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In 1995 Pope St. John Paul II wrote the encyclical Evangelium Vitae, in which he coined the term Culture of Death to describe aspects of modern society which are "... actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency. Looking at the situation from this point of view, it is possible to speak in a certain sense of a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favoured tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated. In this way a kind of 'conspiracy against life' is unleashed." 1 (emphasis mine)
Take a moment to read that paragraph again, slowly.
It's fair to say that in the ensuing 30 years or so this Culture of Death has only grown in strength and ubiquity. It is no longer simply the powerful against the weak. Death is now seen as a personal solution to personal problems. It is not insignificant that the transgender movement, for example, speaks of deadnaming to refer to the act of using the name a transgender or non-binary person used prior to transitioning.
Death, it seems, is now an acceptable solution. It is The Fatal Solution.
I remember the day Roe v. Wade was announced. I'll admit that it's a strange thing for someone to remember when they were only 14 years old at the time. But the reason I remember it is that my father was very upset about the ruling. My family had dinner together almost every night and politics, economics, culture, and society were frequent topics of conversation. My father was very animated, and I remember it well. Being only 14 years old, I said something like "I don't see what the big deal is... I mean, don't you think that women should be able to say whether or not they want to have kids?" He turned to me—he was sitting at the head of the table, and I was sitting to his right—and in a rather harsh tone, he said simply "You don't know what the hell you're talking about!" I'll never forget it, because it was a tone he had never used with me before. And he was right. I really didn't know what the hell I was talking about. But a few short years later I got the education I needed.
I started college in 1976, just 3½ years after Roe was decided. To help earn my way through college I started working in the Admitting Office of a world-renowned hospital. The main thrust of my job was to escort patients being admitted to the hospital to their rooms. After about 2 years, when I was about 20 years old and a junior in college, I transferred into a job as a medical technician in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). This was when they would train you on the job. In that job, I drew blood from hundreds of premature babies, and babies born with anything from minor birth defects to conjoined twins. Babies born with their intestines, or their hearts, or their spines, or even their brains outside their bodies. Babies born without most of their brains. Babies born with heart defects, brain defects, limb defects, urinary tract defects, genital defects, Down's Syndrome, and all other manner of chromosomal abnormalities. I held premature babies that would literally fit into the palm of my hand. Death was common. I remember going home to Thanksgiving Day dinner with my family after a shift on which three babies died. The smallest baby I remember surviving was born weighing only 14 ounces.
There were three large rooms in the NICU with patients in them. Two of the rooms held 10 babies, each in an "isolette," what are commonly called "incubators." These two rooms held the critically ill babies. They were all "babies," even though gestationally they were technically "fetuses." More on that later. The third room also held 10 patients. We affectionately called this room "The Pasture." It was where the more stable babies went when they had improved enough not to need the critical care provided in the other rooms but were not quite ready to go home. They were there mostly to feed and grow.
One baby was with us in the NICU for 15 months. I still remember her real name, but I will call her Takisha here. For the first 12 months or so, Takisha was critically ill. The staff spared no effort to resolve every medical issue that arose. We grew to love her deeply and to celebrate every success and worry over every setback. It seemed she always took two steps forward and one step back. Sometimes three steps back. Nevertheless, Takisha continued to slowly improve and eventually "graduated" to The Pasture. I remember celebrating her first birthday, after which, her improvement seemed to accelerate. She was getting ready to go home. One Sunday I came into work, and I could immediately tell that something was very wrong. The air was different. There was no chatter or "Good mornings." I had left the unit only 12 hours earlier, and everything was fine. It wasn't long before someone told me that during the night, out of nowhere, Takisha had gone into cardiac arrest and could not be saved. The effect on the staff was devastating. Over forty years later, I'm getting choked up as I write this.
Literally on the same floor, down the hall and around the corner, was Labor and Delivery. And next to that was the "Fertility Control Clinic." A euphemism if ever there was one. It was the abortion clinic. It wasn't "fertility control" at all. It was "birth control." And not in the contraceptive sense of that term. I realized the irony was that what we commonly refer to as "birth control" is really "fertility control" and what they referred to as "fertility control" was really "birth control." Birth control in its most brutal form. Both terms intentionally designed to distract from the truth of their purpose.
It also occurred to me that here we were, in the NICU, doing everything humanly possible to save these babies (fetuses, remember?), even when there was very little hope of success, and even at enormous financial and emotional cost. At the same time, on the same hospital floor, not 100 paces away, they were killing babies who were gestationally older than many of the babies we were trying so desperately to save in the NICU. I could not help but realize that the only difference between the babies being saved in the NICU and those being killed in the FCC, is that the mothers in the NICU wanted their babies, and those in the FCC didn't. And I thought "Well, if that's how we decide who gets to live and who doesn't, that someone wants them, then that leads to a very dark place that I don't want to go."
And that realization was the education I needed to understand why my father was so upset about Roe v. Wade. Now I knew what I was talking about.
Over the years I've matured in that realization to understand that some of the mothers do, in fact, choose to abort their babies with great pain, sadness, and reluctance. Nevertheless, the fact remains that they abort their baby to solve some problem. They love their baby in the abstract, the baby they have conceived in their imagination. But the baby they have conceived in their womb, the one who has some abnormality, the one who was created in difficult circumstances, the one who came at the "wrong" time, not so much. At least not enough to choose to bring them to birth.
After graduation from college, I continued to work in the NICU for several more years and eventually moved to a new job as a Critical Care Technician in Cardiac Anesthesia, working closely with the anesthesiologist on open heart surgeries. I saw many more deaths, and many more lives saved. Both children and adults, but mostly adults. I worked there until I finished a second bachelor's degree. Eventually I left the hospital to pursue a career as a computer programmer. After about 5 years working in other industries, I returned to the health care industry, applying computers to the practice of medicine and to medical research. After 13 years, I returned to the same hospital where I had worked while in college, and I continued to work there for the next 27 years. During that time, I earned my master's degree in medical informatics from Northwestern University.
Those experiences at the hospital had a profoundly formative effect on both my career, and the rest of my life. I became unabashedly prolife. My prolife outlook is not only cast in concrete but is also based on personal experience. I did not come to it blithely. It is not naive. It is not without compassion, nor without a personal, concrete, real understanding of the difficulties people face in life. It has come from both happy and traumatic experiences. And what I am left with is this: "Well, if that's how we decide who gets to live and who doesn't, that someone wants them, then that leads to a very dark place that I don't want to go."
Once we decided that there are problems that can only be solved by killing babies, we crossed a line where The Fatal Solution becomes an acceptable solution to a problem, if the problem is important enough to us. War becomes easier. Assassination becomes easier. Suicide becomes easier. Killing our masculinity or femininity, even symbolically killing our identities, to re-create ourselves in our preferred image becomes acceptable if we feel we cannot live as we were created.
I do not want to live in a world where a homeless person's life is considered expendable because they have no one who wants them, or where an old woman is pressured to take her own life because her children can't be burdened with her, or where a baby can be left to die after surviving an abortion because his mother doesn't want him, or where a disabled child is denied care because some doctor decides the child's life isn't worth living, or where an adult child can decide that his father's life should end because he has dementia.
In such a world, politicians will more easily decide that my son's life is expendable in a war. They will decide that old people are too much of a burden on the Social Security system. People will decide that death is a solution to more and more problems.
If killing a baby is ever an acceptable solution to a problem, then there can be no reason to say that destroying another person's life for political purposes is not acceptable, if the political purpose is important enough to us.
If we decide that killing a baby is ever a reasonable thing to do, then there is nothing we won't do if the problem to be solved is important enough to us.
I realize that what I have said here will offend many people. But I must say it. In his spiritual classic The Way, St. Josemaría writes "Listen to a man of God, an old campaigner, as he argues: 'So I won't yield an inch? And why should I, if I am convinced of the truth of my ideals? You, on the other hand, are very ready to compromise… Would you agree that two and two are three and a half? You wouldn't? Surely for friendship's sake you will yield in such a little thing?' And why won't you? Simply because, for the first time, you feel convinced that you possess the truth, and you have come over to my way of thinking!" 3
One of the great temptations we all face is the temptation to do something we know is wrong so that good may come of it. But giving in to that temptation always causes more harm than good, even if that harm is not readily visible, or easily identified. The broken hearts suffered by women who have had abortions attest to this. The good that the babies who were aborted could not grow up to do will never be known or quantified, but what is known is that they will never be able to do it. By giving in to this temptation, we say that we know better than God. Even if the baby being aborted was conceived in an evil way, deciding that it is better to kill the baby than to nurture her, is denying that God is capable of drawing good even out of evil, and that he has a plan for that baby that will make the world a better place and enrich the life of the mother, if only she will let God take charge and do the good he has in mind.
This essay would be incomplete if I failed to put this truth into the context of God's mercy and forgiveness. We are all sinners. And while I have never participated in abortion in any way, I have sinned greatly, sometimes in ways that are just as grievous as abortion. But our heavenly father is eager to forgive. He stands on the top of the hill, peering out to the horizon, anticipating the first sign of our return. The instant he sees us coming, he runs to us to throw his arms around us and clothe us with his mercy, and restore us to his household. (cf. Luke 15:11-32) We do not have to earn his mercy, or prove to him that we are worthy of it. It is on permanent offer. We only need to say "yes" to it, with sincere sorrow in our hearts.
Read and meditate on the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
In this essay, I am not expressing any opinion on the role of civil law with regard to abortion or any other "life issue," although I may address that in the future. My opinions on that have changed over the years and will surprise some, but that's for another time. Rather, I am only trying to accomplish three things: 1) to convey my thoughts about why abortion is always a moral evil that should be avoided by all people and in all circumstances; 2) to encourage those who do not agree with me to reconsider their position; and 3) to encourage all those who have had an abortion, or encouraged or assisted someone to have an abortion, to acknowledge the gravity of their failure and to seek the guaranteed mercy and forgiveness of God.
If anyone is offended by the things that I say in this essay, I do not apologize. I have tried my best to be true to the maxim that "charity without truth is not charity, and truth without charity is not truth." I apologize only to the extent that I have failed in that. If you choose to terminate our friendship, I will mourn that loss and will always remain ready to resume it in the future.
1 Evangelium Vitae. Paragraph 12. 1995. Pope St. John Paul II. www.vatican.va.
2 Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
3 The Way. Number 395. 1934. Josemaría Escrivá.
Words Matter!
Maryland voters will vote to approve or reject a proposed amendment to the state constitution that, if approved, would have a disastrous effect on parental rights.
Read the words of the proposed amendment carefully. It provides the necessary framework for the courts, the schools, law enforcement, and the medical community to ignore the parents' rights to make decisions they believe are in the best interest of their child.
The language is so absolute, so far reaching, that it is no stretch of the imagination to suggest that the amendment, even without corresponding enacting or enabling legislation, would allow a child of six to simply say that he never wants to have children, and the medical community would be obliged to sterilize him.
In the text of the proposed amendment below, I have bolded the parts that support my contention, above:
“That every person, as a central component of an individual’s right to liberty and equality, has the fundamental right to reproductive freedom, including but not limited to the ability to make and effectuate decisions to prevent, continue, or end one’s own pregnancy. The State may not, directly or indirectly, deny, burden, or abridge the right unless justified by a compelling state interest achieved by the least restrictive means.”
Given the clear intent and reach of the amendment, it's hard for me to think of what the courts would deem "a compelling state interest."
There's no age limit stated or implied. In fact, the very use of the term "every person" is clearly intended to include minors. The phrase "and effectuate" means the child can make the decision without the approval of his or her parents. The phrase "directly or indirectly" can obviously be read to include almost any action you can think of.
If you put your head in the sand and pretend this won't be used to effectuate exactly the scenario I mention above, then you're either an idiot, or you're complicit.
Vote NO to this amendment. It's outrageous.
Update: 9/10/2024 - California takes custody of and attempts to ‘transition’ Christian widow’s child. See?! Don’t think this won’t come to Maryland if this amendment passes.
Editor's Note: This was originally written on December 8, 2008 on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception
The book "Render Unto Caesar", by Archbishop Charles Chaput, makes a contribution to the ongoing literature and discussion about Catholics in the public square. Unfortunately, it resolves very little. It is a good primer on Catholic political thought but I wish it could appeal to a wider audience than those of us who are old and interested enough to have followed the life of John Courtney Murray and, apropos, Robert Drinan. What he says is representative of the best and most orthodox of our American Bishops. The motivations for Catholics to enter public life and office, which occupy the first part of his book, were correct and clearly stated. Many of us have urged them upon young people. When he came to abortion, however, the salient issue in public life today, he blinked repeatedly in what sounded like a courageous act of self-justification for his unwillingness to call out the names of those public persons who have left the Faith over doctrines related to life. The age that is upon us will demand the Faith, courage and heroism of well instructed and inspired youth. The companion evils of materialism, serial marriage, a contraceptive mind, and hideous abortion will have to be abjured with great firmness in favor of a generosity that goes far beyond the family-limitation 'permission slips' of today's Episcopacy and happily embraces fecundity with all its attendant idealism and difficulty.
Who can deny it? Our Western civilization, and now virtually the rest of the world, in a great and monstrous act of sycophancy, seems intent on destroying the human race. Demographers tell us with certainty that in a mere 40 years, the world's population will begin a collapse, slow at first, and then in a great horrifying plunge, called by some of them "The White Pestilence" ("White" being more relevant to our hair than our ethnicity). These easily forecast effects will be even more severe than the unpredicted historical outbursts of the Black Plague. World population will go from 9 billion to 3 billion or less by the year 2100. At that time, the fertility rate will be between a diminishing 1.85 (the U.N.'s unsubstantiated hope) and the more realistic 1.2 of a disappearing population. There is no new governmental fertility program that can be fashioned which can escape this outcome. The present generation of more religiously dedicated younger people can only mitigate the effect of the "end game" for their grandchildren by having babies now and passing on the True Faith. (Steve Mosher's recent book "Population Control" is a great reference that needs study by every serious person.) The children of today's elderly will experience the beginnings of this great human drama; their grandchildren will see the plunge; their great grandchildren will know the end results. It would be crass to assert that the "White Pestilence", just over today's time-horizon should be the great motivator for Catholics to respond to their marital vocation, but today certainly is a time to recognize the awful results of the world's manifest growing rejection of life, particularly for the last 50 to 100 years. Only the great ideal of a full-fledged Catholic Faith, lived with youthful ebullience, can serve God's Will.
Today, the Church's reply to this great impending event of the 21st century has been limited to a rhetorical rejection of abortion and a wimpish finger-shaking at contraception and divorce. Even the Vatican's representative at the UN talks of "Sustainable Development" and other such euphemisms employed by Planned Parenthood and the UNFPA. Instead, it must give a resounding vocational call to generosity in family life, however belated. Bland "Oh my!" type observations that Catholics are no longer different from the people among whom they live is not merely to observe the obvious, it is to leave them in the midst of the foul swamp where they have wandered to die. But how will they confront their mistaken ways and march back to the dry land if they have an uncertain bugler? Protestant Randall Terry of Project Rescue has the right message, "Throw away your contraceptives and have the Children God wants you to have."
Most Catholics (54% in the last US National election) no longer even believe that aiding and abetting the continuation of abortion is utterly incompatible with continued membership in the Church, or its overwhelming importance vis a vis every other public question in our National life. Surely, if one gives a fair reading to the intent of Canon Law and the Catechism, regardless of the evasions employed by both the pro-aborts and the pastoral Episcopacy, this is incontestable. Without any sense of rancor, or desire for punishment or vengeance (incomprehensible sentiments in any Catholic, regardless of who might accuse them, even a Bishop), a recognition of apostasy, heresy, and grave public sin must have public consequences on the practical level. The Eucharist itself is being publicly abused. Bishops disgrace themselves and cause scandal when they discount the expressed and manifest mind of the Pope and Canon Law about pro-abortion public figures receiving Holy Communion. They "waffle" on the question and forget that the law is a teacher, but unenforced law is a nightmare.
We can observe that the Church does not routinely announce to non-Catholics that they will be denied the Eucharist when they attend Mass. The Bishop's directive on this topic, though infrequently spoken, appears in many missals in the pew. Non-Catholics know that they should not approach the Eucharist. Similarly, divorced persons, and persons living in some attachment to sin or irregular marriage, do not approach the Eucharist. Heroic persons in such situations simply stay in their place at that time of the Mass, regardless of human respect. If those who aid, abet, promote, legislate, acquiesce to, assist, or commit abortion are not told explicitly that they have excluded themselves from the Church, there will never be comparable behavior on their part, and they will continue to erode respect of the Holy Eucharist.
Cardinal Stafford's recent comments on the occasion of a review of Humanae Vitae were remarkably grave. His insights were certainly not simplistic. They displayed a serious understanding of Salvation History and where we are today as a result of the recent Presidential election and the voting pattern of persons claiming to be Catholic. After positioning the Eucharist squarely in the center of Catholic marriage and all its attendant issues, he quotes from the Encyclical itself, "we are to be true with body and soul". Nevertheless, standing in distinct opposition to this has been the ambiguous "jawboning" of American Bishops. Rightly or wrongly, today they are widely perceived, by Catholics and non-Catholics as well, to be uncertain about their conclusions on abortion since there is no observable public result. The causes of this are probably many, but the "pastoral" tone of their governance and their recent public record of distrustful behavior is prominent in the list. Many Catholics do not believe the Bishops when you say abortion is always and everywhere wrong. Furthermore, it is commonly and reasonably understood that many of the clergy believe contraception is morally permissible, and abortion acceptable when it does not work. Public testimony of mature and faithful priests re-enforces this belief. Further still, the indecent presentation and teaching of NFP, under the auspices of the Church as if it were some new dogma ("99% effective in avoiding conception", Archdiocese of Phoenix, e.g.), has destroyed any concept of self-sacrificing dedication to the fecundity that God expects of a Catholic couple. Few take seriously any more the teaching authority of the Church on abortion. Three vignettes from recent days make this point.
1) Two elderly ladies in my retirement community, on the last day of the prayer campaign to end abortion, just before the election were seated in the Blessed Sacrament chapel saying the Rosary in a soft voice, their heads leaning toward each other. One, a life-long Democrat, had announced in adamant and aggressive tones that she could not wait to vote for Obama. The other, not so clearly political, had indicated that her vote was for McCain because of Obama's stance on abortion. Their contradictory positions and the consequences seemed to go unnoticed in the pious confusion of the Obama supporter.
2) I asked a 90-year-old lady, a friend who had announced her vote for Obama, if she knew what FOCA meant, thinking she did not and might be persuaded to change her vote if she did. "Oh, yes. It means the Freedom of Choice Act to allow abortion." "But abortion means the murder of a child", I said. "Oh Bernie, we have to have some choices, don't we?", was her reply.
3) A retired lawyer, formerly employed in Democrat legislative affairs who has been publicly praised by the Church, baited me to discuss Congresswoman Pelosi's public statements about the Church's theology on abortion. I demurred. He is virtually a next-door neighbor and I did not want to create difficult feelings by speaking too glibly. Instead, I sent him some of the clear explanations that appeared in a Catholic publication and followed it up a few days later with two pieces of Church generated literature that was intended to help people in making a principled vote. His anger came back to me in a note that explicitly threatened friendship with me if I persisted in "preaching" to him (something that I simply had not done). He said he was "proud" to have voted for his political party's choice.
The situation begs the question: Must not Bishops make it absolutely clear that pro-abortion conduct means a person no longer holds to the Catholic Faith, and that such persons have excommunicated themselves? It seems to me that nothing short of public recognition of this fact, in the case of public figures, will make this point clear and focus the attention of both Catholics and the general public.
Recently, I heard that Venerable John Cardinal Newman once said, "Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion." Rhetorical conclusions seem like all we've had so far.
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