Referral Fables of Caritas Christi

Long time prolife activist Anne Fox has taken over the helm of Mass Citizens for Life and appears to be injecting some badly needed energy into their activism.

The Cardinal's statement that he has adequately protected the rights of Catholic workers to be free from material cooperation in abortion and an accessory to sin has left them wanting.

Caritas Christi has said it will provide a full range of family planning services. The public has learned that this terminology is code for abortion and abortion-related services. Mass. Citizens sought the meeting to give Caritas Christi the chance to refute these assumptions and to assure the general public that it would not be providing such services.

Since we have not heard from Dr. de la Torre, Mass. Citizens must regretfully assume that, in fact, Caritas Christi would abandon its twenty-three year commitment to protecting the lives of unborn babies and their mothers.

Our members will be contacting the offices of Caritas individually to express their outrage that Caritas would take this anti-life position."

In other news, I spoke today to the Caritas Christi's spokeswoman Theresa Prego to get clarification of the logistics of avoiding conversations about abortion and instructions on who to call after they leave Caritas. After flushing out details of who is going to be in the examination room with the doctor and pregnant woman when she says she wants an abortion she admitted that Centene, being in St. Louis and all, couldn't possibly take place in that conversation and that the woman was going to have to get instructions from a Caritas employee.

I told her there was no other way around that conversation and hand off of proabortion information constitutes being an accessory to the abortion.

Oddly contradicting their representations that they will provide a full range of family planning services including contraception and abortion, Prego then said Caritas employees were not going to be "expected" to talk to the patient about the abortion.

I presume that would manifest itself with the Caritas employee telling the pregnant woman that material cooperation in abortion is not permissible and escorting the woman out of the office?

Everyone just trying to sort out how Caritas can avoid conversations about abortion when the woman brings it up without violating their contract with the insurance program Commonwealth Care.

We have rights that the Cardinal doesn't have the authority to extinguish.

There's a comment here somebody sent me that is worth fisking.

Remote material cooperation is allowabe, for a proportionately good reason. It seems to me that Caritas is almost bankrupt and about to go out of business,

If the Cardinal wants to materially cooperate in the abortions, drive him to Caritas every day and let him be an abortion advocate point person for handing out the instructions and phone numbers. Forcing the hand of thousands of other Catholics to be an accessory to abortion is not within his rights.