More Catholic fail in Brazil

[mirrorshard]

More Catholic Fail: nine-year-old rape victim pregnant with twins, has abortion, bishop excommunicates everyone who helped her, Vatican defends the bishop.

I wish this sort of thing was unexpected, but really, that's bishops for you. With a few honourable exceptions, who'd be decent noble human beings without any titles at all, all the ones we hear about are a bunch of authoritarian frock-wearing gay-hating child-killing paedophile-enabling Holocaust-denying weirdos.

The thing is... for once, I'm not going to condemn the bishop in question for moral cowardice, for being evil, or for having a moral compass so far out of whack it thinks Santa's living in Tunbridge Wells.

This particular episode, of all of them, is just plain stupid. No matter how you feel about abortion or teenage childhood pregnancy, none of the Bishop's response makes either moral or tactical sense.

There is no conceivable way that this girl could have become a mother. There was only one conceivable way that she could have survived the whole tragic episode, and she took it. Attempting to cram a pair of growing foetuses inside a nine-year-old girl just does not work. I like to think of early-stage pregnancies as the potential for a person, but barring a few centuries' worth of SFnal medical development those poor scraps of cells didn't even have that.

So what did the Bishop think he was trying to achieve? Even if pregnancy is supposed to be a good thing in itself, it's atomistic. Six months' worth isn't better than three. If sex isn't worth it unless you get a child out of it, then that should surely go nine times over for pregnancy.

Of course, that assumes he was trying to achieve something positive... he may be the kind of sub-Daily Mail scum who thinks an object lesson will teach all those disobedient nine-year-old girls that they'd jolly well better stop getting themselves raped if they know what's good for them.

Alternatively, of course, he might be some sort of anti-rational superstitious moron. Something bad happened - quick, make sure someone connected with it suffers in some baroquely unpleasant fashion, or it will happen again! This is cargo-cult thinking. They've seen justice happening, and they know it's a good thing, but they don't know how it works and can't reconstruct the chain of decisions and desired outcomes that lead to the end results.

On the gripping hand, he may just be a panicked authoritarian, who's made himself subject to the Peter Principle. Told that he's some sort of spiritual shepherd, responsible for peoples' souls, he worries and panics and starts going through pointless rituals of condemnation and casting-out to reassure himself that he still has a firm grip on his responsibilities. He's Doing Something, and responding vigorously to the evidence of sin. Never mind the niggling little details; the important thing is that it says, right here in the manual, that abortion is a sin and it must be stopped. If you just follow the manual, it'll all turn out OK, and WILL YOU JUST DO WHAT YOU'RE TOLD AND STOP QUESTIONING EVERY LITTLE THING I SAY!

Really quite sad. I almost pity him, except, well... he took up bishoping of his own free will, and Peter Principle or not he knew what was coming up.

Since I'm genuinely curious - what's the point of bishops? Why do we still have them? What do they do that any other priest can't?

Comments

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's where I was coming from with the Worlds Youngest Mother of Twins. He wouldn't have known about the precise details of this case, so would presumably have looked at others and based his decision on that.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

If the nearest example of a child surviving something similar, and an older child at that, was thirty years ago, then I'd venture to guess that the survival rates must be appalling. Puberty is happening earlier and earlier these days, and child abuse is sadly common, so it's not as if this is the first nine year old to have been raped since then.

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

Really? I'd have thought that almost all young children who get pregnant either choose or are forced to have abortions. I've never heard of nine and ten year olds who live in countries with decent medical systems deciding to carry a pregnancy to term and dying because of it, and I would have thought it would be the kind of thing that makes the news.

Do you really think it's something that happens a lot? Why?

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

I'm quoting your own comment where you cite a case of a ten year old surviving giving birth to twins in 1979. Thirty years till the last known safe occurrence of this sort of thing suggests that, on the whole, it's not safe. But this is all complete extrapolation from a simple comment, for all I know that was just the one you've heard of that popped into your mind, rather than the only one in existence.

I wonder how often it does happen? Child abuse - a lot, alas. Child abuse leading to pregnancies - more than it used to, but not terribly often. In Western countries, the vast majority of those pregnancies will be terminated as routine. In less privileged countries or countries where abortion is banned, that won't be the case, but we're unlikely to hear about it. It's probably the twins that makes this case stand out so much, in the end, because that's the one variable that kicks it over the edge into very very rare, plus all the kerfuffle with the excommunications.

In Judaism, the one rule that overrides all other rules is the preservation of human life. Anyone in authority who took action without thoroughly researching the risk to the pregnant child would be in deep, deep trouble. You can't just say "he wasn't a doctor, how could he know", he had to consult medical experts, and in Judaism he'd probably have had to consult at least two to make sure it was a balanced view. It's the responsibility of the clergy to make sure they get their rules prioritised correctly and safeguard their flock at all times. I thought it was more or less the same in other religions? The thing that really horrifies me about this case isn't the end result of the excommunications, it's that the priest does not appear to have consulted the appropriate medical experts before going ahead with his decision.

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

Anyone in authority who took action without thoroughly researching the risk to the pregnant child would be in deep, deep trouble... I thought it was more or less the same in other religions?

So did I. I'm angry that doesn't seem to have been the case here.

The thing that horrifies me most is obviously a child being raped, but yes, I believe that failing to do his research properly is where the bishop went wrong.

Most of the posts I've seen don't seem to agree with this - they think the Catholic position is that abortion is banned even if it would undoubtedly save a life, which would mean the bishop wouldn't have to do any research.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

Oops, what I meant by "this case" was the part that involved the church authorities, obviously the original rape is far and away the worst thing. Having since then found out that the rapist didn't get excommunicated, something is truly wonky in the system of priorities here. (Thankfully he has been arrested at least.) That's well out of horrifying and into plain odd. I'm guessing the causes are a) religions that are thousands of years old tend to tie themselves in knots when trying to update rules that were originally from a very specific social context (this is what causes most of the oddities in Orthodox Judaism), and b) the Catholic Church has somehow ended up putting a disproportionate focus on abortion.

I'm looking it up, and to my surprise it does seem that saving the mother's life isn't considered a valid reason for exception in Catholicism. However, abortion is permissible in cases where the pregnancy could not survive anyway and the mother's life is at risk, for instance in cases of ectopic pregnancy or uterine cancer, although they don't like calling it abortion, they're talking about hysterectomies and so on instead. I'm trying to find out more about this, since it may be relevant in this case (there's too much on this page for me to skim, I have crappy eyes I'm afraid, but I think someone said that both the child's life and the unborn twins' lives were at risk if the pregnancy continued), but I've found this (http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/592962.html):

There are two questions at issue here. One is medical (Is there ever need for an abortion to save the mother's life?) and the other is moral (Would an abortion in that case be justified?) The answer to both questions is no. There is no medical situation whose only
solution is a direct abortion, as many doctors have testified.

Very blinkered thinking there. My cousin is currently going through assisted reproduction, and one reason why she's doing this is because a pregnancy would literally kill her (she has Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy and is very severely disabled. I don't even dare ask what the Catholic church would say about her therefore having to use contraception, they'd probably tell her she shouldn't be allowed to marry). On further googling, a lot of people seem to be very anxious to deny that the situation where the mother's life would be at risk is even possible. Then there are the ones who grudgingly admit that it could happen, but say that life-threatening complications in pregnancy always occur so late that you could just whisk the babies out and into an incubator. No one seems to be addressing the simple point that if the mother dies during pregnancy, the foetus is most likely to die as well.

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

Yes, it drives me up the wall that so many people get round difficult issues by pretending they're not difficult. "Animal testing doesn't work anyway!" "Carrying a pregnancy to term never threatens anyone's life!"

Pro-choice people do it as well: I see "it's better not to be born than be disabled/poor/bullied, so abortion is good for the foetus too" distressingly often.

My understanding of Catholic doctrine was that killing is acceptable in self defence, and that can sometimes include abortion, but I'm not an expert. I may well have been looking at unusually liberal sources when I gathered that.

As for contraception - the answer would presumably be that your cousin should use natural family planning (and/or that it's wrong that pregnancy would literally kill her).

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

I actually meant a realistic answer, not one which denied the medical evidence or pretended that NFP was anywhere near 100% effective. Not that this bothers her, she's Jewish. I'll ask eye_of_a_cat next time we're talking, she's a liberal Catholic (i.e. can think outside the box, shock horror) and would probably be able to work out the answer even if she didn't know it immediately.

I can't stand either of the American pro-choice or pro-life movements, and anyway neither of them wants to talk to someone like me, who has the impudence to have mixed feelings about abortion. Extremist rhetoric is a major turn-off, I agree.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

As a sidebar comment - I'd be extremely dubious about the status of a decision under such circumstances. If she isn't considered capable of consenting to sex, consenting to motherhood would be a bit beyond the pale. (I realise this isn't a legal concept in the same way, but it's at least as much of a moral one.)

Also, interesting article (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16647417). A cursory look around can't find any studies of the risk to the mother, but there is apparently a significant elevation in the risk of stillbirth.

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

As a sidebar comment - I'd be extremely dubious about the status of a decision under such circumstances. If she isn't considered capable of consenting to sex, consenting to motherhood would be a bit beyond the pale.

I disagree. A child deciding whether to have sex or not involves a choice between a good option (not having sex) and a bad one (having sex - which an overwhelming body of research shows damages children in all kinds of ways.)

A child choosing what to do about their pregnancy is instead choosing between two bad options, and I think she has every right to decide that carrying the pregnancy to term is less bad than having an abortion.

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

I think we have to remember that the age of consent is a legal fiction. It's a useful fiction, but we should extrapolate from it to say that no-one under the age of 16 (or 14 or 18 or whatever, depending on where you live) is capable of making meaningful life decisions.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

It's definitely an unstable term, and historically the age of consent has varied all over the place, not including cultures which practiced child marriages and thus didn't even bother with an age of consent. I believe the range today is 12-18, with some countries having a rather sensible system whereby there's a maximum age gap (2 or 3 years) between sexual partners if one is a minor. 9 is way under any age of consent that I know of. You could argue about whether a 15 year old understands the implications of sex and motherhood, but a 9 year old?