Kristof v Olmsted
The bishop of Phoenix is getting some more glare of publicity, this time from Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. I hope more people will start to grasp just what it is that he and his Conference of catholic bishops are saying. They are saying that hospitals – all hospitals if they had their way, not just Catholic ones – should flatly refuse to save pregnant women’s lives by ending early pregnancies. They are saying that if ending an early pregnancy is the only way a particular woman’s life can be saved, then that woman must die. (They make an exception for something they call “indirect abortion,” which is enormously generous of them.)
Now the bishop, in effect, is excommunicating the entire hospital — all because it saved a woman’s life.
Precisely. That’s the bit that needs to be emphasized, and repeated. Some people think the bishop simply doesn’t realize what he’s saying. Oh yes he does.
The hospital backed up Sister Margaret, and it rejected the bishop’s demand that it never again terminate a pregnancy to save the life of a mother.
But the bishop remains a free man. He has not been arrested. There is no talk of arresting him (except for around here). He is using all the “authority” and influence he has in an effort to compel hospitals to let women die, yet no one tries to stop him. People defy him, but that’s as far as they go.
Good. The more people know about this the better. The Catholic Church runs full-speed and head-down at the brick wall of modern society. I suspect they will end up with a headache.
Arrest him for what, exactly? What about his actions was literally criminal (as opposed to just being morally reprehensible)? Surely talk of arresting would be meaningless hyperbole, no? He has no direct control over medical policy at the hospitals, so at best he can only try to persuade them with religious arguments, which is precisely what anti-choice preachers do all the time.
Well, the hospital administration ignored him, so they did stop his influence in this particular case.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa and Wayne de Villiers, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Kristof v Olmsted http://dlvr.it/FHgHq […]
Eh… I could try to construct a legal case based on an attempt statute. Conspiracy to commit attempted… whatever crime it would be if persons with a legal duty to try to save a life stood aside and watched while the life they had a duty to try to save was extinguished.
I don’t think it would fly, but you could throw it at the wall and see if it stuck.
Patrick,
The cops could arrest the holy bishop on a charge of incitement to commit an act of violence and/or murder; if the cops had the will to do so that is. The court they took it to might throw it out, but it would get an airing; if the cops had the will to do so.
I think that if I made a public statement like, say. ‘all policemen should be shot tomorrow: make tomorrow shoot-a-cop day’, an officer or two would want to honour me with a visit: official or unofficial; formal or informal.
Seriously? Couldn’t they do that to any anti-choice activist who uttered the same views? Yes, the bishop is a reprehensible human, but let’s not lose sight of the actual law and make silly claims.
Tulse,
There are laws against incitement to violence and murder. So, yes they could. What a court would do with it is anyone’s guess, and I have mine.
The law is selectively written, and what is written is then selectively applied. In other words, the law is politics.
But in the US their criteria are very strict, because of constitutional issues of free speech. It is nearly impossible to convict someone who does not utter an immediate threat against a specific person. The notion that the police would charge someone for saying what the Bishop did is absurd, however heinous his position is.
Be that as it may. I am not a lawyer, but ‘nearly impossible’ still admits ‘possible’ in my book.
In my view, all but a small minority of humans have an innate ability to empathise, which is the basis of the human notions of justice and fairness. It is also I think the basis of Ophelia’s rightful indignation as expressed in her threadstarter here.
Wherever the law, either as written or as applied and interpreted by the courts, gets into conflict with the notion of justice, the law eventually loses. It may take time, but discussions like this are part of the process.
Specificity be damned. The holy bishop from what you say is getting off on a technicality. It should in my view be possible to convict someone who issues a general call for the killing of a whole class of people. If some would-be Hitler set up a political party calling for the extermination of all Jews, or just wrote a book along those lines, several European countries would have him in the slammer.
Tulse
So if this situation occurs again with some other woman at some other catholic hospital and the Bishop spouts the same views , could he be arrested then? (immediate threat , specific person)
If I understand the case correctly, the Bishop was indeed making a very specific and immediate threat against the woman, who was in extremis at the very time of his actions to pressure the hospital. He was not making a public speech about abortion rights at Catholic hospitals, he was doing his damnable best to to influence whether a particular person got an operation to save her life. Heck, the very idea that he interrupted the medical treatment of that woman – for hours if not days IIRC – for any reason at all, was an act which put her specific life immediately in increased danger.
The content of the Bishop’s speech should not be protected, regardless of the fact that it was religious, because it did indeed promulgate the immediate death of a specific person. He alone is certainly responsible for all increased medical risk of the woman. The SOB should never have used that particular moment in time to step forward. He was essentially pulling the scalpel out of the surgeon’s hand. Imagine if the woman died while the hospital administrators and staff were in fevered meetings trying to decide what to do.
From Kristof’s article:
What? This has nothing to do with funding, tax-exempt status, or anything that actually matters?
Tulse, the bishop tried his hardest to compel (via his “authority”) Catholic Healthcare West to sign a written agreement never again to perform an abortion in the same circumstances. He tried to compel them to promise to commit deliberate medical malpractice which would result in patient death. If that’s not prosecutable, then that’s my point – it should be. There’s a difference between the bishop and, say, Ronald Conte, who simply wrote an article on the subject. The bishop tried to extort a written agreement to commit negligent homicide.
colluvial – no – nothing that matters, but of course plenty of people do think it matters, so the bishop’s efforts matter.
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