Is a Fetus a Person?

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This CNN article covers a story about a Catholic hospital in Colorado that is involved in a lawsuit that deals with both ethics and morals. In 2006, a 28 week pregnant woman bearing a set of twins went into cardiac arrest in the Emergency Room of St. Thomas More Hospital. Both the mother and twins died in this tragedy. After the event, the woman's husband, Jeremy Stodgill proceeded to sue the hospital for wrongful death of his wife and unborn twins. The hospital's lawyers defended the case by referencing Colorado's Wrongful Death Act, which does not consider fetuses to be persons. This lawsuit soon gained a lot of attention and criticism for hypocrisy from the public and media, which caused the owners of the hospital, Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI) to respond. According to CHI representatives and the state's bishops, they were not aware that their attorneys were referencing the Wrongful Death Act, which clearly contradicts the Catholic belief that human life starts during conception. Furthermore, they promised that the hospital's attorneys would not reference the act in the future.

The moral issue of this story and a large factor of this lawsuit is whether fetuses should be considered persons or not. Clearly, there are opposing views from the State of Colorado and the Catholic church. If the hospital was not affiliated with any religion, it would not have received the mass criticism that this particular hospital did. The main reason why the media responded to this story is because the organization's beliefs were not aligned with their actions. Morals are deeply rooted by factors such as culture or religion and defines people's characters.  There is no right or wrong answer to whether the unborn twins should have been considered persons or not because people have different morals and viewpoints on this topic. However, the contradiction of CHI's religious beliefs and their attorney's actions in court stirs up an ethical issue.

The ethical question in this story is whether CHI was indeed unaware of the fact that their attorneys were citing the Wrongful Death Act. Some may argue that a business is a business and upper management of CHI could have agreed for their attorneys to refer to the Wrongful Death Act, even if it was against their religious beliefs. After all, even hospitals are companies and would lose a large sum of money on a lawsuit as major as this one. The truth may never be revealed, but I personally find it hard to believe that the organization was completely in the dark about the actions that their attorneys were taking.