CV NEWS FEED // Catholic ethicist Charles Camosy is offering a pro-life response to a recent study that suggests that infant mortality rates rose 12.9% after Texas enacted its law protecting life after a heartbeat is detected.
The journal JAMA Pediatrics published the study on June 24, the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. The study has been widely distributed by major news outlets as “scientific proof” that pro-life laws have a direct negative impact on child mortality.
Camosy, who is a professor of medical humanities at Creighton University School of Medicine and a moral theology fellow at St. John’s Seminary, addressed the study’s findings in an email interview with CatholicVote.
“There are at least two important responses to this,” Camosy wrote. “First, even with this increase, infant mortality in Texas was still within the average range in recent years.”
“Second, most of the increase came from congenital problems often related to disabilities,” he wrote. “Suggesting that more disabled children should be killed prenatally in order to save some of them from death a bit later in life is deeply offensive on multiple levels.”
“It is really remarkable that this argument is made so openly,” Camosy continued, referencing the discriminatory nature of the argument that children with disabilities should be aborted.
He then recalled a study that found that several years after the Netherlands legalized killing disabled infants, “more people used abortion to kill disabled children instead,” Camosy wrote: “The object of both acts was the same though: making a disabled child dead.”
Camosy also addressed what the pro-life response to caring for unborn children with disabilities or life-limiting diagnoses should be.
He shared that he personally knows “of many pro-life families who foster and even adopt disabled children,” and highlighted that more pro-life families should do this.
“We should also support social programs for women and families geared toward making care for disabled children easier,” Camosy continued. “And we should continue to work to make perinatal hospice far more available to women and families after being given a life limiting diagnosis.”
“Finally, we should partner with disability rights communities and build trust around these sets of issues,” he wrote. He remarked that while this is a strength for the pro-life movement regarding end-of-life care, the same strength regarding beginning-of-life care is lacking.
Camosy also pointed out that the study challenges the assumption that JAMA’s researchers and scientists were coming from an impartial place, but added, “It is very close to impossible to get a fair hearing on abortion-related matters in the context of secularized medicine, especially after Dobbs.”
“[I]t is obviously no accident that the study was released on the two year anniversary of Dobbs,” he wrote. “This suggests an activist mindset and, when we consider the pro-abortion (not just pro-choice) mindset of those who hold power in secularized medicine we should be on the alert.”
