Concerns are being raised about a Wisconsin Catholic college covering abortions in its health insurance plan.
According to The College Fix, which investigated the matter, Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, provides a student health insurance plan that covers at least some abortions and potentially violates Catholic Church teachings.
The Catholic Church teaches that every human life is valuable because they are created in the image of God, and abortion is a grave moral evil that destroys an innocent child’s life.
The Edgewood student health plan initially appears to follow this teaching. According to the report, the plan excludes “abortion procedures”; however, there are exceptions.
The Wisconsin Physicians Service Insurance Corporation, the college’s provider, said those exceptions allow for abortions when “the termination of a mother’s pregnancy is: considered a life-threatening complication of the mother’s existing physical illness; or due to a lethal fetal anomaly; and the abortion procedure is permitted by and performed in accordance with law.”
Based on the language, it is difficult to tell if the exceptions allow unique, living unborn babies to be killed in abortions in violation of the Catholic faith. In the medical field, the terms abortion and termination of pregnancy can have different meanings. For example, a miscarriage may be referred to as an abortion on medical records. The insurance company did not respond to requests for further clarification.
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“If by lethal fetal anomaly what is meant is removing the remains of a fetus that has died in the womb, then, yes, that can and should be done,” Princeton University Professor Robert George, a Catholic, told The Fix. “No moral problem.”
However, if it means killing an unborn baby because they have been diagnosed with a fatal condition, George said that is not morally acceptable.
Here’s more from the report:
Regarding the vaguely worded “life-threatening complication” provision, George offered some examples that might meet the threshold of an acceptable abortion, as it were.
“[I]magine a woman is pregnant with a child and is completely happy about it. But she is diagnosed with an aggressive uterine cancer prior to the point at which the child can survive outside the womb. If the uterus is not removed (which is precisely what would be done if the woman were not pregnant) both she and her child will die. May the womb be removed? I say, and the Catholic Church says, ‘Yes’,” he wrote.
Catholic universities sometimes stray from church teachings on abortion. Some have been caught promoting the abortion chain Planned Parenthood to students, while others have welcomed pro-abortion speakers on campus. In January, dozens of Catholic university professors expressed outrage after the King’s University College Campus Ministry in Ontario, Canada hosted a screening of the pro-life film “Unplanned.” And in 2016, another Catholic school, Loyola University, came under fire for allowing an abortion demonstration on campus.
The Catholic Church teaches that all human lives have value, from the moment of conception to natural death. It is a strong advocate for the protection of human lives from abortion, assisted suicide and euthanasia across the world.
