The Messenger - November 2007 - Our Drift into Darkness
By Fr. Seamus Murphy, SJ - 01 November 2007
THE POPE’S INTENTIONS: This month the Pope asks us to pray ‘that legislators and medical researchers have deep respect for human life, from its beginning to its natural conclusion’.
The Holy Father’s intention arises from recent developments in medical technology. As well as pushing back the time at which premature babies can be saved, medical technology is developing new capacities in genetic engin-eering, and creating living human embryos outside the mother’s body, deep-freezing them, and experimenting on them.
Sanctity of Life
Such developments raise moral issues. Yet while the technology is new, the key moral values are not. They are human dignity, respect for the person as having transcendent value, respect for the integrity and sanctity of the living human body, and the equality between living human beings.
As Pope John Paul II stated in his 1995 letter, Evangelium Vitae - ‘The Gospel of Life’ - there are numerous threats to those values. New technology is not bad in itself. Genetic engineering as genetic therapy, correction for genes carrying hereditary disease, is good. However, genetic engin-eering for genetic enhancement, i.e. producing human beings to order (e.g. male, blue-eyed, high IQ, tall, etc.), is morally objectionable and potentially evil since it denies the child’s value as a person, of their value as an end in his/herself.
Genetic enhancement identif-ies the child’s value as a product, made to somebody else’s specific-ations. It identifies the child as defective if it doesn’t meet these specifications, and defines his or her value merely as a means for others. It is analogous to slavery, human beings who exist for others’ purposes, human flesh that can be bought and sold.
The problem is not with the technology but with the defective values of parents, customers or consumers, medical personnel, and legislators, who determine how the technology is going to be used. In the last few years, there have been two good novels focusing on the disturbing ways people can use the technology: Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper (2004) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005).
Culture of Death
The moral deficiency the Pope has in mind includes failure to understand the values listed above, due to ignorance or refusal to understand them, in turn due to selfishness. There is too, so deep in all of us that it seems like a mark of original sin, that tendency of wanting to use others for our purposes. In view of these wrong values, the Pope went so far as to speak of a ‘culture of death’ flourishing in our world.
Such a culture is observable among groups pushing for euthanasia for people who are old, sick, or desirous of dying. Since the year 2000, euthanasia has been legal in the Netherlands, where it is available on request, even if one is not old, seriously ill, or in pain. An earlier draft of the law would even have allowed it to children as young as twelve.
Such a cultural shift in values will lead the very elderly and infirm, requiring much care, to think that they are a burden and should have the decency to ask to be killed, regardless of whether they want it. Another appalling, but all too predictable, trend has emerged in the Netherlands. While euthanasia was initially defended as what the patient wanted, the reports indicate that in a significant number of cases doctors are simply killing the elderly and infirm, without getting their consent. This is murder.
Nobody has any right to kill an innocent person, even if the person asks for it. The end does not justify the means. The moment medical personnel start killing, a great moral barrier has been breached. It morally corrupts those whose vocation is to save and to heal human beings. Legislators who allow doctors to kill have much to answer for. It is no answer to reply that the legislators don’t force doctors to kill. In a society where abortion is the norm, doctors or surgeons who refuse to do so may have difficulty getting employment.
Stem Cell Research
Something similar applies to the beginning of life. At present, various groups are lobbying governments to allow the creation of human embryos solely for purposes of experimentation, trying to use stem cells to find new cures for various diseases. The Irish government (at the time of writing) has gone some way in the direction of allowing it.
At present, there is little reason to think that such experimentat-ion will lead to cures of disease. In any case, that point is irrelevant to the question about the moral status of the human embryo: Is it a person? If it is a person, then such experimentation, no matter how many cures it might lead to, is seriously morally wrong.
Modern science is quite clear on when human life begins. A new human individual life begins with fertilization, when the sperm and ovum fuse. Genetics has shown that the DNA, the entire genetic programme, for a human being,
is present from the beginning in the fertilized ovum. Thus a new individual human being exists from the time of fertilization.
Sadly, there is resistance to recognizing such human beings as persons with dignity and rights, and instead there is a desire to see them only as human tissue which may be experimented on and dumped when no longer needed. However, such an attitude was only to be expected once abortion had become widespread and accepted.
Cultural Collapse
The change in attitudes to abortion in the last fifty years is nothing less than a moral and cultural revolution - or perhaps ‘collapse’would better describe it. Abort-ions have occurred in all societies in history; an injustice perpetrated by the mother, doctor, and father. The degree of blame will vary with circumstances in the individual case.
What is new is the social acceptance and legalization of abortion on permissive grounds. This is a social injustice, for it amounts to that society stating that unborn children or embryos do not count as persons with rights. It is like slavery: it removes the humanity, dignity and status of the person from a class of human beings.
Such a social attitude, such a law, would be a great evil - even if a single abortion were not actually taking place. In the western world, we have moved from viewing abortion with abhorrence, through compassion, through acceptance, and finally to holding that it should be provided by law and protected as a legal ‘right’, and hence, in some way good.
The process of making abortion acceptable has involved society being half-persuaded to believe a great lie: that the early human being, the embryo in the first fourteen days or the foetus in the first months of pregnancy, is not ‘really’ a human being, at least not yet.
Drift into Darkness
As with anything diabolic (as that process surely is), it is accompanied by confusion: those who support abortion, whether enthusiastically or reluctantly, cannot agree among themselves as to when the unborn human being gets to qualify as a ‘person’ (i.e. with rights).
That in itself is a telling point, giving further evidence that the drift to acceptance of abortion is a drift into the darkness where there is only confusion, hopelessness and inhumanity. Some prominent, respectable figures in the USA and elsewhere even hold that the child doesn’t fully qualify as a person until a couple of years after birth. The Pope’s intention desperately needs prayers.