In 2009 Sister Margaret McBride, a Roman Catholic hospital administrator in Phoenix, was caught in the crosshairs of this reality. She saved the life of a twenty-seven-year-old woman who arrived at the hospital three months pregnant and suffering from dangerous pulmonary hypertension. McBride, on the hospital’s ethics committee, approved a procedure that would save the woman’s life but ended the pregnancy, arguing that abortion was not its primary objective. The young mother of four lived, but McBride was excommunicated. “The mother’s life cannot be preferred over the child’s,” read the
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