“…Instead, AE may be understood differently (and, in fact, very often it is), even within the Catholic tradition or other moral doctrines that ascribe full personal status to fetuses. Many theologians or religious leaders have defended the moral permissibility of AE on the ground of either (i) the principle of double effect, as an indirect (and permissible within these doctrines) abortion where the intended aim is to remove not the fetus, but some biological material (e.g., a cancerous but gravid uterus or a placenta) that is treated as a real threat to the pregnant woman's life and also the cause of the fatal threat to the fetus (Lysaught 2011;Magill 2011); or (ii) the principle of choosing the lesser evil, which states that in a situation of choice between two or more evils (in this case, the death of one person or the death of two), one is obliged to perform the least wrong action (Prusak 2011). The Catholic tradition, surprisingly, has not reached a satisfactory consensus on this issue, and CO refusals in lifethreatening emergency circumstances are contested even within this normative doctrine (for a review of possible Catholic views on this issue, see Coleman 2013).…”