Archbishop Kurtz resigns as religious liberty chair during cancer treatment

CNA Staff, May 20, 2020 / 12:45 pm (CNA).- Despite objections from Catholic groups, a Missouri death row inmate died by lethal injection May 19, in the first execution carried out in the United States since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

Catho… […]

Cincinnati, Ohio, Apr 8, 2018 / 06:00 am (CNA).- A clean needle exchange program that distributes condoms is hosted in the parking lot of an Ohio Catholic hospital, and one Catholic bioethicist thinks the system can do better.
 
“I would say Catholics are called to more. At a minimum, Christ articulated a higher standard for moral life than what other people are doing,” Catholic bioethicist John Brehany told CNA April 4, addressing the needle exchange aspect in particular.
 
The hospital statement justifying the practice stressed harm reduction.
 
“It seems to me that they have a good motive,” Brehany said. “They want to help people, they want to help people avoid harm. That’s understandable, is that good enough? Is that what Christians are called to do?”
 
Brehany is director of institutional relations at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, which handles inquiries on Catholic bioethics issues. He has a doctorate in healthcare ethics, a licentiate in sacred theology and is past executive director of the Catholic Medical Association.
 
The Mercy Health Clermont Hospital in Batavia, Ohio is hosting in its parking lot an Exchange Project program that offers condoms as well as injection equipment and other health services, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports.
 
“First and foremost, the needle exchange services program is a harm reduction program aimed at reducing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV and Hepatitis C,” Mercy Health spokesperson Nanette Bentley told CNA April 3. “The program includes needle exchange, access to testing and condoms as a holistic approach to harm reduction.”
 
“When clients enter the van, they enter the property of Hamilton County Public Health,” Bentley said. “The van is staffed solely by employees of Hamilton County Public Health and all services are provided by those employees.”
 
“Mercy Health – Clermont Hospital provides a central location for the van to offer its harm reduction program but does not provide any services on the van,” she added, saying that Mercy Health provides “many other medical and preventive services for patients with substance abuse issues.”
 
In Kentucky, the St. Elizabeth Healthcare system hosts the needle exchange program in parking lots at its Covington hospital and at St. Elizabeth Urgent Care in Newport. However, these programs will not distribute condoms.
 
“St. Elizabeth Healthcare is dedicated to caring for our patients’ medical needs without compromise of the Catholic Church’s teachings concerning birth control,” Guy Karrick, a spokesman for St. Elizabeth, told The Cincinnati Enquirer. “We are going above and beyond for our community to get a program in place as quickly as possible.”
 
St. Elizabeth considers hospital property to be bound by Catholic teaching, such as the U.S. bishops’ Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services.
 
“Catholic health institutions may not promote or condone contraceptive practices,” one directive reads.
 
Karrick did suggest the program might be best off on health department grounds.
 
Brehany said he couldn’t adequately assess the entire program since he did not have all the details. He also stressed that issues of cooperation in evil are among the most complex in moral theology. While some Church teachings are clear and settled, others are not. For instance, the use of contraception in marriage is clearly forbidden, but Church teaching on the ethics of using condoms to reduce the transmission of disease outside of marriage is less developed.

In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI told journalist Peter Seewald that while condoms could not be considered “a real or moral solution,” their use by homosexual prostitutes might be considered “a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility.”

Benedict later clarified that “naturally the church does not consider condoms as the authentic and moral solution” to the spread of AIDs or other other sexually-transmitted diseases.
 
“At the National Catholic Bioethics Center, when it comes to the question of justifying the use of condoms to prevent disease transmission, we’ve always argued against that,” Brehany told CNA. “One reason is that Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae teaches that every sexual act must retain its essential openness to procreation.”
 
In addition, he said, “If someone has a dangerous disease, really, the better ethical action is not to expose someone else to it at all.”
 
Dr. Lynne Saddler, district director of the Northern Kentucky Health Department, voiced gratitude for the partnership with St. Elizabeth’s, the Catholic system that barred condom distribution.
 
Although the National Harm Reduction Coalition of New York City praised St. Elizabeth’s participation in the program, it advocated that the system add condom distribution “as part of a comprehensive HIV prevention strategy for a particularly vulnerable population.”
 
Dr. Judith Feinberg, who ran the first needle exchange program in the Greater Cincinnati area in 2014, said the program was about doing anything possible to keep people safe.
 
“The whole point is to prevent disease, and the condoms are part of preventing disease,” she said.
 
According to Brehany, the issue of cooperation in evil is “complex” and must be evaluated on several factors including intent and the nature of one’s involvement with another person’s unethical action. Catholic teaching, especially as taught in St. John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical “Veritatis Splendor,” rejects both a utilitarian mode of thinking and an ethical approach based only on good intentions or good consequences.
 
Further, those cooperating in moral evil must always be aware of whether their cooperation might cause others to believe that a practice is morally allowed.
 
“Adequately discerning the effect of our actions on other people’s faith is always a consideration in issues of cooperation,” said Brehany.
 
As for needle distribution, while Church teaching is less developed, he suggested that a clean needle distribution would be more justifiable if the goal included weaning someone off drugs, rather than intending to help them maintain their drug use in a manner that merely reduced the risk of spreading disease.
 
CNA sought comment from the Cincinnati archdiocese, but was referred to Mercy Health.

The Mercy Health system has hospitals in Ohio and Kentucky. Its sponsors include the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of the Humility of Mary, and the Franciscan Sisters of the Poor.
 
The St. Elizabeth Healthcare system is sponsored by the Diocese of Covington. It operates six facilities in northern Kentucky.

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Bismarck, N.D., Jun 27, 2019 / 12:11 am (CNA).- North Dakota’s sole abortion clinic, located in Fargo, is filing a lawsuit against two state laws that it claims force doctors to present false information, and is asking a judge to block the laws’ enforcement.

The complaint is from the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights on behalf of the American Medical Association, the Red River Women’s Clinic in Fargo, and the clinic’s medical director, Dr. Kathryn Eggleston.

The lawsuit alleges that two state laws, set to go into effect Aug. 1, force doctors to “lie”: one requires doctors to affirm that an unborn baby is a “unique, living human being,” and the other requires doctors to inform patients that reversals of medication abortions are possible.

Medication abortions have become an increasingly common method of abortion in the United States, making up 30-40 percent of all abortions.

North Dakota State Rep. Daniel Johnston said he sponsored the bill so that “women having second thoughts” about going through with a medication abortion know they have options, according to the Associated Press.

The AP reports that Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Utah have passed similar laws that require patients to be informed about medication abortion reversal.

The lawsuit asserts that there is no “credible, scientific evidence” that a medication abortion can be reversed.

Medical abortions involve the taking of two pills – the first pill, mifepristone (RU-486) blocks the progesterone hormone, which is essential for maintaining the health of the baby. The second pill, misoprostol, is taken 24 hours after mifepristone and works to induce contractions in order to expel the baby. Some women, after taking the first pill (mifepristone), experience regret and do not want to follow through with the abortion by taking misoprostol.

A study published last year in Issues in Law and Medicine, a peer-reviewed medical journal affiliated with the pro-life organization Watson Bowes Research Institute, examined 261 successful abortion pill reversals, and showed that the reversal success rates were 68 percent with a high-dose oral progesterone protocol and 64 percent with an injected progesterone protocol.

Dr. Mary Davenport and Dr. George Delgado, who have been studying the abortion pill reversal procedures since 2009, authored the study. Delgado sits on the board of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and co-founded the Abortion Pill Rescue Network, a coalition of 800 medical providers across the country.

“When I learned about the work of Dr. George Delgado…I jumped right on that. I felt we needed to educate women that they had a choice,” Tammy Taylor, a nurse practitioner at Guiding Star, a women’s health care clinic in Tampa, told Pregnancy Help News this month.

Taylor’s Tampa clinic has provided 15 women so far with abortion pill reversals, some of whom have traveled up to two hours for the procedure, Pregnancy Help News reports.

The director of a women’s clinic in Denver told CNA in April 2018 that she has found the abortion pill reversal protocol to be safe and effective with her patients, and her clinic has successfully treated several women who come in seeking a reversal after taking the first pill.

“I think the fact that we have now over 300 successful reversals is evidence that it works,” nurse practitioner Dede Chism, co-founder and executive director of Bella Natural Women’s Care in Englewood, CO, told CNA at the time.

“This isn’t make-believe and it isn’t coincidental.”

Delgado told the Washington Post that he believed more research should be done on abortion pill reversal, but that he believes there should be nothing to stop doctors from using the progesterone protocol in the meantime.

“(T)he science is good enough that, since we have no alternative therapy and we know it’s safe, we should go with it,” he said.

The pro-life group Heartbeat International has documented numerous cases of successful abortion pill reversals resulting in healthy babies being born. A recent report from Pregnancy Help News, a service of Heartbeat International, said 750 babies have been saved in this manner.

The AMA also took issue with a law that requires physicians to tell patients that abortion terminates “the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being,” a statement that the AMA deemed a “controversial, ideological, and non-medical message.”

North Dakota’s governor signed into law in April a bill that outlaws the common abortion procedure known as “dilation and evacuation,” also known as “dismemberment abortion.”

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