What You Don’t Know About the Nun Excommunicated for Approving an Abortion

So we’ve been hearing a lot about Sister Margaret McBride in the news lately, the nun working for St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona who was excommunicated for approving an abortion. If you’ve been reading/watching the news lately at all you know the bullet points of the story: The woman in question was already a mother of four with pulmonary hypertension, which doctors said would have killed her and her 5th baby if she carried it to term. Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, who is not a doctor, “disagreed” (How you “disagree” with medical facts, I’m not sure.) and excommunicated the nun for her decision, a decision which pretty much any logical person, despite their beliefs, would have made. Despite the immense amount of media coverage this story has received, a few extra details haven’t been widely reported involving Bishop Olmsted and the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix. A hat tip to The Independent for giving us the full, well-rounded story…

Writing in the left-leaning Huffington Post, bioethicist and medical historian Jacob M. Appel described Olmsted as having a “reputation as a particularly cold-hearted and intransigent figure” who had “gained notoriety for refusing communion to a 10-year-old autistic child who could not swallow”. He added, “Thanks to men like Mr. Olmsted, obtaining obstetric care at a Catholic hospital has become a dangerous game of Russian roulette.”

Wow…what a great guy. He definitely sounds like the kind of asshole who should be dictating morality to people. I bet you he had something else in mind for that 10-year-old to swallow. On that note…

By the beginning of last week, a Facebook page — Allies of Sister Margaret — had been set up in support of the nun, with many of its hundreds of members drawing a sharp contrast between the swift and sure judgment against Sister Margaret and the rather more lenient approach taken against pedophile priests.

Olmsted himself replaced Irish-American Bishop Thomas O’Brien, who, according to an official report, “allowed priests under his supervision to have contact with minors after becoming aware of allegations of criminal sexual misconduct” and acknowledging “transferring offending priests to situations where children could be further victimized.” O’Brien was also later convicted of leaving the scene of a fatal accident, after running over a man in Phoenix. There was no evidence that O’Brien had been excommunicated or that Olmsted considered this a necessary step.

So it’s murder when you flush out an underdeveloped fetus, something a woman’s body does naturally all the time, but when you run a man over with your car, that’s totally cool with god. I must have missed that one in Sunday school. And what makes the pedophilia argument even more relevant in this case is the fact that their last bishop is a child molester who has yet to be punished, or even truly reprimanded, for his crimes. This story just gets better and better.

Speaking of which, the other thing the news has been failing to report lately is that Sister McBride isn’t exactly the moral crusader we’ve been led to believe she is. She faced another tough decision years ago, and she folded faster than Bishop O’Brien drives…

As a senior hospital administrator in a part of the US with more than its share of illegal immigrants, she was no stranger to making difficult, controversial choices. According to the New York Times, St. Joseph’s focuses on keeping down the cost of the uninsured and repatriates about eight uninsured patients per month. One of these people was 18-year-old Joe Arvizu, an undocumented, poor Mexican boy, who suffered from leukemia and had to have surgery to stop bleeding on his brain. His family, however, had no insurance and couldn’t afford the treatment. “They said they knew that we couldn’t pay the bill, so they couldn’t continue with the treatment anymore,” his mother Rosa told local press. “I asked for a payment negotiation, but they said that no, we couldn’t make it with the income we have. I didn’t want to make any decision by myself, but they told me the ambulance was ready.”

Despite his mother’s objections, Joe was transferred to a hospital in Mexico. Joe died on December 3, 2007 — the hospital was unable to supply the blood for a transfusion. Sister McBride was quoted by local press as saying that the hospital’s charity committee reviewed Arvizu’s case but decided he would be able to get adequate treatment in Mexico.

Saying someone would get “adequate treatment in Mexico” is like telling a black man that he’d get adequate treatment at a KKK rally. They couldn’t even give the Mexican hospital some blood for the transfusion? You better believe that if this kid wasn’t an “undocumented, poor Mexican boy,” he’d be alive and well right now. In fact, he’d probably be the Diocese of Phoenix’s cute little white poster boy for the local media, showing how loving and caring the Church is to those in need, despite the lies those “evil atheist/liberal/communist/Nazis” are spreading.

This is just another example of how the right thing to do and the religious thing to do are often two completely different decisions, and even though McBride made the right choice in the mother of four’s case, she’s not the modern saint they’re making her out to be. Maybe this time she just decided to think for herself. Maybe this time she just got fed up. Or, maybe this time, she realized that a life of celibacy, penguin suits, sexism, and archaic doctrine just wasn’t worth another life.