Since when are Catholic Bishops working in the ER?
To the great dismay of Catholic bishops, Connecticut’s lawmakers have mandated that all of the state’s hospital emergency rooms, including Catholic-run hospitals, must make emergency contraception for pregnancy prevention available to every rape victim who comes through their doors.
The Connecticut Catholic bishops are not happy. They have agreed, according to the current issue of the National Catholic Register, to “reluctant compliance.”
Which basically means that they’ll actually require hospital staff to abide by the law and provide medical care. Shocking.
Interestingly, though, they’re fudging their position on emergency contraception in order to save face and pretend that the decision fits into their anti-contraception stance:
Despite their past claims that EC is immoral, evil, and all of the denunciations they like to hurl at things female (birth control, sterilization, in vitro fertilization, abortion), and despite a Vatican declaration that EC, whether interfering with implantation or fertilization, “is really nothing other than a chemically induced abortion,” they’re singing a different tune.
Their new position holds that since you can’t know when EC is interfering with implantation, and since that’s probably not often the case, and since we’re not talking about a high number of women who get pregnant from rape (several thousand women in the U.S., who cares?), then dispensing EC without the ovulation test is not “intrinsically evil.”
“In permitting Catholic hospitals to comply with this law, neither our teaching nor our principles have changed,” lied Bridgeport, CT Bishop William Lori, chair of the U.S. Bishops Committee of Doctrine (and, less illustriously, as I point out in Good Catholic Girls, a bishop who has kept an accused priest sex molester in ministry after including his victim in a $21 million settlement). “We have altered the prudential judgment we previously made.”
The twisting of their theological “truths” to serve their own ends reveals the capricious nature of the decision-making process of this all-powerful, all-male hierarchy. Unfortunately, there is no indication that they are willing to allow the woman who has been raped or any other pregnant woman to make her own “prudential judgment.”
Interesting… if that’s the justification for EC, then how do they logically continue to oppose regular birth control?
(Answer: Logic never factored into it).