Pope Francis greets family members
during an audience with
participants attending an international
conference of pro-life
and medical leaders, at the Vatican on May 25. Photo: CNS Dear Editor, Mary Kenny’s column (IC 10/03/2016 ‘Don’t terminate – donate organs, urge British doctors’) seemed somewhat disappointing.
First, she declined to question a proposed “legal right to terminate the pregnancy” in cases of fatal foetal abnormality. She thus emitted to highlight the huge moral difference between dying and killing.
Next, your columnist neglected to challenge a slippery slope utilitarian approach proposing that severely disabled unborn babies might only be “allowed to be born” for organ donation. Yet each such child is a human person in its own right. As such he/she is entitled to be treated as an end in himself/herself not as a mere means to others’ ends. Organ donation alone cannot be made the primary purpose of any human life.
Yours etc.,
Seán Bearnabhail,
Bóthar Padraig Naofa, Báile Átha Cliath 9.
Mary Kenny writes: I absolutely agree that this is a ghoulish, utilitarian project – Malcolm Muggeridge predicted, 50 years ago, that we would be “cannibalising” human bodies for transplant and now it seems some wish to “cannibalise” the unborn. My main purpose, however, was to report this proposal by doctors in the British NHS that parents shouldn’t terminate a pregnancy but bring the baby to birth to furnish organ donation. And to underline the paradox that those Irish people who praise the British NHS for termination services for the disabled unborn may soon be faced with a request to continue such a pregnancy for donation purposes.
Photo CNS