Denver, Colo., Mar 24, 2020 / 06:19 pm (CNA).- The Catholic bishops of Colorado have welcomed the repeal of the death penalty, as the state becomes the 22nd to repeal capital punishment.
“For many years, the Colorado Catholic Conference has supp… […]
Columbus, Ohio, Mar 24, 2020 / 05:00 pm (CNA).- Amid efforts to conserve medical supplies for the response to the new coronavirus, Ohio’s health department has asked the state attorney general to issue a cease and desist order to Preterm, a Cleveland-based abortion clinic that continues to perform elective abortions despite statewide orders against elective surgeries.
Melanie Amato, press secretary of the Ohio Department of Health, told the Daily Caller News Foundation March 23 that the health department “has been made aware of allegations that some health care providers appear to have violated the order on performing non-elective procedures.”
When the state health department learns of allegations of non-compliance, it is asking the Ohio Attorney General’s Office to issue cease and desist orders, she said.
“These orders have started going out,” said Amato. “This is now an enforcement issue.”
The Ohio Department of Health’s March 17 order canceled “all non-essential or elective surgeries” that use personal protective equipment by 5 p.m. March 18. The move is intended to conserve resources for health care workers as victims of new coronavirus are expected to fill hospital beds.
The Ohio Attorney General’s Office previously sent out letters to non-compliant facilities that have been subjects of complaints to the health department. Ohio authorities have said abortion clinics were only some of the surgical clinics that received letters.
Abortion clinics that received letters included Planned Parenthood Ohio Southwest Region, Women’s Med Center in Dayton and the Preterm facility in Cleveland.
Despite the statements from Ohio authorities, Preterm plans to continue to provide “the full range of abortion care services because it is essential healthcare,” Preterm executive director Chrisse France told the Daily Caller News Foundation Monday morning.
“In compliance with the order from the Ohio Department of Health, our physicians will be making individualized determinations to ensure each person gets the healthcare they need and that all healthcare providers across the state have access to the supplies needed during this pandemic,” France said.
Iris Harvey and Kersha Deibel, the respective presidents and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio and Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio Region, have claimed that Planned Parenthood can still continue to provide “essential services, including abortion.”
Ohio Deputy Attorney General Jonathan Fulkerson sent a March 20 letter to Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio’s Cincinnati surgery center saying that the health department order was driven by the need to preserve personal protective equipment “for health care providers who are battling the COVID-19 pandemic that is spreading in our state” and to “preserve critical hospital capacity and resources.”
“This is an unprecedented time in the state’s history and everyone must do their part to help stop the spread of this disease,” Fulkerson said.
“If you or your facility do not immediately stop performing non-essential or elective surgical elective abortions in compliance with the attached order, the Department of Health will take all appropriate measures,” he continued.
Bethany McCorkle, a spokeswoman for the office of Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, told CNN that abortion providers are among one of many to receive such a letter.
“This is not an abortion issue,” McCorkle said. “A letter was also sent to a urology group that was allegedly performing elective surgeries.”
A March 18 joint statement from eight medical groups including the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists, which tends to take pro-abortion rights stands, asserted that abortion is “an essential component of comprehensive health care.”
The groups argued that abortion is “a time-sensitive service for which a delay of several weeks, or in some cases days, may increase the risks or potentially make it completely inaccessible.” Not being able to obtain an abortion has consequences that “profoundly impact a person’s life, health, and well-being.”
Ohio Right to Life had previously written Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio to complain about what it said was a violation of the order.
“As countless other clinics across the state comply with this health order and prioritize the lives of their fellow Ohioans, Planned Parenthood continues to put profit and abortion above the safety of our society’s most vulnerable members–children and the elderly,” Ohio Right to Life president Michael Gonidakis said March 21.
In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton said Gov. Greg Abbott’s statewide order barring non-essential surgeries, issued on Sunday, applied to abortion clinics.
“We must work together as Texans to stop the spread of COVID-19 and ensure that our health care professionals and facilities have all the resources they need to fight the virus at this time,” said Paxton. “No one is exempt from the governor’s executive order on medically unnecessary surgeries and procedures, including abortion providers.”
Failure to comply with the Texas executive order could mean fines of up to $1,000 or 180 days in jail.
Jonathan Saenz, president and attorney for the group Texas Values, welcomed the decision.
“Abortion is not essential healthcare,” he said March 23. “At a time when so many lives are at risk, we should all be able to agree that efforts to protect people from the coronavirus should be more important than the taking of a human life through abortion.”
Tara Pohlmeyer, communications manager with the pro-abortion rights group Progress Texas, criticized the action.
“Instead of trying to distract with ideology, state lawmakers should focus on prioritizing public health and safety measures,” she said, according to the New York Times.
On March 24, the Catholic Medical Association, along with several other medical groups, issued statement explaining that abortion “generates more patients to be seen in already overburdened emergency rooms. Most abortion providers instruct women to go to an emergency room if they have any concerning symptoms after the abortion. Approximately 5% of women who undergo medication abortions will require evaluation in an emergency room, most commonly for hemorrhage. Surgical abortions can also result in hemorrhage. Emergency room personnel – who are already struggling to meet the demands of the COVID-19 pandemic – will be further strained to provide care to these women”.
In Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Washington state, where pro-abortion rights support is strong, officials have said that orders halting elective surgeries do not apply to abortions.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has suspended non-essential business and elective medical procedures but did not clarify whether this included an elective abortions. The state of Louisiana has ordered a delay in non-essential medical procedures but it is also unclear whether elective abortions are included.
Sanaa, Yemen, Mar 24, 2020 / 04:40 pm (CNA).- A Yemeni appeals court run by Houthi rebels on Sunday upheld the death sentence of a member of the Baha’i religion. The court also ordered the dissolution of Baha’i institutions.
Hamed bin Haydara was detained by Houthi rebels in 2013, and was denied access to a March 22 appeal hearing in Sanaa which upheld an earlier death sentence.
“This alarming decision is an egregious violation of religious freedom and the fundamental rights of Yemeni Baha’is,” Gayle Manchin, vice chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, said March 23. “USCIRF has been long concerned with the welfare of Mr. bin Haydara and the Yemeni Baha’i community. We call on Houthi authorities to immediately reverse this verdict and cease their baseless persecution of this peaceful religious minority.”
According to USCIRF, bin Haydara was charged with “with spying for Israel, teaching literacy classes deemed incompatible with Islam, and attempting to convert Muslims.”
The Baha’i International Community said it was “utterly dismayed at this outrageous verdict” and demanded the court reverse the decision, AFP reported.
“At a time when the international community is battling a global health crisis, it is incomprehensible that the authorities in Sanaa have upheld a death sentence against an innocent individual solely because of his beliefs instead of focusing on safeguarding the population, including Baha’is,” said Diane Ala’i, a Baha’i representative to the United Nations in Geneva.
According to AFP, the Houthis have sought to ban the Baha’i religion.. The Houthi movement’s courts have started proceedings against 20 members of the religion, six of whom have been detained. The movement controls Sanaa and much of the westernmost part of the country.
In January, Pope Francis told Holy See diplomats that the crisis in Yemen is “one of the most serious humanitarian crises of recent history.”
The civil war between Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and a Saudi Arabian-led coalition has killed over 100,000 people since 2015. According to a Center of Strategic and International Studies report, the war has also caused nearly 24 million people to be in need of humanitarian assistance.
Restraint on humanitarian organizations and aerial attacks has left 80% of Yemen’s population in need of food, fuel, and medicine, the CSIS Task Force on Humanitarian Access reported.
The Associated Press reported in February that half of the United Nations’ aid delivery programs had been blocked by the Houthi rebels. The rebels had requested that 2% of the humanitarian budget be given directly to them, heightening concerns that the group has been diverting charitable funds to finance the war.
In recent years, the pope has often asked for prayers for the Yemeni people in his public audiences.
“Pray hard, because there are children who are hungry, who are thirsty, who have no medicine, and are in danger of death,” Pope Francis said during an Angelus address in February 2019.
King Richard II (1377-1399), in the 14th century, formally dedicated England to Mary, giving the country into her care as her Dowry. This has long been of great importance for Catholics in England. A painting, […]
Washington D.C., Mar 24, 2020 / 03:30 pm (CNA).- As the coronavirus continues to spread, many people find themselves confronted with their mortality for the first time. One religious sister, who has created a ministry helping Catholics find hope in their faith when faced with the reality of death, says they need help.
Sr. Theresa Aletheia Noble, FSP, is a member of the Daughters of St. Paul, an order dedicated to spreading the faith through modern media. She is also the author of several publications on the theme memento mori, remembering your own death, all of which aim to help the reader develop spiritual practices and disciplines which acknowledge the reality of death.
She told CNA Tuesday that in the “relatively unprecedented” situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have been forced to consider their own deaths “in a different way altogether, almost communally.”
Catholics have a special role to play in this time, she said.
“As Catholics, we have a special responsibility to live this [time] close to our tradition,” Noble told CNA.
“I think that it will be beneficial to us spiritually if we live this reality close to our tradition, which gives us a lot of guidance on how to live with fear of death and how to cope with it in a faith-filled way, but also a reasonable way.”
Personal faith and responsibility are both important, especially now, Noble said, with the “fearful reality” of the coronavirus leaving her concerned for the health and safety of her own loved ones.
Faced with the unique situation of entire societies experiencing some form of memento mori, Noble said that Catholics should bring their fears and anxieties to Jesus, as well find hope in their faith.
Noble explained that from a religious perspective, “meditation on death helps us to see those fears, but then bring them to Jesus and help him to fill those fears with this hope.”
A faith-filled approach to death is not about rejecting fear, she said, “it’s natural and real to respond to death with a feeling of fear,” but becoming open to grace at the same time.
“Because we have the gift of faith from our baptism, we can respond to that fear differently,” said Noble. “We can also have hope in the midst of that fear.”
Witnessing to this hope, she said, is something Catholics can do to help those who do not have faith and have been left isolated through anxiety and fear during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Personally, I think that’s how Catholics can help their secular friends right now. They might not have the faith that we have, but we can keep turning to Jesus in this and finding that hope that our faith really does provide for us, and being that light of hope to others right now.”
Finding hope in this time is a “special gift that all Christians can be to the world,” she said.
While many Catholics are struggling to adjust to closed churches and the suspension of public Masses, Noble said that it was important to remember that “in extraordinary circumstances” God provides.
“God provides us with the graces that we need in the time that we need them,” she said, and encouraged people to make acts of spiritual communion, “asking Jesus to give us the graces that He would have us at Mass, and to give us even more to deal with the situation, because He’s going to give us all that we need.”
Noble emphasized that while memento mori is a beneficial spiritual practice, it does not mean that someone should become “totally fearless of death,” especially not to the point of carelessness.
A Christian approach to mortality is “the balance of extreme caution and value for the preciousness of our lives, with the recognition that the end of our lives is really out of our hands, and it’s in the good and holy will of God,” said Noble.
“God wants us to use our minds and our intellect to be cautious and careful, and to only take risks when God calls us to and not when the risks outweigh the benefits,” she said.
Washington D.C., Mar 24, 2020 / 02:30 pm (CNA).- In Italy, which has the most deaths from coronavirus, some doctors have said they have had to overlook older patients to focus on younger ones who are more likely to survive as the virus overwhelmed the healthcare system.
In the US, states and hospitals are considering how to distribute healthcare if demand for limited resources exceeds what can be provided. Worldwide, there are 332,930 confirmed cases of Covid-19, and 14,509 deaths. Of those, 31,573 cases are in the US, where there have been 402 deaths due to the virus.
Colorado adopted a Crisis Standards of Care Plan in 2018 as guidelines “to assist healthcare providers in their decision making with the intention of maximizing patient survival and minimizing the adverse outcomes that might occur” when healthcare needs “far surpass” what is available.
“It’s very military-style triage,” Dr. Matthew Wynia of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus told The Colorado Sun’s John Ingold. “If we get hit that hard, we are going to have some very difficult decisions to make. And we can’t wait until then to get ready for that … it would be irresponsible not to plan right now for a huge surge of patients.”
Colorado’s crisis standards of care would be activated only after the governor declares a public health emergency, and even then, it would implemented locally, depending on the conditions in individual counties or communities.
Among the goals of the state plan is to “minimize serious illness and death by administering a finite pool of resources to those who have the greatest opportunity to benefit from them”.
Guiding ethical elements of Colorado’s plan are stewardship of resources, duty to care, soundness, fairness, reciprocity, proportionality, transparency, and accountability.
It focuses especially on fairness, proportionality, solidarity, and being participatory.
The Colorado guidelines say healthcare providers should be fair to all the affected “without regard to factors such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability or region that are not medically relevant.”
With regard to solidarity, the Crisis Standards of Care Plan says that “all people should consider the greater good of the entire community.” It adds that for transparency and accountability, “the community, healthcare providers, and emergency management agencies” should be engaged during the process.
Dr. Charlie Camosy, an associate professor of theology at Fordham University, last week discussed with CNA the principles that should be used as doctors might face choices over healthcare distribution.
“There are virtually no universally agreed-upon principles to do this–excepting, perhaps, the idea that health care providers, first-responders, law enforcement, and others primarily responsible for the day-to-day functioning of the polity should get priority,” he stated.
For Catholics, he said that serving “the most vulnerable first” is a fundamental principal.
“Those people are Christ to us in a special way and we will be judged according to how we treat them. We don’t think about, say, how long they might stay on a ventilator vs. how long someone we might encounter next week might stay on a ventilator. We also don’t think about how long they might have to live if the treatment is successful vs. how long other someone we might encounter next week might live if their treatment is successful.”
He added that it makes sense among limited resources “to treat those first who are most likely to benefit from the treatment. And there may be a disproportionate number of younger people in the former category. But that is not the same as deciding that we ought to prefer the young to the old because they have longer to live.”
While the US bishops’ Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services do not directly address resource allocation during crises, they do note that “Catholic health care should distinguish itself by service to and advocacy for those people whose social condition puts them at the margins of our society and makes them particularly vulnerable to discrimination: the poor; the uninsured and the underinsured; children and the unborn; single parents; the elderly; those with incurable diseases and chemical dependencies; racial minorities; immigrants and refugees.”
The directives add that “in particular, the person with mental or physical disabilities, regardless of the cause or severity, must be treated as a unique person of incomparable worth, with the same right to life and to adequate health care as all other persons.”
In Washington, advocates of persons with disabilities have filed a complaint saying that crisis care guidelines issued by the state health department are improperly discriminatory.
“There’s been a long history of people with intellectual, development mental disabilities having our medical care denied,” Ivanova Smith, one of the complainants, told NPR. “Because we’re not seen as valuable. We’re not seen as productive or needed. When that’s not true. We have people that love us and that care for us. Many people with disabilities work and they do amazing things in their communities but they need that life saving care.”
Attorneys representing the Thomas More Society and the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund published a memo March 23 urging that “policies rationing care on the basis of disability or age … would violate federal law regarding invidious discrimination.”
“Anticipated longevity or quality of life are inappropriate issues for consideration. Decisions must be made solely on clinical factors as to which patients have the greatest need and the best prospect of a good medical outcome. Therefore, disability and age should not be used as categorical exclusions in making these critical decisions,” the memo concludes.
Peter Breen, vice president of the Thomas More Society, commented that “The horrific idea of withholding care from someone because they are elderly or disabled, is untenable and represents a giant step in the devaluation of each and every human life in America.”
Other possible criteria for healthcare distribution during crises include first-come-first-served, or a lottery system.
Washington D.C., Mar 24, 2020 / 01:30 pm (CNA).- As state health officials plan for health care rationing during the coronavirus pandemic, lawyers, ethicists and theologians are warning that denying care on the basis of age or disability violates feder… […]
Rome, Italy, Mar 24, 2020 / 12:56 pm (CNA).- While Fr. Giuseppe Berardelli is remembered fondly by those who knew him as a man of kindness and self-sacrifice, the reports of a donated respirator passed along to a younger patient are not true, the secre… […]
Vatican City, Mar 24, 2020 / 12:25 pm (CNA).- The director of the Holy See’s press office, Matteo Bruni, said Tuesday there are now a total of four people connected to Vatican City who have tested positive for the coronavirus.
Included in this number, Bruni said, is the first confirmed case of COVID-19 connected to Vatican City, which was announced March 6. Of the subsequent cases, two are employees of the Vatican Museums and a third is an employee of the merchandise office.
Bruni stated March 24 that these four patients “had been placed in solitary confinement as a precaution before they tested positive and their isolation has already lasted for over 14 days; currently they are being treated in Italian hospitals or at home.”
The Vatican’s first case of the coronavirus was found after a patient tested positive in the city state’s outpatient health facilities March 5. The facilities were then closed for one day to allow for their sanitation.
The confirmation of COVID-19 cases came after information that the Vatican’s dicasteries and other offices will continue to be operational during the Italian lockdown.
The press office informed journalists March 24 that increased measures have been put in place to avoid the spread of the coronavirus, such as increasing the numbers of those who work remotely, thus minimizing the number of staff present in offices.
This is to both “limit the movement of employees and at the same time guarantee the exercise of the Petrine ministry,” the release stated.
“The heads of the dicasteries are entrusted with the task of continuing to ensure essential services to the Universal Church.”
During the Italian coronavirus lockdown, Pope Francis has continued certain aspects of his daily schedule, including his morning Mass, general audiences, and Angelus, however they are being shared over video livestream and without the presence of the public.
His schedule has also included one-on-one meetings with Roman curia officials.
The number of active COVID-19 cases in Rome’s region of Lazio has grown to over 1,500. There have been 80 deaths from the virus in the region. Overall, more than 6,800 people have died in Italy from the coronavirus.
Like many of you, our Sunday morning was spent, not in a pew, but in our living room, watching Mass on television. For a few hours on Saturday, it looked as though we might be […]
© Catholic World Report