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U.S. Catholic Health Association Giving Flawed Advice on Morning After Pill to Catholic Hospitals

Commentary republished with permission by Matt Bowman of Alliance Defense Fund
Excerpted from http://www.constitutionallycorrect.com/archive/2007/10/03/553.aspx
 
WASHINGTON, DC, October 3, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Connecticut Catholic hospitals' spokesman Barry Feldman, in statements discussing the new policy allowing emergency contraception for rape victims even though embryos might not implant as a result, listed the Catholic Health Association as support for the new policy.

The position of the Catholic Health Association on "emergency contraception" is well known and seriously flawed.  It basically presents "emergency contraception" as permissible even after a positive ovulation test.  To get there it shamelessly adopts the definition of pregnancy at implantation, and broadly justifies acts that prevent "pregnancy." (see the CHA official position here: http://www.chausa.org/Pub/MainNav/whatwedo/Ethics/resources/rapetreatment/consid... )
 
CHA even has the gall to insert the death industry's verbal engineering into official Catholic teachings.  The U.S. Bishops have directives to protect the sanctity of human life (see them here: http://www.usccb.org/bishops/directives.shtml ).  Directive 45 is a clear prohibition on abortion, but the CHA states directive 45 this way: "it is never permitted to directly terminate an established pregnancy."
 
Observe that sleight of hand.  "Established pregnancy" is one of the abortion lobby's latest euphemisms invented to refer to implantation. (see the evidence here: http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/08/2/gr080207.html )
 
It was needed because their preposterous redefinition of pregnancy wasn't working (everyone knows that women who have embryos are "pregnant" even before implantation).  Using this term, pro-death advocates at the American Medical Association admit (see http://search.ama-assn.org/Search/cs.html?charset=iso-8859-1&url=http%3A//ww... ) that emergency contraception prevents implantation but adamantly deny that it interrupts "an established pregnancy," so you and I are expected to nod in vague agreement and stop worrying about innocent human embryos.  These are the very word games that the Catholic Church has condemned time and again, yet CHA sophistically uses them to change the U.S. Bishops' unequivocal condemnation of abortion into a statement essentially allowing embryo killing. 
 
The new policy for Catholic hospitals in Connecticut will be to dispense Plan B regardless of whether its pre-fertilization effects are negated and its post-fertilization death-dealing effect is the only remaining mechanism.  Their spokesman and the sources they rely on seem to adopt the very pro-death word games that are designed to cheapen the lives of human embryos.  This situation is becoming more troubling as it unfolds.
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Matt Bowman is Legal Counsel in the Alliance Defense Fund's Washington DC office. He served three years as a law clerk in federal court, and graduated from Ave Maria School of Law.

Editor's note: The title of this commentary is not that of Mr. Bowman's but of the editor.

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