Oh, I didn't know that the hypothetical given to me was a real case.
Could the woman be induced into labour, then? Or is that considered an abortion as well?
Jim is referring to the AZ case with Sister McBride. An induced labor would not be considered an abortion as long as the fetus was viable. Now, even if the fetus was not normally viable and they would try some radical methods to save the child because the mother at that point was about to die...it would not be an abortion.
There are whole threads from when the Sister McBride issue happened that go over the whole thing.
The doctors admit no effort was made to save the child because they wrote the fetus off as a lost cause. And many Catholic physicians, while stressing they do not know the details of the case, commented that unless something was very unusual the condition being addressed is not some automatic death sentence as was described.
The one you see most often in that respect:
However, Dr. Paul A. Byrne, Director of Neonatolog[bless and do not curse]y and Pediatrics at St. Charles Mercy Hospital in Toledo, Ohio, disputes the claim that an abortion is ever a procedure necessary to save the life of the mother, or carries less risk than birth.
In an interview with LifeSiteNe[bless and do not curse]ws, Dr. Byrne said, I dont know of any [situation where abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother].
I know that a lot of people talk about these things, but I dont know of any. The principle always is preserve and protect the life of the mother and the baby.
Byrne has the distinctio[bless and do not curse]n of being a pioneer in the field of neonatolog[bless and do not curse]y, beginning his work in the field in 1963 and becoming a board-cert[bless and do not curse]ified neonatolog[bless and do not curse]ist in 1975. He invented one of the first oxygen masks for babies, an incubator monitor, and a blood-pres[bless and do not curse]sure tester for premature babies, which he and a colleague adapted from the finger blood pressure checkers used for astronauts[bless and do not curse].
Byrne emphasized that he was not commentati[bless and do not curse]ng on what the womans particular treatment should have been under the circumstan[bless and do not curse]ces, given that she is not his patient.
But given just pulmonary hypertensi[bless and do not curse]on, the answer is no to abortion, said Byrne.
The reason Byrne is so often quoted is he is an expert at dealing with premature and births considered non-viable. For him to make the statement that he knows of no situation where an abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother is telling. And he is not the only one to say that.
Of course he is not the doctor of the woman in question, but he has seen thousands of cases both personally and in case study. If such a thing was even very uncommon he would not say he knows of no situations. A statement echoed by others.