LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY drgndancer)

OK, I'm really confused now. I'm listening to my wife discuss a friend's very sadly prematurely ended pregnancy. No, this is not a post (directly) about abortion, but rather a still birth. Brief synopsis: Woman got pregnant (intentionally I think), Woman carried baby to term, One week before predicted date of birth a final check-up showed no heartbeat. The final determination is that the baby was tragically strangled by its umbilical cord less than a week before it should have been born.

The parents are understandably crushed, and here's where the relationship to this community starts. The parents were informed by their priest (they are Catholic) that since the baby never drew its first breath, it has no soul. It will receive neither the sacrament of Baptism nor last rites. I'm confused here... Is the Catholic Church more or less the birth of the "pro-life" movement within Christianity? Don't Catholic groups protest the murder of "innocent babies" quite regularly? How does this work? It seems extremely hypocritical to me that a church would simultaneously work to "defend life" at the expense of female self-determination and medical advancement (through stem cell research), while refusing to grant the parents of what really was for all intents and purposes a baby the comfort of a simple baptism. Am I missing something here?

How many other Christian religions have this dichotomy? The whole thing both confuses me and saddens me. From the standpoint of the parents, I feel really bad that they don't get the closure that normally accompanies a death... From the point of view of the Church I simply can't understand their anti-woman, anti-progress stance when they don't consider a 9 month still born a "baby".

Edit: I'm reporting this based on the account of a very distraught and somewhat angry woman. I feel reasonably comfortable that in fact the priest said what I reported, but his level of kindness in doing so and/or offers to perform some other sort of blessing are unknown factors. I wasn't intending to indicate the that the priest was a horrible person (he may or may not be), but rather to try to understand the theological underpinning of what he said. He may have been extremely kind and may have offered to do any number of prayers and blessings... I don't know, all I know is that he would not baptize the baby, and that the mother's interpretation of why was "Because it was never alive".