ectopic pregnancy and abortion

[Balthazor]

1 Must a woman wait until her fallopian tube is ruptured and she is bleeding internally and has to have a section of the tube taken out with the pregnancy for it to not be a mortal sin?

2 Or can she have a slit made in the tube and the fetus taken out and then the slit sewn up again?

3 Or can she have the Mexatrexate, and avoid a very expensive surgery, pelvic scarring, a missing tube and an increased risk to her life?

I have a lot of trouble with this it seems only the first of the three is permissable. I really don't know about the other two. Would they be mortal sins or not?

Oh ...FYI...Mexthotrexate is injected in the early stages of an ectopic pregnancy...it stops the cells from dividing and the mothers body just sort of absorbs the pregnancy. I hope this qyestion is clear enough....



Thank you so much

[Adeodatus]

Balthazor,

For this discussion I will restrict myself to the example you gave, of an ectopic pregnancy in a Fallopian tube. Such pregnancies are not viable because of the nature and size of the Fallopian tube, and eventually the tube will rupture as the child grows, and the child will certainly die and the mother's life will be jeopardised.

Yet even if we have this kind of certainty that the child will die, we cannot directly kill an innocent human being. So no kind of physical extraction of the child (vacuums, scraping etc.) or drug-induced abortion may be used. The intention of such methods is directly to kill and remove the foetus, the child, from the Fallopian tube and thus avert the risk of rupture. Someone may argue that their intention is to save the mother's life, not to kill the child. That may be true, but such an intention is mixed, because it also directly intends the death of an innocent child. The reason this is so is that the action one takes in such a course of action is directed against the child. The child is physically killed without harming the mother, so as not to further harm the mother.

Does this leave us with only option no. 1? No. There is another way.

In such cases many Catholic moralists, applying the moral principles of the Church, conclude that what we can do is resect (i.e. cut out) a portion of the Fallopian tube. This portion will contain the child, and it is from the portion that is at risk of rupture. Such an action will inevitably result in the death of the child. But the action itself is not a direct act against the life of the child. The child's death truly is not intended, although it will definitely follow, and the mother's life may be saved without waiting for a rupture to happen first.

Many secular ethicists think this is a stupid action. By directly aborting the child you can save the mother's Fallopian tube. But killing the child directly is not an option for us.

Is killing the child directly all that different from killing it indirectly? At first glance it doesn't seem all that different to us. The result is the same. The child dies, the mother lives. The drawback in the morally-justifiable method is that the mother also loses her Fallopian tube. It will be harder for her to conceive again (as long as she has her other Fallopian tube intact).

I think at first glance many people will think this method I outlined is just playing with words. And I think that's because most of our generation are brought up in a kind of utilitarian mindset. We value the ends, and the means to the end don't seem so important. But as human beings, our actions and our words are all we have. They flow out from us, shaped by the sort of persons we are, and in turn shape the sort of persons we become.

For example, we could argue that have a habit of viewing pornography is okay because it doesn't harm anyone else, the people in that 'industry' know what they're doing and they want the money etc. Even if an action concerns us alone, these actions must be true to who and what we are. So even if we could argue that some action (say, pornography) harms no one else, there is still the problem that it harms us. We become less than what we are by these actions.

The same applies in all of morality. If we become the sort of people who can justify the direct killing of an innocent human being, then we are already beginning to be lost. We become different kinds of humans, humans who will not flinch from killing innocent humans. The solution of removing a portion of the Fallopian tube along with the child will still result in the death of the infant, but the action will have proceeded from us as from human beings who [b]will not[/b] willingly, actively, directly kill another human being. We acknowledge the child's death to be an awful tragedy, a tragedy brought about by our actions, but we neither willed the child's death nor sought to kill the child directly.

Remember: our actions flow from the sort of people we are, and they shape the sort of people we become.

[BLAZEr]

Adeodatus, great answer. I'm glad I decided to leave this one hoping you would answer it.