Okay, I don't usually like to talk about my non-wedding world, but I would like the opinion of you lovely Catholic ladies.
In "real life," I work as a geriatrician. I see most of my patients in nursing homes. As a geriatrician, I don't deal with abortion issues as the vast majority of my patients are beyond their reproductive years. However, I have a new patient who just survived a traumatic car accident. She is only in her thirties. She was incidentally found to be pregnant when she was in the emergency room.
On meeting her, she started crying and told me that she doesn't want to be pregnant. She wants an abortion.
Now, obviously, I don't perform abortions (in addition to trying to be a good Catholic, I also lack the training to perform them). I have reached out to the woman's primary care doctor to tell him about the situation. As a physician, I am allowed to decline to perform procedures or prescribe medications that go against my personal beliefs, but I am supposed to refer patients who want them to people who can help out.
As a Catholic, I feel a little funny even referring this woman to an abortion provider. I know that a referral does not necessarily equate an abortion (she could change her mind or the doctor could decide that she's not appropriate for the procedure), but...
Delaying the referral could make it so that she needs a more complicated procedure and would probably be medically ethically wrong. But I also wonder if she is feeling overwhelmed by her recent surgery and accident and whatever else, and she's not thinking clearly through the pain and anguish. And in my heart, I feel that if both she and the baby survived that horrendous accident, maybe that's a sign that this pregnancy was meant to be?
Any thoughts?
Edited to remove personal information.