Catholic hospital: fetuses are persons, er, unless we kill them accidentally

More evidence that God is getting a bad rap and needs a major rewrite. In this case, a Catholic hospital in Denver is claiming that twin fetuses who died in the emergency room were not persons and therefore, the hospital is not culpable for their wrongful deaths. Normally, Catholics insist that fetuses are persons before their own mothers are born but when lawsuits are involved, god is nowhere to be found. How conveeeeeenient.

More on the story:

Lori Stodghill was 31-years old, seven-months pregnant with twin boys and feeling sick when she arrived at St. Thomas More hospital in Cañon City on New Year’s Day 2006. She was vomiting and short of breath and she passed out as she was being wheeled into an examination room. Medical staff tried to resuscitate her but, as became clear only later, a main artery feeding her lungs was clogged and the clog led to a massive heart attack. Stodghill’s obstetrician, Dr. Pelham Staples, who also happened to be the obstetrician on call for emergencies that night, never answered a page. His patient died at the hospital less than an hour after she arrived and her twins died in her womb.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Stodghill’s husband Jeremy, a prison guard, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on behalf of himself and the couple’s then-two-year-old daughter Elizabeth. Staples should have made it to the hospital, his lawyers argued, or at least instructed the frantic emergency room staff to perform a caesarian-section. The procedure likely would not have saved the mother, a testifying expert said, but it may have saved the twins

Maybe this is new church doctrine, like the trinity. God is three! Three! Three persons in one! Like a perky triplet of girls smacking rolls of breath mints together. Or maybe this is an example of Schroedinger’s fetus. The fetus is both a person and not a person. You will never know until someone files a lawsuit.

Let’s see, where are we now? Contraceptives make you a slut, pedophilia is forgivable, abortion is strictly verboten and fetuses are not really persons even at seven months gestation. Wow, that’s amazing. I would have said at about 22 weeks they’re entitled to life saving measures and only medical reasons for the health of the mother or child should be acceptable for terminations but Catholic hospitals are willing to deny personhood all the way to the third trimester if there’s money involved.

And the Vatican thinks the nuns need thought control.

Can we stop listening to the guys in the red beanies now?