Local News
Letters To the Editor
Published: June 10, 2010
To the Editor:
This article (“Camp Continues To Honor Miralles’ Legacy,” The Georgia Bulletin, May 27) is absolutely marvelous! I miss camp so very much, and I miss Toni even more.
I sent the article to my son Drew even though I know it will cause some heartache. He, too, would start talking about the next year’s camp before we were five miles away! The article pegged what I always said about camp: it was the ONLY place Drew ever felt fully accepted for just being himself as he was.
Elisabeth Blanton, M.D.
Lilburn
To the Editor:
The Catholic Medical Association stands with Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted in condemning the actions of Mercy Sister Margaret Mary McBride and the staff at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix where they approved and carried out an abortion on a woman at 11 weeks’ gestation with pulmonary arterial hypertension ( News Briefs, The Georgia Bulletin, May 27). This disease is a serious disorder that is worsened by pregnancy but their statement that it “carried a near-certain risk of death for the mother if the pregnancy continued” is incorrect. Great advances have been made in the treatment of this disorder in the past ten years and with a multidisciplinary approach and new drug therapy that does not harm either the mother or the child, the maternal mortality has been reduced from 70 percent to 25 percent. This child had a 100 percent mortality from the abortion, yet would have been born without heart disease and would have had a normal life expectancy. The Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, section 45, states, “Abortion (that is, the directly intended termination of pregnancy before viability or the directly intended destruction of a viable fetus) is never permitted. Every procedure whose sole immediate effect is the termination of pregnancy before viability is an abortion ...”
We won’t make advances in medicine unless we try to save both the mother and the child. For example, it was also recommended in the past that women with breast cancer in pregnancy undergo abortions. Now these women are treated with standard chemotherapy regimens after the 12th gestational week without endangering the health of the baby.
Kathleen M. Raviele, M.D.
Atlanta Guild of the Catholic Medical Association
