WTF-- IVF is the same as murder?

[wnylib]

63. As I said in another post, my former

mother-in-law tended to think she was more Catholic than the Pope. Since I am not Catholic, and was quite young at the time (20), I had no objective source for judging the things she said about her religion. Since she was a lifelong Catholic with a niece who was a nun, I figured she knew what she was talking about on most issues about her church.

But, to give you an idea of what she was like, she constantly scolded me for not converting because she said I was destroying her son's soul with my "paganism" (membership in a Protestant denomination). She also said that she donated to someone at her church for the IRA. Don't know if that was true or just talk. Her family had been in the US for 5 or 6 generations, so it's not like she had any close ties to anyone in Ireland.

She had completed high school and worked in an office for a couple years before marriage so I was astonished by her superstition on one issue. I overheard the MIL and other members of their family very quietly mention my ex's "fainting spells." I had not seen this until one day when we were in a hospital ICU waiting room where my sister was critically ill. He fell to the floor and had a grand mal seizure. Nurses attended him as he went into a series of them and an orderly rushed him to the ER. When he recovered, the ER doctor wanted him to go back later for tests and to try some meds to control it. He refused to go back.

I hoped his mother would convince him to see the doctor but she told me that doctors couldn't help him because the first "fainting spell" happened in church, after his confirmation. It happened a couple more times in church, so she believed the cause was a spiritual conflict over his soul, not a medical issue. She believed he would overcome it through faithful religious observance and prayers for his soul. I was dumbfounded. I'd expect that attitude from an evangelical fundamentalist sect or a 3rd world illiterate person, but not from a modern day Catholic in the US who had at least a high school education. A priest or doctor (preferably a Catholic one for her) could have told her it was epilepsy. But I wonder if she would have believed it even then.