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These terms are becoming quaint, perhaps obsolete. This year, two federal courts and the president of the United States took steps to redefine the practice of medicine for the next century. Sadly, their actions can only bring our society closer to a "culture of death".
That phrase, coined by Pope John Paul II, describes a cultural climate that seems to be taking hold through the developed nations of the world. It is a culture that pits the powerful against the weak. A culture in which those who require great acceptance, love, and care are considered useless, treated as burdens, and rejected.
On April 10, the presidents of the United States vetoed legislation to ban partial-birth abortions. In doing so, he put a stamp of approval on a technique that is more like infanticide than abortion. A living, fully formed child in utero is manipulated into a breech position and delivered feet first, except for his or her head. The child is held in this position while the abortionist punctures the child's skull with scissors, opens the scissors to enlarge the hole, and removes the baby's brains. The now-dead baby is then delivered the last few inches.
Where is the "art of healing"? What happened to "First of all, do no harm"?
With a single stroke, government approval of "choice" or "terminating a pregnancy" expanded to protect the violent killing of children just moments and inches from taking their first breath outside the womb.
Another barrier was breached by two federal appeals courts. They ruled that doctors can legally give a lethal dose of drugs to terminally ill patents made vulnerable by illness in order to "assist" their suicides.
The Ninth Circuit Court discovered a "right" to assisted suicide in the Constitution's protections for liberty. Then the court went even further. It blurred any distinction between assisted suicide and euthanasia. It gave a green light to doctors giving lethal injections to patients unable to commit suicide. It said that family members or state-appointed guardians can decide to euthanize "incompetent" patients.
This "liberty" will be available to the terminally ill, where "terminal" is defined expansively to include people with chronic illness. Even someone who could live a long and happy life but needs insulin or kidney dialysis to survive may be eligible. But the liberty is not available to everyone. The state may still protect young, able-bodied people from committing suicide, because society has a strong "interest" in protecting their lives. It is a strange "liberty" that belongs only to people the state views as being worthless. It is a very strange liberty indeed that others can exercise "for you" against you -- allowing a son, for example, to decide that his incompetent mother is better off dead.
For its part, the Second Circuit Court erased the long-standing and obvious distinction between a patient's right to refuse burdensome treatment and the direct, active killing of that patient. Arguments that the very old, sick, or disabled will be pressured to end their lives, that doctors trained to heal should not be made to kill, and that society will be further brutalized went unheeded.
Unless the U.S. Supreme Court overturns these rulings, assisted suicide and euthanasia may be coming soon to a hospital near you.
The president's veto and the appellate rulings have propelled us to a fateful juncture. A wrong turn here will lead our nation into moral darkness. These decisions are predicated on the belief that some lives lack sufficient "quality" or "meaning" to be protected. They are directly opposed to the Judeo-Christian conviction that each human being is infinitely valuable, because each was specially created by a loving God.
These decisions sound the alarm. We have embarked on a most dangerous course. By entertaining the once thinkable -- abortion, euthanasia, and infanticide -- we show a shocking tolerance for evil.
In his 1995 encyclical, The Gospel of Life, Pope John Paul II reminds us:
We are facing an enormous and dramatic clash between good and evil, death and life, the "culture of death" and the "culture of life." We find ourselves not only "faced with" but necessarily "in the midst of" this conflict: we are all involved and we all share it it, with the inescapable responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life. (no. 28)What can we do to build a culture of life?
We can make sure that we fully understand the Church's teaching about the sacredness of every human life. We can spread this understanding in our families and in the public square.
We can help shape public opinion and public policy on issues affecting human life by exercising our responsibility to vote, by contacting our elected officials on critical issues, and by taking time to write letters to editors about the life issues debated in our communities. Radio call-in programs, computer bulletin boards, and "chat rooms" area also useful venues for promoting pro-life views.
In deed, as in word, we must live the truth of the Gospel of life. John Paul II urges each of us to adopt a new scale of values -- to give primacy to being rather than having, to persons rather than things. "This renewed life-style," he tells us, "involves a passing from indifference to concern for others, from rejection to acceptance of them" (no. 98).
Together, says the Holy Father, "we sense our duty to preach the Gospel of life, to celebrate it in the Liturgy and in our whole existence, and to serve it" through "programmes and structures which support and promote life" (no 79). As Christians, we are a people of life. Now more than every, we are called to act accordingly.
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