Church excommunicates a girl for aborting her twins but lets her rapist go free

[Aiza]

It doesn't? I thought it does. Wikipedia seems to confirm it: "Excommunication at the moment of death results in a person going to hell, the same result as dying in plain mortal sin, because of the necessity of the unity of the ecclesiastical body." Their source for that statement is a council that took place in Florence in 1442. Is that incorrect?

You can still go to Heaven if you have what is known as perfect contrition. And this is a repentance based purely on love of God and hate of all sins--you do not need any priest or bishop, though perfect contrition requires the desire to confess anyway. If they aren't at all contrite, neither perfect nor imperfect, than their salvation would be in jeopardy anyway. Excommunication changes nothing in terms of Heaven or Hell.

To be honest, that strikes me as hair-splitting. You still get a dead fetus at the end of it. And the example you brought up, a hysterectomy, is one that even a layman (in medical terms) knows will result in the death of the fetus. It's one thing to say that undergoing a medical procedure that has a chance of leaving the fetus alive, even if the fetus doesn't come through, is not a sin -- that's sane and reasonable. But saying that a hysterectomy -- which kills the fetus -- is permissible, while a therapeutic abortion -- which kills the fetus -- is not, is ... well, mind-boggling, at least to me.

It is based off the Principle of double effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_double_effect) , and the difference between causing a bad side effect or doing evil for some good end. Therapeutic abortion fails the first criteria straight away--killing a fetus is not considered a morally good (or neutral) act by Catholics. Removing a diseased uterus (as in indirect abortion) is.

Another example on that wiki page used are deaths due to vaccine side effects. Giving out a vaccine is a good act, and saving lives is a good effect, but as a side effect, some people might die. If you do what you can to make sure the absolute minimum people die and the amount of people who died are less than those saved, its not a mortal sin. However, if we switch it around, and lets say--kidnapping and infecting people with disease so you can study the effects of disease test cures, and save lives. Even if saving lives is a good thing, even if you save more lives than you kill, kidnapping and infecting people with disease is already inherently evil.

I don't think "excommunication" and "sympathy" are mutually exclusive either.

And there is where we are just going to have to agree to disagree, because while some people see an embryo, a blastocyst, a fetus or anything in between as a full human being ... others don't.

Catholics do though and excommunication is a penalty which only matters if you believe in the Church anyway.