In May of 2024, a Pennsylvania nurse who had been charged with 22 counts of mistreatment of her patients was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Former registered nurse Heather Pressdee was sentenced after having pled guilty to three counts of first-degree murder and 19 counts of criminal attempt to commit murder. Of the 22 patients whom Pressdee was charged with mistreating in November 2023, it is claimed that 17 died after being under her care.

This article will demonstrate that similar principles and applied premises are involved in the deliberation and will of a so-called health care professional charged with killing one’s own patients and one who subscribes to abortion ideology. With both actions sharing similar guiding principles and premises, abortion ideology is left to defend rationally how the killing of an unaware innocent child by way of an abortion may be licit but not the killing of an unaware health care patient.

Similarities in Moral Principles and Ethics-oriented Applied Premises

In terms of terminology going forward, practitioner status, in truth, must be qualified; hence, terms such as “ill-functioning practitioner” or quotes around “nurse” or “practitioner” will be used as qualifiers when applicable. The rationale here is that a practitioner who acts willfully in a way opposite to that of the proper health care practitioner, and wills a proximate end opposite to the proper proximate end of the practitioner and the end of the patient, ceases being a practitioner, in truth. Additionally, in order not to confuse the Pressdee case specifically with the philosophical arguments universally applicable to all “practitioners” who might be guilty of killing a patient, this article, inspired by the Pressdee case, will proceed with discussion of the commonalities of any such guilty “nurse,” thereby removing the necessity of detailing every minute piece of evidence or argument in the Pressdee legal case. With these clarifications stated, one may begin a deeper analysis.

If, as charged, Pressdee did mistreat almost two-dozen patients, several conclusions may be drawn regarding applied first principles and premises, a few of which will be discussed here.

First, a guilty killer “nurse” would need to reason that his will may override the will of the patient whom he intends to kill. This rationale would give this ill-functioning practitioner, in his mind, permission to supplant the exercise of the patient’s will with the exercise of his own will. A guilty killer “nurse” would be reasoning from the false premise that his will and desire were of greater importance than the will and desire held by each patient. This rationale would be false in terms of its supposition that any person has this capacity, and then, secondly, that he individually has this capacity. Further, when the “practitioner” moves to actualize this alleged capacity, its falsity would be inherent upon the exercising of this alleged power. An individual “nurse” who believes, in such a grandiose fashion, that his will supersedes those of all persons around him, evidences influence from the lower passions, which Thomas and Aristotle argue must be tamed and made obedient to reason. (This argument differs from one surrounding mere consent, in the common understanding of the term, as in an analysis of whether a person approves/supports/requests an action, although this also was not present during Pressdee’s alleged crimes. Rather than a basic consent analysis, the argument here entails analysis of the very claim that one’s will is permitted, in principle, to supersede the will of another.)

Second, a guilty ill-functioning practitioner’s actions necessitate a belief by the actor that his desires exceed in importance any principle-derived right to life held naturally by a patient. For an ill-functioning practitioner’s reasoning would proceed along one of the following lines: First, he could have rejected outright any objective guiding principles on the dignity of life. Second, if the ill-functioning practitioner still believed in the existence of objective guiding principles on life, he would believe that his will, as somehow superior, made those principles of no consequence in general. Third, the illfunctioning practitioner could have determined that any existing principles were not applicable in these instances.

A killer “nurse,” in sum, would assert that his desires outweigh any basic, inherent rights of others, even though his patients, simply by willing to live—a precept of natural inclination for living beings, as the being is fully geared to, equipped for, and constantly and forever moving toward, continued life—would be infringing on none of his own natural rights.

One sees the following, then, in a guilty killer “nurse” scenario: a) supplanting of will; b) individualist thought that excludes consideration of duty; and c) a rejection of principles that are in discord with one’s own desires.

Principles and Premises Behind Abortion Ideology

Although American society, generally speaking, still reprobates heinous deeds like those with which Pressdee was charged, some of the same people who would condemn these apparent actions are willing to accept and to apply similar principles and premises to support the action of abortion, the intended murder of an innocent child in the womb.

Among abortion ideology’s most common claims is that a birth mother is entitled to end an unborn child’s life because the child is residing within her body. On this individualistic line of thought, the ideology often claims that a mother has absolute right to intervene, as she desires, with regard to anything that may be occurring in or to her body. This claim is not entirely false, for all men do hold free will title to their persons, but it is improperly applied in the case of a child residing in the womb.

This claim—one that also rejects human, parental, and motherly duties to others—is faulty when it comes to the issue of a child temporarily residing in, and temporarily receiving nutrition within, the mother’s body. Upon the conception of a human person, a mother’s health care practitioner now has two patients under his care, and any rejection of this objectively obvious and evidential truth is a dereliction of medical duty. It is upon a human person’s conception that a woman becomes a mother and that a man becomes a father. One does not “become” a mother or father at the birth of a baby. This distinction is significant, especially in the quest to turn minds to the truth. For it is the case, and confirmed biologically, that a conceiving woman and man are parents—mother and father—upon conception; thus, if they procure an abortion, a pregnant couple is killing their son or daughter.

Another frequent rhetorical strategy of abortion ideology is the attempt to deny the personhood of a child in the womb. This attempt, however, is weak, for the philosophical accident of a human person’s age has no bearing on the substance’s definition as a human person. The most recent natural science substantiates the metaphysical arguments insofar as it proves that upon conception an entirely different human person, with his own DNA, begins to exist materially as a substance consisting of form and matter. Barring external powers or circumstances stopping his natural progression, this particular substance, built naturally in every way to continue living, will continue to exist. In the intended termination of a human person’s life in the womb, the congruence of starting premises and principles mirrors those of an alleged killer “nurse.”

First, in the case of both a child’s abortion and the deliberation of a killer “nurse,” there is a presuppositional rejection, ignorance, or inconsideration of a principle of a right to life for other innocent persons. In abortion ideology, the desire of another person—and not the person whose life will be ended intentionally—supersedes any right to life of the subject baby. The subject child is the one whose life is at stake. By virtue of the subject child sharing in the universal nature of a living human being, however, it is objectively evident that the child desires to live, and not to be killed and suffer death. Every human person, at all ages, shares in the universal nature of human personhood; thus human personhood-ness is, by definition, inherent in all particular human persons.

In the case of willed abortion, the subject person’s naturally oriented will and desire to continue living are supplanted by another’s will and desire, with any consideration of the subject person’s basic right to life and inherent dignity deemed to be inapplicable. An ill-functioning practitioner who kills his patients is starting from the same premise: That one’s own passionate and/or rationally disordered desire to kill one’s unknowing patients outweighs any right to live on the part of the subject patient—the one whose life is at stake. In sum, abortion ideology claims that another person’s will overrides any consideration of a) another person’s natural rights, b) first principles regarding the human person and his inherent dignity, and c) basic natural evidence that living things seek self-preservation as part of an internal direction.

If the presupposition is that any one person’s desires are permitted to supersede, override, or nullify any universal or particularly applied basic natural rights of another, then the principle may be rationally applied by a “nurse” killing his patients; an authoritarian killing persons he alleges to be “undesirable”; a eugenicist sterilizing persons he alleges to be “inferior”; and a eugenicist euthanizing disabled or elderly persons. The list surely goes on, for the faulty suppositional principle places subjective, individualistic, and relativistic conclusions of despair as the barometer of what gives another the “privilege” of continued unencumbered life.

A Comparative Analysis: Similar Moral Principles Guiding Decision-making

Contra the dictates of any one person’s passionate disorientation or conclusory alleged reason, there exists no “choice”—a common mantra used in abortion ideology—to kill innocent persons. An action is not choice-worthy simply because it is chosen; rather, actions that happen to be chosen are good or bad. Killing a child in the womb is an action, but it is not a good action. The child has not consented to this killing (and he never could consent, for part of his function as a human being is to continue living). Likewise, simply because a guilty killer “nurse” chooses the action of killing his patients does not make that action good. One may possess free will to choose, ultimately, what is good or what is bad; however one does not have the capacity to will (or alter) what is the good. A dichotomy alleging that one may “choose” to see a baby to full term or one may “choose” to kill the baby in the womb is both deceptive and faulty. The latter decision, the termination of another person’s life, is not good as a choice, and the very construction of dichotomous terms implies moral equivalence between the two “choices.”

Choice regards one’s decision to perform this or that action, such as a man choosing to eat either an apple or an orange. Following Thomas Aquinas, this man’s “choice” on the possible actions to take (whether to eat an apple or to eat an orange) is a decision between potential actions following deliberation. However, there are instances in which a choice does not exist, in truth, to be chosen, for by its nature the action is illicit, inherently unchoice-worthy, and disruptive to the achievement of proper ends. (If the end of a light bulb is to illuminate, it performs its function as a thing that lights itself in order to illuminate. Acting so that it lights to the best of its ability and actualizing its potentiality to its fullest as a particular light bulb would be its function. If the light bulb were rational and possessed free will, and it chose an action that would make itself explode rather than light, the light bulb would not be acting in a way to achieve its proper end.)

There is no “choice,” in truth, for a man who seeks to act in accord with his function as man, in his deciding between eating an apple or eating a deadly poisonous mushroom. The latter act, the eating of a deadly poisonous mushroom, is geared toward an objectively bad end. If the man is seeking a nutritious breakfast for reasons of health, then, in accord with his function as a human being who cannot eat deadly poisonous mushrooms and achieve health and continued life, the man does not have a choice, in truth, between eating an apple and a deadly poisonous mushroom for his breakfast.

Thus, a claim that “Men have a ‘choice’ either to eat apples or to eat poisonous mushrooms for breakfast” is deceptive and faulty as a statement, insofar as it claims moral equivalence between the actions. One may possess a will that is free; but if the man selects the bad (poisonous mushroom) over the good (apple), he has “chosen” something that cannot be chosen in proper accord with his function. The poisonous mushroom will not only bring him the opposite of the health he seeks (his proximate end for eating breakfast), but it will kill him. It is morally abhorrent and objectively wrong for one to claim to a man, then, that “Sir, this morning for breakfast, which you desire to eat because you seek to eat a nourishing meal for the end of health, you have a choice between eating an apple or a poisonous mushroom,” as though the two are equivalent to his achieving his proper end.

An analysis of “choice,” understood properly, then, is an objective examination of the goodness or badness of particular actions. There is a difference between “choice” of/between action/s (as in the selection of an apple or a poisonous mushroom) and “choice” in action insofar as the choice is good (selection of an apple or a poisonous mushroom insofar as it is in accord with the function and end of the one choosing).

The Basic Fundamentals of the Human Person

Every particular man’s life transcends human opinions on the dignity of that life related to any material philosophical accidents—age, disability, health, and the like—on the understanding of Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy. Likewise, privations, which Thomas describes as when a thing is lacking something natural to its form, do not affect the wholeness of the substance.

When one reduces man to his accidents, privations, or material parts (as in, man is but an animal and only a material body), one reduces a man to something less than the fullness of a human person. A reductionism to privation makes one apt to consider actions that remove human persons’ lives, if (allegedly) they are deficient. For, on this view, one with privation is either inherently less than a human person or is existing in a state less than a man should exist in as a man.

However, the child in the womb and the patient under medical care are human beings regardless of their privations or stage of development at any one particular time. Neither unborn children nor medical patients are a collection of material parts, the stage of development of, non-presence of, or malfunctioning of thereby somehow impacting the dignity of the whole substance. Every allegation of lesser personhood is opinion: These claims are subjective, relativistic, passionate claims. Only the objective truth, however, may guide moral actions, most especially those that involve one person deciding that it is permissible to kill another innocent person.

Obviously, the actions of a killer “nurse” and the actions of someone seeking or providing an abortion have the same ends—killing (a term which necessarily means death); this similarity is apparent and is in no need of a discussion. What has been argued in this article is much deeper. Indeed, the conclusions behind the determination of permissible actions by a killer “nurse” and abortion ideology have similar roots of starting principles. Some of the main similarities may be broadly analyzed as a) supplanting of will, b) individualist thought that excludes consideration of duty, and c) a rejection of principles that are in discord with one’s own desires.

If one finds disgust in the acts of an ill-functioning practitioner who is charged with killing her patients, but simultaneously believes in the moral licitness of someone committing an abortion, one must analyze and refine one’s first principles and premises. A truthful analysis will disclose uncomfortable similarities between the two actors’ rationale.

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Original Bio:

Gerard T. Mundy is a writer and teaches philosophy, including the biomedical ethics curriculum, at a New York City university.