Canon Lawyer Ed Peters weighs in on the legal aspects here, but what I found interesting was his link to a Q&A from the Diocese in pdf here. I’ve been having a little trouble figuring out what procedure was used and noted this:
What if the treatment provided to the mother results in the death of her unborn child?
Certainly a physician should try to protect both lives equally. If the child can grow past viability and
then can be delivered, that is always preferable. If, however, a necessary treatment brings about the deathof the child indirectly it may be allowable. A Dilation and Curettage (D&C) or Dilation and Extraction (D&E), however, would never be such a treatment since it is the direct killing of the unborn child and is, morally speaking, an abortion.
which suggests to me that it was either a D&E or D&C. That also makes sense because Mark Shea linked a Commonweal article that made the jaw-dropping assertion that it was not abortion, it’s just surgically separating mother from child. That reminds me of a comment by Zippy that it is absurd to say “I didn’t run that red light. I merely refrained from pressing on the brake which is a morally neutral act.”
We had a commentator at W4 say the same thing–specifically, since the suction abortion might have sucked the child out in one piece (since the child was so tiny), that this was a matter of “removing the child.”
But I will say this: I believe that we need to take a very hard line on removing a child deliberately pre-viability _ever_, and I fear that people don’t always really understand that this is abortion–even hard-liners. For example, deliberate labor induction at 17 weeks is an abortion, even if you haven’t ripped the child to pieces first. In fact, labor induction abortion is very common in the U.S., and everyone understands that it is an abortion. If the child is plausibly viable and there is some overwhelming reason (especially one where both lives are at risk), then one could potentially justify induction followed by strenuous efforts to take care of the preemie. But if you know that no one is going to take strenuous efforts because either a) the child will very likely die in the process of being “removed” or b) there are no strenuous efforts that can be taken at that stage or c) all available doctors have it as part of their treatment protocols to do nothing for a child at that stage of development, then even an intact removal just is an abortion and must not be considered anything else.
Of course, 11 weeks is ridiculously early, and the child was killed immediately by the abortion, nor was there anything at all that could be done for it.