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Question
Dear Father Angelo,
I am G. a 22-year-old boy who has already written to you some time ago for other matters. Here is the question: I am a medical student, and I am doing an internship in a pathological anatomy department.
Unexpectedly today, a professor made us attend the autopsy of an aborted baby in the second trimester of gestation due to Down syndrome. In my opinion, this act of taking away someone’s life is abominable, and it crossed my mind that by witnessing the autopsy of this body, been treated in a manner not worthy of a human being, and destined to be disposed of in an atrocious way, and by not opposing to it, I cooperated with this evil deed.
I am afraid that I have offended Christ by sinning mortally.
I thank you for your availability and for this service of yours that is so important in my life.
Please pray for me and I will also pray for you.
Greetings in Christ
Answer from the priest
Dearest,
1. from a subjective point of view you have not committed any mortal sin, because you have been presented with a fait accompli.
The perplexities have arisen along the way.
2. First, it should be noted that it is unworthy to suppress, i.e., to kill, a human being because he or she is affected by Down syndrome.
There is no difference, as far as the dignity of the person is concerned, between being inside or outside the womb of one’s mother, between being healthy or affected by some anomaly.
3. Killing a child and then making him or her the subject of an autopsy gives the impression that we are processing waste material and not an innocent human being who has been brutally killed.
4. Although the autopsy on corpses and on spontaneously aborted fetuses is lawful, there is something new here: the hospital has lent itself to the killing of that child and now it would like to gain something good from that crime, because certainly any new knowledge is a good thing.
However, common sense – without bothering a possible code of ethics – warns that because of the crime committed an autopsy should be renounced, at least as a form of respect for the murdered and reparation for the serious crime committed.
Every voluntary abortion is horrifying. And even more so when it comes to a child guilty (?) of being affected by Down syndrome.
Everyone should feel humiliated for what has been committed.
The body of that child – judged waste material – should have been treated with pity, at least in death, since he/she had not been when alive.
5. The Magisterium of the Church recalls that “the corpses of human embryos and fetuses, whether they have been deliberately aborted or not, must be respected just as the remains of other human beings.”(Donum Vitae, I, 4).
It is sad to have to point out such an extensive lack of humanity.
To tell the truth, one should not be surprised by this lack of humanity because a greater lack of humanity had been committed upstream with the killing of the child.
6. On the other hand, fait accompli, you should have told your professor that the autopsy upset you and that you judged it as a further pitiless act on the flesh, although already dead, of an innocent child killed.
And even in the case that human law does not oppose it, yours and probably other students’ sense of humanity should have been respected.
So, it would have been right at least to warn in advance of what was about to be done and not to present anyone with the fait accompli, or worse, to force them to attend that autopsy.
7. I am replying to you when it is almost the day before Christmas Eve (2019), which is par excellence the feast of life.
I don’t think it was just by chance that your email only reached me today.
Next to the gladness for the birth of the Lord there are still many who continue to perpetuate Herod’s crime.
Our joy cannot be full when we know that in the world the hand of Herod – perhaps near here – continues to act cruelly as if nothing had happened.
I wish you a Holy Christmas.
I gladly remember you to the Lord and thank you so much for the prayers you have assured me of. I do care about it.
I bless you and wish you all the best for your future.
Father Angelo