consistency?

[cellio]

For the last few days there has been a story in the news about a baby that was born with two heads (twins gone wrong). Or, more precisely, about the surgery that was being done to remove one of them. Some of the reported facts got me to wondering about something.

The second head had brain activity. (I understood it to be activity independent of the other brain.) The additional head had eyes, a mouth, and other features that moved and apparently reacted to environment. If the head remained it was certainly going to become a serious hardship for the child, both physically and mentally. It was not clear to me that its presence was directly life-threatening.

So, the doctors removed an entity that was developed enough to have a working brain and body parts, which was infringing on a host entity through no fault of its own, to preserve the health but not necessarily the life of said host.

Now, I have absolutely no problem with that decision. But I wonder how those who are anti-abortion see it. I did not hear of any protests outside the hospital, and I would be somewhat surprised if a significant number of anti-abortion folks actually objected to this surgery. You'd have to be pretty hard-hearted to object to this, I think.

But I wonder about the reasoning. What are the salient differences between this case and abortion that make the former acceptable and the latter not? Is it just that a suffering child tugs on the heart-strings more than a suffering adult? Or is there a real difference? The analogous abortion case would seem to be an unintended, risky pregnancy resulting in a fetus with a serious not-immediately-fatal defect, like Down's. While many anti-abortion people make exceptions for cases like that, many others do not. They're the ones I'm curious about.

Comments

Re:

[dmnsqrl.livejournal.com]

Btw, while looking at information on other topics I found an article that was giving a summary sort of of a document called "Human Sexuality" put out by the US bishops in 1990

http://www.americancatholic.org/Newsletters/CU/ac0892.asp

the relevant part of the article


Regarding other birth control methods, the Catholic Church teaches that "a couple may never, by direct means (i.e., contraceptives), suppress the procreative possibility of sexual intercourse" (Human Sexuality, 47). It follows that direct sterilization surgeries are also prohibited, except in those instances when one is directly removing a diseased or cancerous reproductive organ, with the resultant sterilization being indirect and unintentional.

I can tell that this is somehow related to what Fr Lee expressed although I wouldn't be able to say exactly what else might have got him from there to what he said.