Right to Life Weekend: Protection for the Ill Elderly and Unborn

This past Friday was designated the Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of the Unborn.  The annual March for Life is this coming Friday January 29.  It will be a very different march compared with previous years.  It will be much smaller, lacking the usual thousands of marchers, and much of it, such as the associated conferences, will be held virtually.  One hopes for normalcy next year.

 

The March for Life weekend is an extraordinary event.  Students from all over the country came to Georgetown, sometimes camping out in the dorm rooms of friends.  Georgetown was the center for many of the associated conferences.  In January 2012 I led the holy hour, benediction, and rosary at Georgetown the day before the 13th Annual Cardinal O'Connor Conference for Life.  It was a heartening experience to see Dahlgren Chapel filled with young people praying and preparing to march for the protection of the unborn.

 

Though initially restricted to the first trimester we have reached a sad point as revealed in an article from the Washington Post dated February 1, 2019.  It read: "This week in Virginia, Delegate Kathy Tran (D-Fairfax) admitted that, yes, her bill would allow a doctor to perform an abortion after the mother had gone into labor."  Equally disturbing was the following sentence noting that Gov. Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist by training, defended Miss Tran's position in a radio interview.  A man charged with treating very ill children was coming out in support of killing infants while their mothers were in labor.

 

While the March for Life has focused primarily on the rights of the child in the womb there is increasing urgency that there be a focus as well on the rights of the vulnerable at the other end of the age spectrum, the ill-elderly (and sometimes not so elderly) as well as those in the end stages of dementing disorders.  What was known as euthanasia back in the late seventies, and then physician-assisted suicide, is now being billed as physician prescribed death, a rather stunning euphemism. 

 

In his encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) St. John Paul II, condemned "therapeutic interventions--which accept life only under certain conditions and reject it when it is affected by any limitation, handicap, or illness."  He went on to decry masking the horror of crimes against life by describing them in euphemistic terms. 

 

Back in the spring of 1978 I was fortunate to spend six weeks as visiting registrar or resident with Dr. Cicely Saunders who founded London's St. Christopher's Hospice in 1967.  She was very much responsible for the spread of the hospice movement to and through the U.S.  Dame Cicely was a fierce opponent of euthanasia.  She said in an interview:  "Impending death is no excuse for ending life. Rather than rushing to kill the dying in the name of their suffering, we should focus on practical measures for alleviating their pain and spiritual means to make their final moments worth living."

 

Perhaps it is the devaluation of human life in U.S. society that allowed  hospitals and other institutions to force many elderly to die alone and terrified, bereft of even one designated family member at the hospital or nursing home bedside due to irrational fears of contagion.  

 

Medical schools have been complicit. 

 

What is called the Hippocratic Oath at med school graduation today is nothing more than the kind of pledge Calvin and Hobbes would make in their club.  The revised oath is unrecognizable compared with the original.  Indeed, it should not even be called the Hippocratic Oath.  

 

The promises that are no longer pronounced include, : 

 

"I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan." 

 

"I will not give a woman a pessary to cause abortion"

 

"Into whatever homes I go I will avoid any voluntary act of impropriety or corruption, including the seduction of women or men, whether they are free or slaves."

 

We pray for the conversion of our country and the politicians charged with enacting laws, that they will return to valuing the lives of the most vulnerable at both ends of the age spectrum.  And we pray that American society will come to understand that human life matters more than the lives of dogs, cats, and other animals.  

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All of the photos below are from Loyola, Spain the last time I left the country in July 2019.  One hopes it will be possible during the summer of 2022. 

+ Fr. Jack, SJ, MD