The Church cannot lose

Canon City, Colorado (CNN) -- Life begins at conception, according to the Catholic Church, but in a wrongful death suit in Colorado, a Catholic health care company has argued just the opposite. A fetus is not legally a person until it is born, the hospital's lawyers have claimed in its defense. -CNN

 At first glance this may appear hypocritical.  However we should note that this is a lawsuit and therefore dictated by law.  By law, the fetus was not a person.  Once you catch the distinction between legal and moral definitions, then the hypocrisy vanished.

In fact, I think that's what makes this so clever for the organization.  This case highlights the difference between the moral and legal definitions of a person and gives them a platform; it calls attention to the gap.

Overall, I believe it will be a propaganda victory for the Catholic Church.  If they win, then they save a lot of money.  Then they get to go out and preach about the saddening immorality of the laws and judges that try to define life, though they'd want to leave out that they were the ones arguing for the more restrictive definition.  The real win is if they lose.  They'd be out a bit of money, but that's a small price to pay for a legal precedent that puts life at 7 months, or more importantly, in the general realm of before birth.

Or they could settle, let the whole thing blow over, and everything ends up terribly uninteresting.