Her baby, Francesco, was born perfectly well. Chiara died. Chiara’s funeral took place last week in Rome, reports the Catholic Herald.
But Francesco was not her first baby.
Her first, Maria, was found in the womb to be terribly disabled. Chiara and her husband Enrico refused repeated advice to abort Maria.
The baby lived for 30 minutes, and was baptised, loved and mourned. Chiara and Enrico’s next baby, David, was found in the womb to have no legs.
Further complications followed and once more he died soon after birth, cherished, loved and celebrated to the end. Then Chiara became pregnant with Francesco. Chiara was found in the fifth month to have cancer, but she would not accept any treatment that would harm her baby. Sometimes love is like that.
But in terms of Catholic moral theory Chiara was not obliged to refuse life-saving treatment.
If treatment is given with the intention of saving the life of a mother, where the completely unintended result may nevertheless be to kill her unborn baby, it is morally acceptable.
This is utterly different from killing the baby in order to save the mother. In the latter case one actually intends to kill the baby in order that the mother should live.
Catholic moral theory, based on Natural Law, holds that it is never, absolutely never, morally acceptable to kill an innocent person in order to help another. This is no matter who that other may be. That is non-negotiable.
So if Chiara had undergone life-saving treatment and Francesco had unintentionally died in the womb, Chiara would not have been morally culpable.
Of course, she would never have actually intended to kill her baby, even to save her own life. She would not have preferred that her baby die rather than she did herself, and accepted it as right under the circumstances, “the lesser of two evils”.
But Chiara could have received treatment without at all intending to harm her baby. She could have done this without blame even if she knew that there was a good chance her baby would – barring a miracle – be killed as a result of the intervention.
So much for Catholic moral theory. And it seems to me in all of this it is correct and perfectly defensible.
Yet it has to be admitted that other non-Catholic philosophers have found something distinctly iffy about this reasoning.
And if it is felt to be iffy then perhaps the iffy-ness lies not in its logic but in its psychology.