Mary Kenny“Lethal injection is the usual method of execution, and it’s surely a perverse application of medical science”, writes Mary Kenny
We should welcome the news that the pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, has withdrawn permission for the use of its drugs in the administration of the death penalty in the US.
“Pfizer’s mission is to apply science and our global resources to improve health and well-being at every stage of life,” the company said. “Consistent with these values, Pfizer strongly objects to the use of its products as lethal injections for capital punishment.”
Thirty one states still have the death penalty on their statutes, but only six of them have used it in recent years.
Lethal injection is the usual method of execution, and it’s surely a perverse application of medical science to employ drugs devised for health and healing to deliver death. Almost as perverse as, in certain Arab states, where doctors use anaesthetic drugs to amputate the hand of someone convicted of theft – and then provide him with an artificial hand.
Execution by the guillotine or by hanging was brutal; it didn’t pretend to be medically assisted (although practiced executioners, such as Albert Pierrepoint, claimed that they minimised the suffering of the condemned).
Culpability
Execution by firing squad sought to exonerate each individual shooter of culpability by equipping some guns with blanks – no man knew who had been the executioner.
But now that ‘Big Pharma’ has announced that it’s in the business of preserving life, not extinguishing it, perhaps someone could lobby Pfizer and Co. to stop supplying their drugs in late abortions and in assisted suicide? Surely there’s an ethical issue here, too?
In second-trimester abortions, the doctor introduces a drug to directly kill the unborn before slicing up the remains. I watched this procedure, as the gynaecologist coolly explained to me that “the foetus often shirks from the lethal injection” in a pitiful reflex to avoid death.
And now that the head of Britain’s Royal College of Midwives, Cathy Warwick, has called for total abortion freedom up to birth, perhaps the drug companies are looking at this market?
Somebody please ask Pfizer & Co. to be consistent in their opposition to delivering death.
A basic bedsit is better than living homeless
I only learned recently, during a public discussion on our distressing housing crisis, that bedsits are no longer legally permitted for rent in Ireland. The reasoning is that the bedsit doesn’t reach the required standard of housing provision.
This is a very apt example of the saying: “The best is the enemy of the good.” Sometimes, when you strive for a standard that is too ideal, you eliminate something that might be good enough, at least temporarily.
In my generation, we all lived in bedsits at some point. I lived in a “maid’s room” in Paris – literally a garret under the eaves. It was very basic indeed, but a heck of a lot better than being homeless.
Taking the nuptial contract seriously
A couple recently approached a very pretty Church of Ireland church in the Shannonside area with a view to getting married in this picturesque location.
They explained they had originally been Catholic, but they had taken a fancy to this particular place and they would like to marry in the church. The rector said that would be perfectly acceptable: baptised Christians of any denomination could be married in this church.
The couple then explained that they would like to write their own wedding ceremony, rather than follow the official rubrics. Ah, no, said the rector: that wouldn’t do. If they wanted to be married in an Anglican church, they would be married according to the Anglican rite.
Good for him, for standing by his values! There’s a limit to this ‘á la carte’” approach. You shouldn’t just swan into a church with your own makey-up ceremony.
Incidentally, I glimpsed, at the back of this fine old church a copy of the Book of Common Prayer. The solemnisation for Holy Matrimony is here introduced with a warning that it is not to be “enterprised…unadvisedly, lightly or wantonly, to satisfy men’s carnal lusts or appetites, like the brute beasts of the fields… but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly and in the fear of God…”
The modernised version in the Anglican texts is not quite so stern, but it carries the same message about the seriousness of the nuptial contract.