Thoughts in a Haystack

Jerry Coyne has a post at his blog website that recounts the position of the Catholic Church in Ireland that objects to women undergoing chemotherapy simply being told that they should consider contraception because the chemotherapy might damage a fetus, particularly during the first trimester.

Regular readers of this blog (you few, you happy few) know that I grew up in American Catholicism in the northeast and that I harbor few bad memories of that experience, though I put it behind me as a teenager. The Church of my youth was a place where priests rarely, if ever, asked why young healthy couples only managed to produce 2.5 children or otherwise questioned the commitment of the "faithful" to all the Vatican's dictats.

Jerry is 100% right about this:

All the doctors want is a public warning that there are dangers involved in mixing chemotherapy with pregnancy, and that there are several ways to avoid pregnancy. In the meantime, people may be dying because the Church doesn't want people covering their genitals with rubber sheaths. Such is legacy of medieval theology.

It's enough to make anyone spit!