By George Weigel

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...