “The Church’s defense of life encompasses the unborn.”
So far so good right? Here’s where it gets hypocritical-
But when it came to mounting a defense in the Stodghill case, Catholic Health’s lawyers effectively turned the Church directives on their head. Catholic organizations have for decades fought to change federal and state laws that fail to protect “unborn persons,” and Catholic Health’s lawyers in this case had the chance to set precedent bolstering anti-abortion legal arguments. Instead, they are arguing state law protects doctors from liability concerning unborn fetuses on grounds that those fetuses are not persons with legal rights.
As Jason Langley, an attorney with Denver-based Kennedy Childs, argued in one of the briefs he filed for the defense, the court “should not overturn the long-standing rule in Colorado that the term ‘person,’ as is used in the Wrongful Death Act, encompasses only individuals born alive. Colorado state courts define ‘person’ under the Act to include only those born alive. Therefore Plaintiffs cannot maintain wrongful death claims based on two unborn fetuses.”
That’s right- the hospital is claiming that the unborn aren’t people. All for the sake of money. The hospital thinks the unborn aren’t people at all- when it suits them. When it comes to money. That’s sickening.
But that’s not the only thing that’s sickening in this story for the truth is, lots of folk who SUPPORT abortion are jumping on the ‘attack the hospital’ bandwagon- happily pointing out the hypocrisy here inherent while simultaneously encouraging the murder of the unborn themselves. Yes indeed, they dislike the hypocrisy of the Catholics but don’t see their own hypocrisy as manifested in their faux outrage. If they were really outraged they would be outraged at abortion itself and not at one of the far too many willing to allow it for the sake of filthy lucre.
I don’t know so much, Jim. The lawyers are arguing that the law which was prevailing at the time of death did not recognise unborn humans as legal persons. And they are almost certainly correct to do so. A legal argument is not an argument about facts per se – it is about legal definitions and admissable facts. A legal argument is also not one about morality/ethics – it is about law. Occasionally facts coincide with legally admissable facts and occasionally law coincides with a person’s ethics. But not often, and not in this case. The law rarely satisfies every concern in society, but it is in general a good alternative to arbitrary rulings.
This does not of course prevent the Catholic institution from paying compensation voluntarily in respect of the unborn children. So what would be interesting to know is if the Catholic hospital had offered any settlement which included any compensation specifically in respect of the unborn children – although we probably won’t learn of such facts until the legal case is over.