Church's teaching and ectopic pregnancy

[Maggyie]

In my journey through infertility land, I encountered many women who had lost a tube to ectopic pregnancy. If you're not familiar, an ectopic pregnancy is when the baby doesn't implant in the uterus, it goes elsewhere in the body and tries to grow. Usually in the Fallopian tube.

As the baby grows, he or she will get too big and swell the tube. The baby inevitably dies, followed swiftly by the mother's hemorrhage and death, if she is not helped in time.

the Catholic response to ectopic pregnancy is that it can be treated by removing the tube where the baby has made its home, but not by administering drugs that flush the baby from the tube. In both cases the baby dies, but the second case is considered abortion. Although it should be noted, in most ectopic pregnancies the baby has already passed away before a problem is noticed.

Recently I read that there are some extraordinarily rare cases where babies and moms can survive an ectopic pregnancy. It depends on factors like where exactly baby implanted and again, very rare and dangerous. Upon googling I found cases where this had happened, and although the child was born prematurely everyone lived.

What does that reality (that it is rare but possible for the baby and mom to survive) do to our teaching on ectopic pregnancy? To be clear, I feel there ought to be some way morally for a woman to treat the ectopic condition and not wait in the hospital for her likely death. But how does our teaching take this into account?

[Peace]

Re: flushing drugs - is there any official Church document that directly addresses whether that is permissible, or is that only a conclusion reached by moral theologians?

[CatherineM]

Health ethics guide

[Maggyie]

I've been reading more and apparently there is no official teaching. I read an interview with Fr Tad of the Catholic Bioethics Center and he thinks the drug (methotrexate) is unacceptable but that faithful theologians disagree. Confusing though because all other Catholic info sites seem to strongly be against it??

Article from National Catholic Register, owned by EWTN:

http://m.ncregister.com/blog/kschiffer/xxxxwhen-pregnancy-goes-awry-the-moral-ending-to-an-ectopic-pregnancy#.VzsZCkX3bCQ

But then there is this answer from EWTN 's own site which says the opposite: 

http://www.ewtn.com/v/experts/showmessage.asp?number=614153&Pg=.&Pgnu=&recnu=

[Gabriela]

I think this issue is important enough for you to get off the internet and find a real Catholic priest/canon lawyer/bishop/theologian/whatever who can give you some kind of definitive, "In case of X, do Y, and don't do Z" answer to this. Or who can at least tell you there isn't any definitive answer, so you're free to follow your conscience in case of X.

In any case, I don't think the NCR and EWTN should be your last word. This is too serious.

[Peace]

3 hours ago, Maggyie said:

I've been reading more and apparently there is no official teaching. I read an interview with Fr Tad of the Catholic Bioethics Center and he thinks the drug (methotrexate) is unacceptable but that faithful theologians disagree. Confusing though because all other Catholic info sites seem to strongly be against it??

Article from National Catholic Register, owned by EWTN:

http://m.ncregister.com/blog/kschiffer/xxxxwhen-pregnancy-goes-awry-the-moral-ending-to-an-ectopic-pregnancy#.VzsZCkX3bCQ

But then there is this answer from EWTN 's own site which says the opposite: 

http://www.ewtn.com/v/experts/showmessage.asp?number=614153&Pg=.&Pgnu=&recnu=

Thanks. I can see arguments on both sides. The usual way that these kind of issues are resolved would seem to prohibit use of the drugs, but something about the result of that just does not seem right to me. That it should be OK to remove the tube, which would kill the embryo, but you cannot use a drug, which is guaranteed to result in exactly the same thing. . .

[Archaeology cat]

1 hour ago, Peace said:

Thanks. I can see arguments on both sides. The usual way that these kind of issues are resolved would seem to prohibit use of the drugs, but something about the result of that just does not seem right to me. That it should be OK to remove the tube, which would kill the embryo, but you cannot use a drug, which is guaranteed to result in exactly the same thing. . .

My understanding is that it was the intent. The intent of surgery is to remove a damaged organ, with the death of the embryo being an unintended  consequence. I, however, am not an expert. This was just my (limited) understanding of why one was acceptable and not the other. 

Anyway, some docs have tried moving the embryo to the uterus. They have not had successful implantation from doing that as yet, I don't think. 

[Maggyie]

Just to be clear I've never had an ectopic pregnancy thank the good Lord. So don't want to take up anyone's time IRL with theological hypotheticals.

[HisChildForever]

3 hours ago, Archaeology cat said:

My understanding is that it was the intent. The intent of surgery is to remove a damaged organ, with the death of the embryo being an unintended  consequence. I, however, am not an expert. This was just my (limited) understanding of why one was acceptable and not the other. 

Anyway, some docs have tried moving the embryo to the uterus. They have not had successful implantation from doing that as yet, I don't think. 

Could one argue that the intent of the drug is to save an organ from (further) damage, though? With the unintended result being loss of the embryo. It seems to me that both the surgery and drug flushing are "loopholes" to remove the embryo, because it's not the tube that's the issue... it's where the embryo implanted. At the end of the day the goal is to remove the embryo, no? Unless the procedure of relocating the embryo is mastered, it seems to me that with ectopic pregnancies there's no way the embryo will thrive. It has to be removed.

[Ice_nine]

7 hours ago, Peace said:

Thanks. I can see arguments on both sides. The usual way that these kind of issues are resolved would seem to prohibit use of the drugs, but something about the result of that just does not seem right to me. That it should be OK to remove the tube, which would kill the embryo, but you cannot use a drug, which is guaranteed to result in exactly the same thing. . .

The ends don't justify the means. This is a basic tenet of Catholic theology. Both the ends and the route we take to get there matter.

[Peace]

58 minutes ago, Ice_nine said:

The ends don't justify the means. This is a basic tenet of Catholic theology. Both the ends and the route we take to get there matter.

The ends don't justify the means? Thank you for the clarification.

3 hours ago, HisChildForever said:

Could one argue that the intent of the drug is to save an organ from (further) damage, though? With the unintended result being loss of the embryo. It seems to me that both the surgery and drug flushing are "loopholes" to remove the embryo, because it's not the tube that's the issue... it's where the embryo implanted. At the end of the day the goal is to remove the embryo, no? Unless the procedure of relocating the embryo is mastered, it seems to me that with ectopic pregnancies there's no way the embryo will thrive. It has to be removed.

Yeah. It seems a bit like semantics, when the substance of the act is basically the same.

I wonder if the "double effect" test is mandatory or if there are other other ways of analyzing these situations within Church tradition.

[Archaeology cat]

16 hours ago, HisChildForever said:

Could one argue that the intent of the drug is to save an organ from (further) damage, though? With the unintended result being loss of the embryo. It seems to me that both the surgery and drug flushing are "loopholes" to remove the embryo, because it's not the tube that's the issue... it's where the embryo implanted. At the end of the day the goal is to remove the embryo, no? Unless the procedure of relocating the embryo is mastered, it seems to me that with ectopic pregnancies there's no way the embryo will thrive. It has to be removed.

I don't know. It would seem the drug would be directly killing the embryo, though, would it not? vs the embryo dying as an unfortunate side effect of removing the tube? I honestly don't know, and either way it is tragic and I hope they can perfect moving the embryo.

This is where I was getting my reasoning from, though I'm not sure the matter is closed or not.

Edited May 18, 2016 by Archaeology cat