In this week's medical news, it turns out that a chain of hospitals run by the Roman Catholic Church has decided that unborn babies are people, after all, and an Allentown group of urologists has been featured on national television in an alarming way.
I'll get to the thing about babies shortly, but first I must address the TV fuss, because one of the physicians in the Allentown group is my own urologist, a splendid fellow, and he'd never think of examining me in a needlessly uncomfortable way. That is, I hope he wouldn't.
That's not the impression some may have had as they watched Jay Leno on the Tonight Show. In his Monday night "Headlines" feature, Leno displayed a newspaper advertisement promoting "Prostate Cancer Awareness Night and Foam Finger Giveaway" at an IronPigs baseball game last August.
Guys who are aware of how preliminary prostate examinations are made probably would feel the exams are not compatible with those huge foam finger gizmos often displayed at sporting events to brag about being number one.
"This seems like a bad idea," Leno said of the combination suggested by the ad, published by The Morning Call on Aug. 29 to promote a game that evening against the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees.
Leno's feature generally displays malaprops or other amusing items from newspapers and other publications.
Samples: "Lead-lined coffins called health risk," or "Michele Bachman says Jesus may have had Middle East ties," or a notice for "Cat found" accompanied by a photograph of a snarling raccoon.
As reported this week on themorningcall.com, the wording of the IronPigs ad "was an intentional attention-getter." It was not a goof. The IronPigs and Urology Specialists of the L.V. put the ideas of a foam finger and prostate exams together on purpose, for effect, prior to the Aug. 29 game at Coca-Cola Park.
IronPigs spokesman Jon Schaeffer told me that not only was it intentional, they plan similar ads this coming season.
"We were one of the sponsors of the game," said Chris Kann, practice manager for Urology Specialists. "We gave out the foam fingers. It was a promotion we did. … We gave out 3,000 foam fingers at the [Aug. 29 IronPigs] game."
I can tell you that one of that practice's physicians, Dr. Joseph Trapasso, treated me just last year after my waterworks went haywire and he determined that my prostate was the culprit, although I was lucky that it was nothing serious and his treatment made me all better, I think.
If you don't mind, I'll refrain from describing Trapasso's examination in detail. Let's just say the eventual results were as satisfactory as those brought about by John Coffey in "The Green Mile."
In any case, the IronPigs ad was for a good cause. It was designed to point a finger, excuse the expression, at a serious problem. Prostate cancer affects around 200,000 American men at any given moment, and kills nearly 30,000 a year. Urologists are on the front lines of combating the disease before it's too late.
It turns out that others at The Morning Call were amused by the IronPigs foam finger promotion when it happened last year, but I missed it until Jay Leno made a national joke out of it.
Sports writer Jeff Schuler said it was a topic of conversation in the IronPigs press box last summer and columnist Bill White was at the Allentown Fair when somebody told him about the ad, and he mentioned it at the end of a column about the fair. Also, there had been other similar ads on other occasions that I managed to miss until now.
Schuler and White actually like baseball, so they had an unfair advantage. I'll just have to watch Leno now and then to keep up with the sports news.
Elsewhere, it was decided this week that unborn babies are human beings, even if that concept costs church-owned hospitals a lot of money.
Last Friday, I reported that the abortion debate had taken a new twist when a Catholic hospital in Colorado faced a lawsuit involving a woman who was seven months pregnant with twins when she died at the hospital, which made no effort to save the twins by cesarean section.
Catholic Health Initiatives, which runs hospitals in 14 states, took the legal position that babies are not people until after they are born alive, and therefore Saint Thomas More Hospital in Canon City, Colo., should not be held financially accountable.
This week, after Colorado's bishops met CHI executives, the two establishments issued announcements that seemed to reverse that position, saying it is "morally wrong" to make such a legal argument.
It was not clear what impact that will have on the Thomas More case, which has been appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court, but the announcements said the hospital chain was pledging to "work for comprehensive change in Colorado's law, so that the unborn may have the same legal protections as other persons."
Until this week, it had appeared that the church's position that life begins at conception did not apply to situations in which the church stood to lose money.
Happily, that particular form of hypocrisy apparently has ended.
paul.carpenter@mcall.com 610-820-6176
Paul Carpenter's commentary appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
