Three top members of the country’s Conference of Catholic Bishops announced at the end of last week that they are considering challenging a hospital’s legal position over a wrongful death claim.
Heartbeats
According to various US media reports, three Colorado-based bishops expressed serious reservations over the stance adopted by executives at the St Thomas More Hospital, a Catholic facility in Canon City, a town some 115 miles south of Denver.
The case revolves around the death from a heart attack of Lori Stodghill at the hospital in 2006. According to a report in The Christian Post, Ms Stodghill’s husband, Jeremy, sued the hospital, alleging that emergency staff failed to detect the foetal heartbeats of twins and therefore declined to perform a perimortem Caesarean section. The suit claims that doing so could have saved the unborn children.
Doctrine
However, defending the action, lawyers for the Catholic hospital have argued that state legislation allowed for only those defined as a ‘person’ to bring wrongful death claims, and that unborn foetuses did not fall into that category.
That legal argument has triggered an impassioned response from the bishops, who maintain a Catholic hospital’s legal team should not adopt a defence that runs contrary to the church’s doctrinal position. In a statement, the bishops said: ‘From the moment of conception, human beings are endowed with dignity and with fundamental rights, the most foundational of which is life. No Catholic institution may legitimately work to undermine fundamental human dignity.’
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