Courtney McGrailIt would seem for Amnesty that there are lives which are worthy of life and lives which are not, writes Fr Seán MacGiollarnáth
Fr Seán MacGiollarnáth
The campaign by Amnesty International for the freedom to choose abortion for babies with severe disabilities represents a serious attack on innocent human life. Amnesty wants abortion to be available in circumstances where the unborn child is suffering from a life-threatening, life-shortening or life-limiting condition.
This is an insidious attempt to make obstetric medicine an ally of the abortion industry, an attempt which would undermine medicine’s own internal purpose and goodness from within. In truth, however, Amnesty’s campaign is much more extensive and wide-ranging than these cases.
Any campaign for abortion envisages, in advance, the possibility of killing the innocent. The British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe considered that it would be futile to argue with those who would agree, in advance, to the possibility of judicially executing the innocent. There are parallels with Amnesty. To agree to such an attack on the innocent, Dr Anscombe said, showed a corrupt mind and she believed that one cannot argue with a corrupt mind.
On demand
She made this point before Britain’s 1967 legislation, which introduced what amounted to abortion on demand.
Her point may well have been made for effect, but it is no longer the case that those who wish to protect the innocent can avoid challenging those prepared to campaign for and, in places maintain, this response to difficulties in pregnancy.
The much better way is to offer love, empathy and solidarity. It means preserving medicine as a goal-oriented practice serving health and life. It prohibits acts or omissions designed to kill patients simply because they are below a certain arbitrary threshold of health.
A good society does not allow the intentional and deliberate killing of the innocent.
There is, of course, great pain and distress when a mother and a father of a child learn that their baby has a life-threatening condition and will, in all likelihood, live a very short life outside the womb.
However, empathy and practical solidarity are the virtuous human responses to these difficult challenges. Love, empathy and practical solidarity requires supporting the parents and their child, caring for them, being with them, grieving with them, praying with them, and offering them our presence.
Medicine’s purpose is the promotion of the good of health and life and the alleviation of disease and distress. By the practice of abortion in these cases, doctors allow the disease to defeat the purpose of their art.
Disease
The French geneticist Jérôme Lejeune saw that doctors who support abortion in these instances are fighting for the disease and against the patient. Doctors should resist endorsing Amnesty’s plans as they are contrary to medicine’s own internal goods.
Fundamentally, a human rights organisation needs to ask itself about the basis of human rights – rights such as the right to life.
If we are to take Amnesty International at their word, it is not clear who is free to say: “You are not entitled to kill me; I am an innocent person; any illness or condition or syndrome I may have or acquire cannot reduce my dignity.”
Why so? Consider their attitude to the child waiting to be born who is affected with a potentially fatal impairment.
The syndrome is a morally relevant factor in Amnesty’s judgment that such a child’s life could be ended through abortion. Dignity and protection are, for them, apparently contingent on health and wellbeing. If a baby’s health is substantially compromised, his or her immunity from a lethal attack is substantially reduced.
It is not clear that, for Amnesty, there is any barrier to further arbitrary cut off points from the equal protection all are entitled to under the law.
The implication is that the judgment of the worth of or value ofthe life of the child, at least as far as the law is concerned, is entirely relative or subjective, dependent perhaps on the attitude of someone whose estimation of the protection due to the child varies according to his or her health and immediate prospects.
This is truly chilling.
In a sense, they impose the value; the value does not transcend them for it is not something they recognise as preceding their own evaluation of the person. If the child is not worthy of that regard which would save it from abortion, so be it. If it is, it can be thankful.
For Amnesty, it would seem that there are lives which are worthy of life and lives which are not; classic inequality. It is an odd position for a human rights organisation. Our dignity and its protection cannot rest on such a precarious base as the state of our health.
Doctors, too, should be cautious. Medicine is not a game of chance, nor a game of roulette.
Doctors have two patients in a pregnancy, sometimes more, but to all patients in their care they owe the duty of respect of life. That is where medicine should begin and end. Intentionally and deliberately ending the life of a patient is not the mission of medicine.