Clarifying ‘double effect’

Feb. 23, 2011 - The recent controversy over the termination of a pregnancy at Phoenix’s St. Joseph’s Hospital, which Phoenix bishop Thomas Olmstead determined to have been a direct abortion and thus a grave moral evil, has generated a secondary controversy over the meaning of the Church’s traditional moral principle of “double effect.” Some have argued—mistakenly, in my view—that what was done in Phoenix satisfied the classic double effect criteria of Catholic moral theology. ... [read more]