The Irish Catholic bishops have issued a statement on medical care given to Savita Halappanavar…
Wait. What the fuck does anyone care what a mob of ignorant assholes say about reasonable, ethical medical care? I can’t even imagine the degree of arrogance involved for these self-righteous, unqualified old men to be so seriously offering advice on life-or-death issues of obstetrics and gynecology — to be piously asserting their importance even now in the aftermath of a death that would have been avoidable if Catholic doctrine had not meddled.
I can give advice, too. Catholic priests, sit down and shut the fuck up. Learn some humility for once in your privileged, pompous, puffed-up lives. This is the part where you should wake up and realize you are not qualified to run hospitals.
Instead, listen to the doctors. Like Jen Gunter, who finds the bishops’ advice to be inconsistent, incoherent, and confusing. That they even felt that their recommendations would be helpful or needed is damning.
All that their statement tells me is that they haven’t learned a single goddamned thing. They still think they’re qualified to interfere in medical decisions.
Actually they aren’t qualified to intervene in any decisions or give advice of any kind, to anybody. The only qualification to be a Catholic priest is to believe, or pretend to believe, in a load of nonsense.
Btw I’m still holding out for the tardigrade . . .
Well, I think they should have made a statement since they are largely to blame for what happened.
I think the statement should have been:
“We are very sorry for the pain we have caused. We will never again try to influence secular laws, directly or indirectly. Also, we are hateful ignorant douchebags.”
Regarding the statement they have made: *spits*
Yeah, better shut the fuck up than that.
Hey, you don’t get to be humanity’s bully for two millennia without a mindset that your opinions on subjects you have no business opining on are still of the utmost importance.
Ignorant arrogance is a requirement of theocratic tyranny, and no-one has done it as well or as long as the Catholic Church.
Hey, I thought that the church didnt have any assocation with this, like at all. According to ‘nolajim’ and others…
There is another protest outside the Dail tonight while they debate the expert groups report on the need to legislate the X -case
Also there is a poll
http://www.thejournal.ie/abortion-risk-of-suicide-ireland-692718-Nov2012/
cervantes said tardigrade, and I agree! They are all tardigrades… :P
FSM. They’re not very smart, are they? The statements about biology are…wrong. Just wrong.
It’s times like this that I wish there were an afterlife. So that when these men die God could tell them exactly what they’ve done and make sure that they understood it. If they really understood and felt the implications of what they did, hell would be redundant. No person who has the slightest empathy could help but feel unending remorse.
Don’t even have to read it to know it is complete and utter idiocy. Take dogma, throw in bad biology from years ago, and out comes something that should go directly to the sanitary sewer if it isn’t so toxic as to kill the bacteria there.
Don’t even read the comments under the articles. There are a couple of Catholic apologists that seem unable to see the way this works, and are themselves offering “expert” medical advice about how the woman couldn’t have been saved, anyway.
Take dogma, throw in bad biology from years ago, and out comes something that should go directly to the sanitary sewer if it isn’t so toxic as to kill the bacteria there.
Hey, this could be useful: A new treatment for VRE and other resistant microbes! Nothing could become resistant to the toxic sludge churned out by these guys (and I use the gendered term purposely here.)
Not enough catholic apologists in the comments. There is a pro life MD though. Gah. How can you be in the medical profession and value a fetus as much as a full human being with the rights of a person?
So I read their big list o’ apologetics, and after a long list of platitudes about how the Catholic church has “never stated that the life of an unborn baby is worth more than the mother” and how they have equal worth due to their “common humanity”, they slot in this gem: “Whereas abortion is the direct and intentional destruction of an unborn baby and is gravely immoral in all circumstances, this is different from medical treatments which do not directly and intentionally seek to end the life of the unborn baby.”.
… but a medical treatment intending to end the life of the (unviable and soon-to-die) baby was exactly what she needed to live! “In all circumstances”. Including when it saves the mother’s life. So basically what they’re saying si “The doctors followed our teachings to the letter, but don’t blame us! Look, we feel sorry for her!”. How blinkered and self-righteous are these out of touch twats?!
People, do not read the statement. You will be shaking with anger by the end of it.
@iknklast #10
“She couldn’t have been saved anyway”? Well, that makes it all okay that they forced her to die in agony over the course of several days.
@dianne #11
When I used to believe, I believed that Hell was being left alone with your regrets for all eternity.
Seems appropriate.
@mythbri: Seems more logical to me than the bit about fire. That’s just something that someone is doing to you. Regret is something you did to yourself. And, worse, others.
@inklast: She could absolutely have been saved. If an appropriate procedure had been performed as soon as it was clear that she was not going into labor on her own and she’d been given up front antibiotics, she would have walked out of the hospital a day or two later. Totally routine. I’ve seen similar cases where the woman in question survived and had a healthy baby a few years later. This is a 100% preventable death.
@mythbri and dianne
Read Inklast’s comment again. Inklast is saying the catholic apologetics in the comments were saying she could not be saved, not that it is Inklast’s opinion that she couldn’t.
@16: I understood that. I was just agreeing emphatically that the catholic apologists were full of it. Sorry that I didn’t make that clear!
The comments on the link echo a common theme I’ve seen reported: Savita died because she had a severe infection unrelated to her miscarraige. One person claims pre-existing e coli. Probably not news to people here, but I’ve been swamped lately and it was startling to me. :/
Naturally, there are people expressing incredulity and attempting to educate over there (dilated cervix for 48 hours, hello?), but the “ethicists” weighing in seem to be accepting this as established fact. Furthermore, MDR e coli seems to be the new Twinkie.
On a somewhat random note, the Sun has broken links for any number of Savita-related articles. They still feature the stories, but … they’re just not there, including one that headlines “No record of abortion request on Savita file”. I was unable to replicate this problem with any link that came up from a search for “football”.
Catholic bishops are proof that you can judge the stupidity of a religion by the silliness of the hats.
[I’ve left a comment at Dr. Gunter’s with my first paragraph, more or less.]
In the aftermath of Dr. Halappanavar’s death, I noticed that many Irish “pro-lifers” tried to establish a distinction between “abortion” and “medical termination.” We’d find it laughable, were the circumstances less tragic. The pretense was transparent: yes to “medical terminations” where married, honest women are at “legitimate” risk, but beware of those sluts who want to open the door to, God forbid, “abortions.” These people sounded so earnest and gullible that it was tempting to feel some pity.
I’m not surprised that Dr. Gunter professes to be somewhat bewildered by the terminology, though her analysis is excellent. But the bishops are talking to their base, who understand the code very well. When they say that “abortion . . . is gravely immoral in all circumstances,” they’re referring to what sluts do. This sort of hypocrisy, in which some Catholics swim so well, is what leads certain people to maintain, when things get rough, that the only moral abortion is their abortion, excuse me, termination.
Of course, when you turn the light onto such terminology, it looks utterly ridiculous. The problem here seems to be that these Irish bishops think they’re talking down just to their flock. Even though I agree that they should generally just shut up, now that they’ve spoken I’d like to see their absurdities analyzed and roundly condemned.
The comments on the link echo a common theme I’ve seen reported: Savita died because she had a severe infection unrelated to her miscarriage.
This is how Ireland keeps it maternal mortality low despite the extreme incompetence of its doctors: Deaths of women due to complications of mismanaged pregnancies are declared to be due to something unrelated to the pregnancy and therefore not a part of the “maternal mortality” statistics. I’d love to see someone do an honest appraisal of all deaths in women who are pregnant or have been pregnant within the last year, but I fear that getting access to the data would be next to impossible.
BTW, they’ve got a tiny part of a point in that if, for some reason, the abortion really couldn’t be performed at the first possible moment, the actions of the doctors would still be pretty questionable. They should have started antibiotics earlier, should have moved her to the ICU far earlier, in short, should have taken the whole thing more seriously.
Go fuck yourselves, seriously; then go fuck yourselves some more.
@22: I never have gotten out a “pro-lifer” any coherent explanation of what they mean by a “genetically complete human being” and what the implications are for twins and chimeras. Because I don’t see any way around the conclusion that chimeras are two people and identical twins one, if one uses this definition to declare something a “complete human being”.
This.
For all that’s medically important, I had an abortion (a so called missed abortion which is a subset of miscarriage)followed by a D&C, which used to be a common abortion-procedure, yet for our pro-life friends I’m still a good one because I didn’t kill a baby!
Dianne
Not only do they export their maternal deaths because women who are at high risk but not in immediate danger will go to the UK, they also use verrrry narrow limits, especially concerning time.
You probably count as maternal death if you manage to strangle yourself with the umbical cord in a freak accident…
Not only do they export their maternal deaths because women who are at high risk but not in immediate danger will go to the UK, they also use verrrry narrow limits, especially concerning time.
Good point. It’s clearly not an honest definition and certainly not comparable to the surprisingly inclusive US definition of pregnancy related mortality, which includes (IIRC) all deaths of pregnant women and women who have delivered within one year. It catches not just women who die because Catholic hospitals refuse to allow life saving abortions, but also women who die of battering by their domestic partners and those who die in auto accidents because a nasty contraction catches them by surprise while driving and they lose control of the car and run into a tree. Also those who die of completely unrelated problems, but that’s pretty rare.
You probably count as maternal death if you manage to strangle yourself with the umbical cord in a freak accident…
But that’s obviously unrelated to pregnancy because it occurred after delivery…ha!
Which is false. One caused the other.
It’s easy to lie with statistics.
They can always claim that women don’t die from pregnancy or miscarriages.
They die of septicemia, septic shock, DIC, or hemorrhage. As a last resort they can always die of heart failure. That these are the results of pregnancies or miscarriages gone wrong is simply ignored.
If they are devout Catholics and you think they are making stuff up, then probably they are.
Just reading the first sentence of that clusterfuck:
Notice who is already absent?
Savita Halappanavar.
It was a tragedy for her husband and her family, but dying a slow death in agony wasn’t a personal tragedy for her.
Bitches ain’t shit.
Hmmm, according to an Irish source, the real maternal death rate in Ireland may be 4 times higher than they claim.
The usual. Jesus gets all sad when people tell the truth.
Hmmm, according to an Irish source, the real maternal death rate in Ireland may be 4 times higher than they claim.
So, there true rate is likely around 28 per 100,000, which is about twice that of the US’s. And-admittedly without looking at the primary data, so could be wrong-they probably still aren’t using as permissive a definition. Also, the US’s maternal mortality rate is pathetically high due to lack of insurance, underinsurance, increased risk factors for women of minority race or ethnicity (including an increased risk due to prejudice), etc. AND that’s not counting the women who try to make it to Britain but die in British hospitals due to delays in care. In summary: Irish obstetrics kills.
Oh boy, you’re going to catch heck from the pope now.
From raven’s article: “Two of the six women who died coincidentally to maternity died of metastatic cancer, two from substance abuse, one from lymphoma and one died in a traffic accident.”
The two who died of metastatic cancer MAY have lived longer or even been cured if they’d been treated properly. The one who died of lymphoma almost certainly could have. Five year survival for young people with lymphoma is 75-80+% in comparable countries. It’s rare to see someone who is treated for a newly diagnosed lymphoma die within 9 months. Of course, it’s possible that she got pregnant in end stage disease, but unlikely since most women who have been treated multiply for lymphoma are not very fertile. The two from substance abuse may have been self-medicating against depression brought on by being forced to maintain a pregnancy. The traffic accident…hard to say without further details.
In short, these are NOT definitively unrelated deaths. Sorry, try again.
If they can call an embryo a baby I can call that a pregnancy related death!
And well, you can’t include suicide from PPT as maternal death because it would mean that babies don’t shit rainbows and everything is wonderful!
@ raven
Oh, absolutely. I hope I made it clear in my earlier comment that I completely agree with you. I’m just en-fucking-raged by the ridiculously low standards of journalism surrounding this.
But then, it’s people on the side of common decency who are “politicizing” this.
@bradleybetts
I was aware that those weren’t iknklast’s words – I apologize for not being clear.
What I was trying to indicate was my disgust that the idea that Savita “couldn’t be saved anyway” somehow excuses the fact that her pain was nowhere near adequately managed – so even believing that she was going to die no matter what, the fact that she was forced to suffer as she did is extremely reprehensible.
But the catholic strategy is quite clear:
Issue verrrrry vague and unclear policies
Let people wonder and make up their minds themselves
Punish those who do heavily
Shrug your shoulders in public and declare that it’s not your fault if those stupid doctors let the woman die, it was clearly allowed!
Giliell has it right. They are intentionally ambiguous, intentionally misleading, and pushing against clarifying medical guidelines, trying to stall and obstruct as much as possible every step in that direction, in order to:
– Effectively scare doctors out of doing anything related to abortion.
– Claim it has nothing to do with them when people die, it was those incompetent doctors.
It really is sleazy.
For anyone who may be interested, here is a link to an article about Ireland’s maternal death statistics:
http://www.medicalindependent.ie/page.aspx?title=maternal_death_%E2%80%93_into_the_great_unknown
From the article:
So…more accurate data incoming, hopefully.
This is the latest lie of the forced birthers/female slavers.
Abortion is never needed to save the life of a mother.
This meeting was held at the medical school attached to the hospital where Savita died, a few months before she died.
It was repeated by Richard Morlock, the Indiana christofascist who promptly lost his senate election.
There are a lot of conditions that combine with pregnancy to make death a possible complication.
Getting pregnant with pulmonary arterial hypertension, PAH, is often fatal. It depends on the severity of the disease and what treatments are used, but even the best treatment in an ICU can be fatal.
This obfuscatory “have my cake and eat it too” language reminds me of the “If by whiskey” speech of a Mississippi congressman:
@Mythbri #14:
They’ll make you a saint if you enforce this rule enough.
The Bishops just spout Catholic boilerplate without having the guts to say either: “The doctors screwed up, they could and should have gone ahead and done what was necessary to save the mother under the Principle of Double Effect” or “The doctors did right; too bad for Mom” (though one suspects they mean the latter).
Take a fucking position, assholes, and defend it, so we can see what you’re really made of. If you’re going to style yourselves the arbiters and guardians of morality, then act like it: quit putting out weasely statements full of ambiguity and plausible deniability like some goddamn politician.
Fr. Paul Thelakat, spokesperson for the Synod of Bishops of the Syro-Malabar Church (an eastern rite and part of the Roman Catholic Church) actually says “Had the people concerned followed Catholic morality, Savita’s life could have perhaps been saved.”
http://bit.ly/RgIW7y
I say more about it here:
http://bit.ly/10RXQCY
Had the docs done what was right, she probably would still be alive.
Catholic morality is an oxymoron like giant microbes or intelligent Tea Partier.
BTW, manojjoseph is using BLIND LINKS.
Watch our for blind links. I have zero idea if those links go to malware sites. In fact, it is likely they don’t. But it is your computer, so anyone who wants to can let us know if they are OK.
Take a fucking position, assholes, and defend it, so we can see what you’re really made of.
Is that really necessary? If, at this point, you’re still unsure what they’re made of, you’ve probably been asleep at the keyboard for the last 2,000 years.
@44: Me, no. But you know as well as I do that there are plenty of people who have been and still are indeed asleep at the era-appropriate-media-interface. If faced with a definite answer — exactly what, by Catholic morality, should the doctors have done? — instead of obfuscation, a few of them just might wake up.
I’ve long since moved to the Fuck Off And Die department.
That’s also part of Catholic medical ethics (…the word Catholic should imply automatic scarequotes around the following terms, nowadays…) as mentioned in comments in Ophelia’s discussion of the Ethical and Religious Directives.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2012/11/start-at-the-beginning/#comment-350164
This goes back to the Catholic Doctrine of Double Effect, which I can’t help but bring up in these discussions. You see the idea hinted at in the Statement here:
“Whereas abortion is the direct and intentional destruction of an unborn baby and is gravely immoral in all circumstances, this is different from medical treatments which do not directly and intentionally seek to end the life of the unborn baby.”
The key words are “direct and intentional.” It is simply silly for Catholics to cite passages like this to claim that Catholic law would have allowed the doctors to save Savita. Aborting the fetus while Savita was miscarrying would have been both a direct and intentional act against the fetus, which still had a heartbeat.
The doctrine of double effect is designed to grant wiggle room for procedures such as tube removal in ectopic pregnancies, something unnecessary when treating ectopic pregnancies but that still saves a woman’s life. T
he more I read about Savita’s case the more convinced I become that double effect is designed to simply obfuscate the moral issue. A woman died unnecessarily, and that’s simply wrong. Savita’s death shows that double effect does not help all women with life-threatening conditions as a result of pregnancy.
There is one person with his head in the right place over there:
It’s a refreshing bit of reason from someone who knows some modern biology; I’d recommend you read his whole statement here:
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2012/11/25/irish-bishops-issue-statement-on-death-of-savita-halappanavar/#comment-81351
raven wrote:
The links are to a news article and my blog post. Here are the unshortened URLs if it helps.
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Kochi/kerala-catholics-at-ease-with-abortion/article4141018.ece
http://manojpontificates.blogspot.com/2012/11/fr-paul-thelakat-is-liar.html
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/11/28/documentary-shows-catholic-positions-on-abortion-contraception-are-relatively-new/
Well, it looks like the catholic church hasn’t *always* been in favour of women dying from a pregnancy
from the article:
“On the issue of abortion, the documentary explains that the Catholic Church had a more pro-choice approach during the 16th century than it does now. At the time, the church believed in a wide range instances where abortions were permissible. Later in the 17th century, scientists came to believe that the fetus was conceived in its final form and merely enlarged over time. As a result, the Catholic Church took a more prohibitive view on abortion. Though our understanding of fetal development has changed dramatically, the Church has not changed its position.”
From what I have seen in the video, one of the church fathers believed that the very act of sex was sinful, and that the ONLY reason people should be allowed to have sex is for procreation (the churh realized that they could not stop people from wanting to have children). However, since sex is so sinful, the children born of ‘passion’ are also born sinners, b/c the act of sex is so dirty, the result of sex is also dirty and horrible!
It’s not so much that they feel qualified to interfere with medical decisions – it’s that the feel entitled by their irrational and dangerous beliefs to deny people the medical care they need.
But who else can we count on to tell us how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Inquiring minds simply MUST know.
@dianne #17
Sorry, my bad!
WRT the e-coli thing, as I mentioned on the original thread here, e coli is in our shit. Her ruptured amniotic sac and dilated cervix were essentially a giant wound leading directly to a sterile space (the uterus) right next. to where shit leaves the body.
The amount of godbothering, medically illiterate dipshits I’ve seen saying “Oh see she had e coli which is food poisoning, nothing to do with pregnancy so there” has forced me to seriously consider going fucking rogue and performing my piglet experiment on each and every one of them, clergy included.
Anyone got a link to my experiment? I’m on my phone.
No Light, here you go:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/11/14/its-time-to-abort-the-catholic-church/comment-page-2/#comment-493484
Actually, I don’t fault the Catholic priests for speaking up. I fault the Irish people for allowing the Catholic church to have such a great influence on Ireland’s public policies and legal system.
Wait – a statement issued by a group that has no knowledge of what they’re discussing and whom we shouldn’t be paying any attention to.
It’s not signed Jesse by any chance is it?
nolajim lives!