LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY zoethe)

The Pope is canonizing again (Slogan: "More Saints Than Ever Before!"), and among his choices for Sainthood is an Italian pediatrician who did nothing more than die because she refused to abort a fetus that was threatening her life.

Once again, the message of the church is loud and clear: the women don't matter; only the unborn do.

I used to be fairly staunchly pro-life. The first crack in that belief came in a conversation I was having with a Catholic relative who was also a physician and I mentioned that a Catholic friend of mine, whose first three children had been delivered by c-section, had just gone through a tough time because an ultrasound had revealed that the baby she'd been carrying was ancephalic and would not live more than a day or two, but that the doctors had induced her at 30 weeks so she could deliver the baby rather than having to go through surgery again and how much it meant to her to have delivered naturally and had a chance to hold her son and have him baptized.

"That was wrong," this relative growled. "It's just like an abortion."

"You mean that they should have let her carry a child who wasn't going to live all the way to term and have to go through surgery again? What about the mother's health."

"It doesn't matter. It was an abortion, and they shouldn't have done it."

In other words, the health of the women means nothing, even when the unborn child cannot live.

In the case of the woman being cannonized, she had a tumor in her uterus that the doctors told her would kill her unless it was removed, a procedure that would necessarily cost her the fetus. She chose to follow the church, which preaches that it is far better for her to leave this child and her other three children without a mother, far better for her to die, than for the child to die. That she has no value outside of her role as baby-making vessel.

And now the Pope is holding her on high for a choice that no doubt brought grief to all her children. She is credited with miracles of birth. The Vatican apparently sees no problem with this view of women.

I look back on the time when I was trying to change the church from the inside, deeply involved in the focus groups on women's rights.

I was so naive....