> The Catholic Church might excommunicate both the doctor and the pregnant woman - but excommunication is an administrative action of the Catholic Church, and does not necessarily coincide with moral culpability.


WHAAAAAAT? Excommunicate them? So there are strings attached to this conscience thing. Strings big enough to strangle you.

It's not good enough to say Oh, the rules aren't binding, and then neglect to clearly cite the horrific consequences if somebody breaks one (and excommunication IS horrific for believing, practicing Catholics, as it's meant to be). They. Can't. Have. It. Both. Ways.

I know you're going to write a big long thing contradicting me and telling me how wrong I am, but moral logic is moral logic. Making something "allowable" but then punishing someone for it is no different from outlawing it EXCEPT THAT IT'S HYPOCRITICAL. It's pretending one thing while actually doing another. And you just seem blind to this.

Excommunication is not only depriving people of their worship, it's also a huge social stigma in large areas of the world. It will damn them in the eyes of their neighbors and get them shunned in many cases, harm their businesses, cause their children suffering from their peers at school - AS THEY DAMN WELL KNOW. It is pure mendacity to pretend otherwise.

And don't you dare tell me I'm over-dramatising or exaggerating. Just because it might not happen there (where you are: but the US is a big place) doesn't mean it happens nowhere. As Ed T has already pointed out, you seem to think that no one's experience or perspective is valid but your own.

ED T and MGM have both made the other comments I would have followed with and I can't improve on them. But I can repeat them (the boldface emphasis is mine):


MGM

Sorry, Joe, but you seem to me to be doing a good job on our side of this question, in demonstrating a thoroughly alarming degree of confusion and inconsistency in the beliefs and practices of your authorities in relation to one another, to their 'flock', and to the communities they serve at large.

How can it be a "community of believers" whose "membership" is voluntary", who are not subject to external authority, if they can be involuntarily removed from the membership of the community if their conduct in some particular does not conform to the thinking of this [putatively non-existent] authority?


ED T

A person does not need to know the details of the internal teachings of the RC church to make a personal assessment of the result - or, to recognize if something seems "out of wack or wrong"… [or] know all the fine details of the internal workings of a car to recognize that something is going wrong and the car does not do what it is supposed to do.
[BS: read "does not do what it says it does".]

It is certainly an accomplishment that some folks have invested the time to understand all the fine internal workings of the RC church… [but] it is not needed to know when it needs fixing and what needs fixing.