Detroit, Mich., Nov 1, 2019 / 04:56 pm (CNA).- The mother of a Michigan teenager who was recently declared brain dead is asking for prayers and support, after a judge ordered a hospital to continue life support until a Nov. 7 court hearing on her son’s health status.
“We feel that human life doesn’t have an estimable value, and it’s invested with the highest dignity by God…To me, it’s very important that we allow for him to continue fighting,” LaShauna Lowery told CNA in a Nov. 1 interview.
Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan declared Titus Jermaine Cromer Jr., 16, to be brain dead, after two doctors determined that he had suffered “irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem.”
The hospital had made plans to remove his life support systems on Oct. 28, and Cromer’s family challenged the decision, asking for additional medical opinions on whether he is actually brain dead.
Cromer is a junior at University of Detroit Jesuit High School, a Catholic high school in Detroit, Michigan. He was rushed to the hospital Oct. 17 after suffering cardiac arrest. Upon arrival at the hospital he could not breathe independently or regulate his own blood pressure.
After Cromer received hydration, nutrition, and body temperature regulation, his family’s lawyer says he is showing signs of improvement and can now breathe independently and regulate his own blood pressure.
“There are strong indicia that he is getting better everyday,” the family’s lawyer, Jim Rasor, told The Detroit News.
“He is currently able to breathe for short periods on his own. …That’s a dramatic improvement from when he came into the hospital.”
Lowery, who is a Baptist went to a Catholic school when she was young told CNA the family’s Christian faith is in important part of the whole situation.
“We’re Christian, right? What I would say is, in our faith, we believe that when the soul leaves the body is when we’re gone. So I think that we need to allow Titus, to allow for his brain to heal.”
Lowery said the family has received independent guidance that has suggested that for a brain injury like Titus’, it could take between two months and two years for the brain to really see healing.
“Seven days, nine days, right, is not enough time,” she said. “So we really want to be able to give a chance for him to allow for his brain to heal, and to allow for him to fight.”
She cited 1 Corinthians 6:19-20: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been purchased at a price. Therefore glorify God in your body.”
While also asking for prayers for Titus’ recovery, she encouraged any other family that is going through a similar situation to reach out to her with offer support and information.
“I didn’t know I had options. I didn’t know I had rights. I didn’t find out about the patients’ rights until it was too late,” she said.
“And so when you’re going through a situation like this, you’re so overwhelmed by all the information that’s being put at you, sometimes it’s hard to digest. So I would say any family that’s going through this— learn your rights, know you have options, and don’t give up.”
Michael Vacca, an attorney and head of bioethics for the Catholic healthcare nonprofit Christ Medicus Foundation, urged Beaumont Hospital to defer to the rights of the parents.
“Despite being declared brain dead, a designation that is imprecise and inconsistent, these physical signs in Titus are objective indications of life,” Vacca said Oct. 30.
Louis Brown, Executive Director of the CMF, called for another medical facility to take Titus on as a patient.
“It is unjust that medical institutions are seeking to end life support so quickly against the wishes of the patient’s family and when patients are showing signs of life,” he said Oct. 30.
The family will go to court Nov. 7, when both sides will present their case so Oakland County Circuit Judge Hala Jarbou can decide what will happen going forward.
In the interim, Lowrey said, the family is looking for facilities that will take Titus and offer him care, both in the Detroit metro area and further afield.
Cromer’s case is similar to that of 14-year-old Bobby Reyes, who was rushed to C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Michigan last month following a severe asthma attack. Repeat tests in the following days indicated that there was no blood flow or electrical activity in the boy’s brain.
The hospital declared Reyes brain dead and made plans to remove him from life support. Reyes’ family fought the decision but ultimately failed to receive relief from a court, due to a jurisdiction dispute. Reyes was removed from life support on Oct. 15.
The hospital said in a statement, “Continuing medical interventions was inappropriate after Bobby had suffered brain death and violates the professional integrity of Michigan Medicine’s clinicians.” Michigan law recognizes an individual as dead if they have undergone “irreversible cessation of all function of the entire brain, including the brain stem.”
The two Michigan cases have drawn renewed attention to the diagnosis of brain death and sparked concerns over parental rights in cases where family members question a diagnosis.
The National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC) maintains that cases of improvement over the course of months or years generally indicate an incorrect diagnosis of brain death in the first place.
“Stories of people continuing on a ventilator for months or years after being declared brain dead typically indicate a failure to apply the tests and criteria for determination of brain death with proper attentiveness and rigor,” said Fr. Tad Pacholczyk, director of education for the center, in a 2005 information sheet.
“In other words, somebody is likely to have cut some corners in carrying out the testing and diagnosis.”
In Cromer’s case, the family believes their teenage son has been misdiagnosed. Their lawyer cited his improvements in independent breathing and blood pressure regulation as “very strong indicia that he has not suffered brain death,” according to the Detroit Free Press.
Medical criteria for diagnosing brain death, while controversial in some circles, have been accepted by most Catholic bioethicists, provided that diagnostic tests are carried out thoroughly and carefully.
In an Aug. 29, 2000 address to the international congress of the transplantation society, St. John Paul II stated that using as a criterion for death “the complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity (in the cerebrum, cerebellum and brain stem) … if rigorously applied, does not seem to conflict with the essential elements of a sound anthropology.”
The NCBC has also stated repeatedly that “Health care workers can use these neurological criteria as the basis for arriving at ‘moral certainty’ that an individual has died.”
The NCBC noted that determining death by these neurological criteria typically involves bedside testing to assess absence of response or reflexes, apnea testing to assess the absence of the ability to breath, and “possible confirmatory tests to further assess the absence of brain activity (for example, an EEG) or the absence of blood flow to the brain.”
Similarly, the U.S. bishops’ Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services indicate that “the determination of death should be made by the physician or competent medical authority in accordance with responsible and commonly accepted scientific criteria.”
And in 2008, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences stated that “brain death … ‘is’ death,” and that “something essential distinguishes brain death from all other types of severe brain dysfunction that encompass alterations of consciousness (for example, coma, vegetative state, and minimally conscious state).”
“If the criteria for brain death are not met, the barrier between life and death is not crossed, no matter how severe and irreversible a brain injury may be,” the academy added.
The Pontifical Academy of Sciences said that after brain death, “the ventilator and not the individual, artificially maintains the appearance of vitality of the body. Thus, in a condition of brain death, the so-called life of the parts of the body is ‘artificial life’ and not natural life. In essence, an artificial instrument has become the principal cause of such a non-natural ‘life’. In this way, death is camouflaged or masked by the use of the artificial instrument.”
Still, some pro-life advocates question the medical criteria used for diagnosing brain death and argue that taking organs from individuals diagnosed as brain dead amounts to homicide.
The NCBC rejects that stance as “irresponsible” and “in tension with Catholic teaching,” countering that while a body may appear to be alive due to oxygenated blood being mechanically pumped through the body, thorough and rigorous testing can confirm that an individual is truly dead.
Dr. Alan Shwemon, former chief of the neurology department at Olive View-U.C.L.A. Medical Center, is an outspoken critic of the criteria used to diagnose brain death.
Shewmon had diagnosed some 200 patients as being brain dead throughout this career, according to the New Yorker. But he began to have doubts about the condition, which were intensified when he saw the case of a 13-year-old girl in Oakland who had been declared brain dead but began to show signs of improvement after being given tube feeding and hormone replacement.
Over the next four years, the girl was able to respond to simple motor commands and underwent puberty-related physical developments before dying of unrelated conditions, Shewmon said. His analysis of the situation led him to believe that the girl had not been brain dead, but was instead in a “minimally conscious state,” with brain flow in the brain too low to be detected by imaging technology, yet sufficient to prevent the death of brain cells – a condition known as global ischemic penumbra.
“Her case challenges the claimed infallibility of diagnostic criteria for brain death and supports the hypothesis that global ischemic penumbra can mimic both clinical brain death as well as absent blood flow on radionuclide scans,” Shewmon asserted in a December 2018 article.
[…]
Speaker Pelosi and Abp. Cordileone had a disagreement about who should decide this [family size and timing]? Really? That’s what she heard?
Funny. I’ve been impressed by the cardinal’s unfailing articulateness.
I agree that his articulateness has been outstanding, but his actions have been, to date, non-existent. For every Catholic who sees his remarks, ten, twenty, or one hundred will see “Catholic” Pelosi’s remarks. The Catholic Church will not “turn around” until our actions mirror our words.
I would guess that virtually every active Catholic knows someone who thinks they are a good Catholic, but who doesn’t follow Church teachings.
Speaker Pelosi’s remarks are rationalizations; she is a Catholic in name only and not practice. God will judge and I ask her to go back and study the 10 Commandments and the Bible.Dr.Maxine Turek
Nancy Pelosi is not a Catholic. She has other attitudes or free will choices that are in error with the fasith. She uses the mantle of of “Catholic” as dressing for being a good person. I am stopping here because I also am a sinner. I dread have Jesus as my judge but rejoice having Him as my savior. Mrs. Pelosi should consider these words.
Yes, God gave us free will to choose Heaven or Hell. Nancy has chosen the latter.
I note Erik Rosales’ frequent challenging questions in his capacity as EWTN’s Capitol Hill correspondent.
“…vigilantes and bounty hunters…” Silly me, I thought the Aztec Pelosi was referring to the well-paid Abortion Industry and other such head hunters.
God gave us a will to choose His good because His good leads to our eternal happiness. His sixth commandment was, is, and always shall be: “Thou shalt not kill.”
To enact laws, to proclaim a ‘right’ or a ‘freedom’ to kill, to require others to remotely participate all act against the sixth commandment. Killing a human being is a mortal sin. This life gives but a foreshadowed glance at eternity.
Jesus Christ will call Nancy to her reckoning whether she wills it or no. One prays that a spark of the Holy Spirit may inspire her intellect to glimpse the depravity underneath make-up and mask. A heart and soul at odds with God’s commandment count for more than make-up and a dress.
Always heartening reading your posts
Thank you to Gilberta for correcting my math! The FIFth commandment is “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”
Meiron, unless I’ve been misled, I believe it’s #5 you’re referring to.
Thank you, Gilberta. Good catch.👍
I have long suspected that abortion is the (I hate to use the word) “sacrament” of the liberals. I believe child sacrifice is what the devil demands to keep the liberals in power. Every single time the pro-life movement achieves any small amount of success, the liberals fight like those possessed to take that victory away from them. Child sacrifice must be protected at all costs!
Well, when a person hovers on either side of 80, she or he ought to consider that payment will soon be due. They have had their run, and Moloch will soon require payment for giving them a life of power, wealth, and prestige.
In 1998, Ginette Paris, PhD, who is a Jungian, published a book titled The Sacrament of Abortion that is a defense of, even homage to, abortion as a sort of pagan sacrifice.
Yes, a pagan sacrifice. Abortion is sometimes presented to young girls in trouble as a Rite of Initiation into “modernity.”
Of the same mentality as the late 1960s Red Guard Movement in China, which fully initiate a new generation activists into Communism, replicating the initiatory and costly Long March of 1934-35 into central China (of 100,000, less than ten percent survived), which galvanized the leadership role of Chairman Mao Zedong. Or, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge initiation of a Communist order in Cambodia in 1975-79 (two million victims, one fourth of the population). Or any smaller street-gang initiations in our cities.
And now, slow motion throughout the declining West (over 60 million in the United States since 1973). Spearheaded by Aztec Pelosi’s defense of late-term-abortions as “sacred ground” (June 2013). Once initiated with blood on one’s hands, there can be no “turning back”.
Wait, what? There CAN always be Redemption. Someone wrote a book about that, too.
Redemption even for the West as a whole, and for the whole world, and for the whole soul of each of us. “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Mt 28:19).
A question for the successors of the Apostles: “synodality, yes, and what else”?
Thanks for that information, Carl. I am going to check into that.
Might be of interest: Carl Jung was a free mason and suffered as a child from abuse wherein his personality was split into multiples. The evidence cited for this is his posthumously published “Red book”. Red is the colour the Free Masons use to paint their Abuse Rooms under their lodges/temples according to the book by Alexandre Lebreton in French. The takeaway: “Psychology” was a Free Masonic psuedo-science founded to help the Rulers of the Novos Ordo study and learn how to more effectively abuse kids and keep their victims silent. A further piece of the Novos Ordo falls into place…? The book, is called “Franc-maçonnerie et schizophrénie.” ISBN: 9781913890049. It is not a source of feelgood joy in the beauty of creation, but an executive summary and tool for those trying to understand why the Sankt Gallen Mafia seek to destroy God’s Divinely Founded Institution well into their old age with no apparent fear of damnation… One has to conclude they are seriously sick. Why C9 Bergoglio? Nineth Inner circle?? A 5-Star Amazon rateed book has been published on one of Bergoglio’s remaining C6 Cardinals, with a foreword by Archbishop Vigano:
https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Betrayals-against-corruption-Francis/dp/1735267104/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=sacred+betrayals&qid=1632601124&s=books&sr=1-1
Very sad to see an old person, not long for this earth, clinging to their evil ways despite knowing they will have to answer to God very soon. I would be terrified rethink the errors of my life (as I did when I had Covid this year) instead of arrogant and defiant.
sorry but covid went a long time ago. these so called “covid tests” cant even tell the difference between covid and the flu. now it’s all just fear mongering scare tactics by the governemnt. Hitler did it with gas chambers and now the government is doing it with masks. the masks are useless and are causing more suffering and deaths. the government knows this yet does nothing but making history repeat itself from the Spanish flu to the SARS epidemic. they knew then that masks did nothing but make more people suffer and die and unfortunately people are following like blind sheep to a cliff.
🙏
I beelieve it is obvious. The natural inclination would to be worried about your soul at this late a stage. Apparently we do not have a Catholic here we either are dealing with angent of the evil one or she incorrectly beleives in predestination. She is not Catholic. Neither is the group of “Catholics” supporting her position.
Né a. Pelosi, you are NOT a Catholicin case you think otherwise!
Won’t she be surprised when she has her immediate judgement before Jesus! Will she give Him the same response as the Archbishop? Time for the Church to take a DEFINITIVE stand deny Holy Communion to her and all the phony catholic pro-aborts. But that won’t happen since the USCCB is so divided amongst itself.
Excellent comment, Monsignor, excellent comment! What is the USCCB for if not to support and defend the doctrines of the Church? The USCCB is a worthless organization for the defense of Church doctrine. Worthless!
…sorry. IMHO whether the USCCB is divided or not is immaterial. It is bought and paid for by the DNC and has been reduced to performing as the Ministry of Social Justice for the same.
This individual is chaos and lies. Simply demonic. She makes herself a sacrilege.
Why does the Church continue to allow those professing to be Catholic, who clearly defy the moral teachings of the Church, to remain in good standing with the Church? This continues to send a message to the world that we really don’t believe what we teach because we fail to defend it, and that the Church is whatever you want it to be.
Agree with you, Todd, about the Church’s duty to deal properly with quisling Catholics like Pelosi. Unfortunately we have the opposite tact taken by Pope Francis, who says that abortion is murder but at the same time offers effusive praise to politicians who actively promote it, like the President of Ireland.
Pelosi is truly flirting with the area of the afterlife where an ice cream cone won’t keep.
Ma Pelosi will have a Special boat waiting for her at the River Styx. Charon and his 1st Mate Blackmun on the tiller.Will smilingly pipe her aboard for the trip across.
When I read Pelosi’s comments of this sort, I wonder what she will say standing before God on Judgement Day. It’s not Pro-Choice she advocates but Pro-Death. We Pro-Lifers should start calling it what it is! Pro-Choice is having the child and raising it, or having it and giving it up for adoption. But that’s too “inconvenient” for people like Pelosi. How did a very straightforward concept get so convoluted? How did we, as a society come to be where we are on this issue? It seems so clear to me the right thing for a women and man to do in such a situation. The right thing when one is talking “life”. Holy Mother, pray for us.
God wills all of us to choose the good; however, He does not force us to do so. Nancy Pelosi is correct. God has given all of us free will to choose the good or the evil. What she is missing is that the choice for evil has dire consequences in eternity. Abortion is the worst evil this country has ever legalized. In writing that sentence, I started to think about our laws, which all, with one exception, protect life. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness should never come at the expense of the life of another. Pelosi jeopardizes her eternal life in supporting the murders of the unborn.
This pathetic woman needs our prayers.
Ours is not to judge her – that will be soon enough.
Ours is not to judge her – (sic)
Our is to judge her behavior, just as Christ exhorted.
“And why even of yourselves, do you not judge that which is just?” Jesus Christ, Luke 12:57
I repeat – Ours is not to judge her – that will be soon enough. She needs our prayers.
Just now the US House passed its bill to enshrine the right to abortion in law. The Senate must pass the bill; Joe Manchin is said to be a pro-life Catholic….
All this does not bode well for this nation in the sight of God. No longer is it a majority of justices on the Supreme Court. Now the majority party in Congress has perfectly soiled their souls and stained our nation’s ground with the blood of holy innocents.
If it’s ‘none of our business’ in regard to others then the truth of life is merely a subjective construct and not an objective truth even in the Catholic Church. Is it not applicable to everyone and not just Catholics?
To construct, fund, and promote abortion is ‘making it your business’.
There is no ‘constitutional’ right to abortion but only, once again, judicial fiat and Pelosi knows it. To hide behind the vicious euphemism of ‘reproductive healthcare’ and claim ‘reason’ is the height of pride in the service of infernal, willful ignorance.
And the final straw is to pretend her ‘differences’ with Cordileone has to do with ‘family size’ and not the deliberate destruction of a human life.
Will that arrogance serve her standing before God?
Will it, Archbishop Cordileone?
@SpeakerPelosi is now an elderly woman. I hope she realises that power and notoriety will not save her soul. Pray she starts to do the right thing. We are all running out of time.
Yes he gave you free will and you chose to violate it by saying it is OK to kill a human being. Would love to be there when you explain to God when you die and justify your stand. Good Luck
Speaker Pelosi is of that breed that is perhaps best characterized as “autonomous.” The autonomous spirit does not need to consult anyone else or any institution in order to arrive at how the truth of things stands.
For this person the Church, Christ’s Body, is not in any sense an extension of Christ. It is merely an entity, which sometimes seems an obstacle, that nevertheless can be dismissed or ignored out of hand. The autonomous spirit is always free and is always right.
The corollary is that anyone who disagrees with this person is invariably wrong. This includes priests, bishops, archbishops, the Pope, as well as other lay Catholics who try humbly first to know and then to follow, that is, practice, what Holy Mother Church in Her wisdom teaches. That very idea would likely be novel to Speaker Pelosi, and if she even considered it seriously for three seconds would probably find it both silly and objectionable.
Is Speaker Pelosi beyond help or hope? Is hers a case of “invincible ignorance? I cannot say one way or the other. But we all can say, “Pray for us sinners, now and at the our of our death.” In that regard, she is one of us.
Speaker Pelosi is NOT beyond help or hope. She is nearing that point when she will answer for the damage she has done in her life, and she needs our prayers so that she will be granted the grace of contrition BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.
Pelosi’s five children were a blessing, and it is commendable that she views her cooperation in creation as such. Yet, to paraphrase Obama, “She did not build that.” Neither does any woman have a right by natural law and Divine Authority to misuse her body to co create life outside of Holy Matrimony. Shame on Pelosi and those in worldly power to distort what should be a joyous privilege to gift back one’s body and welcome God in procreation.
As for free will–it comes with a cost when abused and squandered for evil. Pelosi’s intellect is warped; her conscience in darkness; and her exercise of will ruled by passion and unbridled temporal power. She has made herself a god.
Glad for the day of fasting and prayer and will be hoping for illumination of souls!
“…It is none of our business how other people choose the size & timing of their families.”
Hmh.
So then, by that logic, why is everyone so upset over the death of Gabby Petito? It’s none of our business if a man wants to limit the size of his family.
Steve K. above – I agree that, unfortunately, for every one who hears Abp. Cordileone, ten, twenty or a hundred will hear Speaker Pelosi. The MSM certainly won’t hear Cordileone except as the spokesman for the supposedly unenlightened, conservative American bishops. Nevertheless, I have hope that Cordileone’s thoughtful, clear and patient teaching will resonate with some of his readers, Catholic or not.
Day of wrath, that dreadful day, shall heaven and earth in ashes lay, as David and the Sybil say.
What horror must invade the mind when the approaching Judge shall find and sift the deeds of all mankind!
The mighty trumpet’s wondrous tone shall rend each tomb’s sepulchral stone and summon all before the Throne.
Now death and nature with surprise behold the trembling sinners rise to meet the Judge’s searching eyes.
Then shall with universal dread the Book of Consciences be read to judge the lives of all the dead.
For now before the Judge severe all hidden things must plain appear; no crime can pass unpunished here.
Oh, what shall I, so guilty, plead? And who for me will intercede when even Saints shall comfort need?
The judgment of those who vote in favor of abortion, most particularly the Catholics, will be horrible beyond anything we can imagine this side of eternity. Pray, pray for them. Blindness beyond comprehension.
Where Nancy Pelosi refers to reproductive healthcare, she is close to getting to the point, although she misses the mark. Georgetown University’s Institute for Reproductive Health, in cooperation with Cycle Technologies, has provided the research and tools for naturally preventing pregnancy. Thus, there is neither need, nor justification, for an abortion. It is, rather, a problem of educating clerics and politicians concerning these effective choices. There is the TwoDay Method of birth control, and the Standard Days Method — CycleBeads approach. These are featured at the Cycle Technology section on Youtube. Rather than debate ethics — which won’t change a politician’s mind — I suggest that Catholics focus on learning about these natural birth control methods, and then teaching as many people as possible regarding how to use them. These are effective, and totally destroy any woman’s justification for carelessly getting pregnant and feeling the need for an abortion. We are not here to condemn. We are here to bring to people the light of the Gospel, and to save endangered souls from a deep state of purgatory.
David,
You are very correct. Many of these cases are a metter of temperance on the part of both men and women. They are a matter of peer pressure, a matter of mistaken imporession of the needs to pleae, of the crime of eithanasia of the imperfect.
The problem here evidently is the messengers. Opponenets of choice loudly proclaimed control of a womans body, right to choose and now the Speaker of the House is proclaiming family size. It sounds like they are gewtting desperaate and are reaching for thin excuses.
Pelosi is a Catholic in name only. But then, so is the Pope. So she has his full support. That is where we are. I know 10 theologians who will tell you this is impossible. But they are wrong. It is delusional to believe otherwise.
Nancy Pelosi and company somehow manage to link the killing of late-term fetuses with “love-making.” I don’t see it that way. So, what is “right” Nancy?
Talk talk talk!! That is all one hears from the archdiocese of San Francisco. When is this man going to grow a spine and excommunicate the Speaker?
Ragging on pathetic Pelosi is an utter waste of time. Accusing our bishops of negligence is not much better. They know if they speak out forcefully and actually ACT for once, they will be slapped down by Pope Francis. She knows it as well. Bad news but true.
There is NO way that this woman can be so ignorant that she actually believes what she is saying on this subject – it has been pointed out to her innumerable times.
Why hasn’t this ghoul been ex-communicated?
An indisputable fact: abortion has been with womankind since antiquity, and probably also since prehistoric times of hominids, Neantherthals, and Cro-Magnons. The Latin Church has never managed, most likely never will be able, to end the female practice of aborting, for it is, above all, an act subject not only to economic factors but also to those of the unique experience, that of any pregnant woman, her wants, needs, culture, and intimate personal understanding, her sense of morality tested, and her cordial state of being in counterpoint with her existential crisis, in brief, her personal life at a momentous decision. If a woman decides to abort, condemning her decision, attempting to prohibit her from aborting, marshalling the law to do so would be on her an imposition, particularly in our post-Christian, secular age, and in a country such as the US where there is no religious consensus, therefore no enforceable law on any matter of religion beyond allowing citizens to practice their faith so long as it does not interfere with the rights of others. One thing for sure, Roman Catholicism, coming down with doctrinal taboos misses the point and probably ends up being more impersonal, more distant, more irrelevant, more alien, indeed, more an intrusive, domineering hateful entity than it already is to many a woman, whatever her confessional persuasion, or lack thereof, pondering abortion or having in one incurred.
All possible compassionate succor and material aid to any woman who considers abortion, or aborts, the Church and State should offer and leave it at that, hands off, respecting the individual’s base freedom to live her life as she discovers or wills it to be, so long as she respects the rights of others. If any pope, prelate, priest, monk, nun, or politician be willing and able to die in the place of any woman who aborts, then maybe said individual -pope, prelate, priest, monk, nun, or politician- may have the right to dictate her life, indeed, to live It. Otherwise, when abortion is at play as a concrete possibility for a woman, it is not the time to marshall Christian ideological rhetoric and butt in, seeking to moderate behaviour, and poach the woman’s soul in distress.
MOIRAO, the point you are missing is, a life, a HUMAN life is being taken by another person for their comfort. If it truly was a “woman’s own body” then no one would be debating the issue.
Speaker Pelosi is the type of Catholic who interprets God’s laws to suit her way of believing, wanting others to follow her. For her, not to take the foolish chance of losing her soul, she should go to confession and speak to the priest who represents Jesus Christ to be assured her sins are not mortal. All Catholics should do the same when in doubt about following God’s commandments.