It’s at least factually accurate, although somewhat deceptive.
Since that seems to be your mission, I’d say it works.
Why can’t I apply it only to abortion, because abortion is so serious? Where did your rule come from? Why must I follow it?
I know it must be hard for some men to understand this, but no pregnancy – wanted or not – is a “mere inconvenience.” A mere inconvenience is a seasonal cold. The best of pregnancies is a year of quite disruptive, uncomfortable physical changes, repetitive and frequent medical visits, a commitment to significant lifestyle changes, and results in lifelong physical changes that are not that desirable. Seeing a pregnancy to term is literally a life-changing experience whether or not the infant remains with the mother. There doesn’t have to serious health concerns for a pregnancy to rise to a level far above “mere inconvenience.”
From a female perspective, I can’t begin to express how offensive that comment is. If you are not intending to offend, you’d be wise to never use that phrase again in conjunction with pregnancy.
You seem to have a penchant for leaving words out when they don’t suit your narrative. The statistic cited in that article is not “590,000 complications” but rather 590,000 severe complications. So you seem to be suggesting that pregnancies lacking severe complications are merely inconveniences. Rather, you are ignoring any of the myriad of complications that arise during pregnancy that still constitute something that can’t simply be hand-waved away as inconvenient.
Take, for instance, pre-eclampsia, a condition of elevated blood pressure that complicates 3-6% of pregnancies, is associated with “high risks of preterm delivery, intrauterine growth restriction, placental abruption, and perinatal mortality” and “sentinel marker for women who will experience premature cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and other chronic illnesses later in life.”
Either this condition is not considered “severe” by the CDC, or the statistics cited in that article are wrong, as this one complication alone exceeds the cited value.
Either way, to deem less serious complications, as well as the uncomfortable and life-altering symptoms of pregnancy as merely inconvenient is, at best, quite dismissive and makes you look like a total asshole.
Which part is “somewhat deceptive”? How can something “factually accurate” be deceptive?
When words are literally accurate but create a false impression, they are factually accurate but deceptive.
In this instance, your first telling of the story was that people were thrown out of the Catholic Church. That was both deceptive and factually inaccurate.
Now you’ve modified the tale to use the accurate word excommunication, presumably because you have learned what you did not know before: that excommunication does not mean being thrown out of the Church.
But your tale leaves the uninformed listener to make the same factual mistake that you did. Since you now know what actually happened, but continue to use the words that confused you, I assume you’re sanguine about the likelihood of confusing others in exactly the same way.
Do you think the factual treatment of the girl’s family by the church was morally just? It strikes me as profoundly morally unjust, and even monstrously evil, if I correctly understand those facts. But I’m not Catholic, of course.
In post 226 I noted that the study encompassed only serious complications. I see the actual word used was severe. I thought those two were synonymous enough for the level of detail in play here.
What is your understanding of what a latae sententiae excommunication entails?
I was quoting my wife, who is by all accounts female. She does not agree it’s offensive when she said it, or when I repeated it.
From my 30 seconds of googling, it means that one is automatically cut off from receiving the Sacraments, and thus if they are unfortunate enough to die before this is reversed, they will be prevented from ascending to heaven upon their death.
Plus, I assume, for very devout Catholics, this would be profoundly emotionally unsettling and painful, especially for a family that experienced what this family just did.
Is my first paragraph correct? Is my second reasonable? What are you feelings about the morality of this particular result/treatment/sentence for the family of the little girl?
So your wife does not feel it rises above a mere inconvenience? several other women have disagreed – did your wife have any complications at all?
No serious ones. We were told the doctor was watching her blood pressure as being slightly high but it never reached the pre-eclampsia threshhold.
Naturally other pregnancies differ. She certainly did not suggest, nor did I, that there is no such thing as serious complications.
Did you happen to follow the meaning of “Latae sententiae?”
That it was automatic, right? That would be exculpatory (morally speaking), I suppose, if it were immediately rescinded by a higher authority, but I don’t believe it was in this case. If I’m wrong, please correct me.
It’s applied automatically, without any process. No trial, no judge, no finding of fact. It just happens, the instant the operation is done.
Above in this thread, I likened it to a rule that you might apply to a self-defense killing. We can imagine a state that has a law that says, “Every killing, even if in self-defense, must be investigated, and the person who did the killing is required to explain the self-defense or be charged with murder.”
Here, the same concept is in play: canon law provides that the instant you kill an unborn child, you are excommunicated. But that only means that you must follow the church’s process to lift that excommunication - to visit a priest and explain what the circumstances were, and show that there was no sinful conduct in this particular instance.
When George Zimmerman used Florida’s lax self-defense law to his advantage, many people suggested that a more appropriate framework would be an automatic charge, with the person who did the killing obligated to at least explain why he acted in self-defense, instead of requiring the state to prove he did NOT act in self-defense.
That’s how this works. No council met to excommunicate anyone. The law simply says that an automatic penalty is in place, and it is lifted by approaching a priest and explaining what the facts were.
Yes, this is what I understood by “automatic”.
Was it lifted, in this case? If so, how long did it take?
So in the case of the child it was lifted without any problem I assume?
The specifics of lifting a latae sententiae excommunication are not made public, unless the person chooses to discuss his own case… But I know of no reason it would take longer than five minutes.
Huh wiki says the girl was not excommunicated, not her mother, because minors can’t be excommunicated and the mother acted to save her daughter’s life.
The National Conference of Bishops of Brazil repudiated Sobrinho’s initiative.[17] At a press conference, Bishop Dimas Lara Barbosa, Secretary General of the Conference, said that the girl’s mother was not excommunicated, since she had acted under pressure to save her daughter’s life, and that there were no grounds to declare the doctors excommunicated, because (automatic) excommunication depended on each one’s degree of awareness and only those who were “aware and contumacious” were excommunicated.[17][18] At the press conference, a document on excommunication written by canonist Enrique Pérez Pujol, who stressed that the penalty should not be applied amid a polemic, was distributed to journalists.[17]