An Irish Catholic theologian has said that the separation by surgery of the Siamese twins, Mary and Jodie, would not be in violation of Catholic moral principle.
Writing in the current issue of the Irish Catholic Father Seamus Murphy SJ, a lecturer in moral theology at the Milltown Institute in Dublin, said that "separating the twins would not violate that principle, since Mary's death would be a foreseen but indirect result of the operation."
On Thursday the Archbishop of Westminster, Dr Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, said it should be considered morally impermissible to attempt to save one twin's life at the expense of the other.
He said the parents' refusal to consent to surgery to separate the twins was because "respect for the rights of both their children makes any other choice on their part morally impossible".
He said that the duty to preserve life did not exist "when the only available means of preserving life involves a great injustice".
"If what is envisaged is the killing of, or a deliberate lethal assault on, one of the twins, Mary, in order to save the other, Jodie, there is grave injustice involved."
Father Murphy said that "the relevant basic principle of Catholic moral teaching is that the innocent must not be deliberately attacked (as occurs in direct abortion). Separating the twins would not violate that principle, since Mary's death would be a foreseen but indirect result of the operation. To put it differently, separation is not the type of operation designed to kill anybody, so it is not the type of action that is intrinsically wrong."
He said that "with nothing inherently wrong involved, such an operation could be morally acceptable".
Addressing the point of whether it was better to separate or not in terms of Catholic moral teaching, he said that when all relevant factors were taken into account "one could reasonably go either way in one's estimate of which was the better choice".
"Neither child's rights would be directly violated, regardless of which decision is made," he said.
Father Murphy said that "through the medium of the Christian concept of leaving it in God's hands, the parents are saying that to ask them to choose the death of one of their children in order to give the other a normal life is to ask them to attack their own flesh and blood, and to demand of them, in the interest of cost-benefit analysis, an alienating and inhuman detachment from their children".
But "other parents might reasonably, though undoubtedly with anguish, decide otherwise". However, "in the absence of clear moral imperatives indicating one choice or the other, greater weight should be given the parents' views and moral sense of what is right and appropriate for their children," he said.
