The Danger of Legal Assisted Suicide

ChelseaAssisted SuicideLeave a Comment

Here is another excellent presentation from last week’s National Right to Life Convention in Jacksonville, FL. It’s Burke Balch, J.D. again on the danger of legal assisted suicide and the hypocrisy of the “right to die” movement. It was one of my very favorite presentations. If you can spare a half an hour, it’s well worth your time:

Related:
‘Safeguards’ will not make assisted suicide acceptable
G.K. Chesterton calls suicide “The Ultimate and Absolute Evil”

Housekeeping: I am still out of town. Spending time with family in Georgia right now. If you’re still reading this, thanks for bearing with me the past few weeks!! I plan on heading home this weekend.

When is it Appropriate to Provide or Withhold Livesaving Medical Treatment?

ChelseaPro Life1 Comment



The first workshop I attended at the National Right to Life Convention on Thursday was titled: Treatment Ethic – Religious Perspectives: When is it Appropriate to Provide or Withhold Livesaving Medical Treatment? The Catholic and Protestant Perspective. Long title, but very informative workshop. I didn’t record the first part of the workshop lead by Lori Kehoe who gave the protestant perspective. But I got Burke Balch’s Catholic explanation, mostly based on the writings of Blessed John Paul II:

Burke Balch J.D. is the director of National Right to Life’s Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics. He also gave an excellent presentation on assisted suicide. I’ve got video of that, too, that I will share as soon as I can figure out how to get it off my iPhone.

Related: “Death With Dignity? A Closer Look at Euthanasia.” Airs 6:30 p.m. ET, Tuesday June 28 on EWTN. Check it out!

Authentic Love

ChelseaAbortion, Assisted Suicide, Disabled, Euthanasia, Love, SufferingLeave a Comment

loveneverfails.png

“Authentic love is not a vague sentiment or a blind passion. It is an inner attitude that involves the whole human being. It is looking at others, not to use them but to serve them. Love, in a word, is the gift of self.”
– Blessed John Paul II

In today’s culture it is considered “loving” for families to end the lives of their loved ones instead of allowing them to suffer and thus to suffer with them. We kill the unborn instead of giving birth to a disabled child, we starve and dehydrate the severely handicapped who are unable to communicate with us, and we hasten the death of the elderly and the terminally ill. All to avoid or eradicate suffering. But is this true love?

See my guest post at Creative Minority Report this week: Suffering, Love and the Paradox of the Cross

Bonus: Check me out on Judie Brown’s blog today! It’s a re-print of something I posted here a few weeks ago.

Convention-Bound Quick Hits

ChelseaPro LifeLeave a Comment

Hello from Jacksonville, FL! I’ve been here since Monday hanging out with some relatives before I have to attend the National Right to Life Convention which starts today!! I haven’t taken much time to post anything, but I have been keeping my eye on what’s going on around the web. A few things worth mentioning:

–My second guest post at Creative Minority Report is live: Suffering, Love and the Paradox of the Cross

–Joe Carter on The Dangerous Mind of Peter Singer:

Singer has spent a lifetime justifying the unjustifiable. He is the founding father of the animal liberation movement and advocates ending “the present speciesist bias against taking seriously the interests of nonhuman animals.” He is also a defender of killing the aged (if they have dementia), newborns (for almost any reason until they are two years old), necrophilia (assuming it’s consensual), and bestiality (also assuming it’s consensual).

It’s easy to want to shrug this guy off as a raving lunatic that no one in their right mind would pay attention to, but he’s been “eerily influential”, as Carter put it, in the academic world.

–Using the findings of behavioral scientists here in the US, Bernardo M. Villegas warns people in the Philippines, where some are pushing a “reproductive health” bill to curb population growth, among other things, that Contraception Leads to Abortion:

The social norm of avoiding pre-marital sex is more easily discarded when contraceptives are widely available. This transformation of behavior is explained by (Nobel laureate George Arthur) Akerlof’s theory about “social identity.” He and co-author Rachel Kranton argued that individuals do not have preferences only over different goods and services.

They also adhere to social norms for how different people should behave. The widespread use of contraceptives and the introduction of legal abortion in the United States changed the social norms which kept abortions at a low level in the past.

Fact: legalized abortion in the United States was a product of legalized contraception, which came 8 years before it.

–On the news that more women are freezing their eggs to make babies later, I second Stacy McCain’s thoughts:

It is a preposterously stupid idea to encourage women deliberately to postpone first-time motherhood until they are middle-aged, without concern for the obvious arguments against such a decision.

That’s probably not all. But I’m heading out the door to go to the convention as we speak, so that will have to do. Check out the schedule for this year’s convention. Do you see any workshops you would be interested in? I haven’t totally decided what I’m going to attend on Friday and Saturday. Would welcome your suggestions!

Happy “Anonymous Father’s Day”

ChelseaFamily, Fatherhood, IVF, videoLeave a Comment

Anonymous Father’s Day is a feature-length documentary, telling the real stories of what it’s like to be a “donor-conceived” person.

IFV: putting the desires of adults over the best interest of children.

See also: Who’s Your Daddy?
IVF, Frozen ‘Orphans’ and the Wisdom of the Church

Happy Father’s Day!

ChelseaPro LifeLeave a Comment

fathersday2.jpg

Since I put up an old picture of me and my mom for Mother’s Day, I thought I’d do the same for dad this Father’s Day. Thank you, Dad, for all you have given me and to all fathers for the hard work you do to support, protect and be an example to your children and grandchildren. Thank you, above all, for accepting your role as father – a difficult task in our society which belittles the vocation and even deems it unnecessary or undesirable through IVF, abortion, contraception and radical feminism.

I’m actually away from my dad this Father’s Day (FD), visiting with his brother and his family down in Georgia. Tomorrow I’ll be on my way to Jacksonville to stay with another aunt and uncle and attend the 2011 National Right to Life Convention at the end of the week! Keep the prayers comin’, please!

On the Road Again…

ChelseaPro Life1 Comment

I’m outta here!! Driving down south again. I’m on my way to Georgia today to stay with some relatives there for a few days. Then on to Jacksonville, FL next week to visit more relatives and attend the National Right to Life Convention. Then it’s back up to Georgia for a few more days before finally returning home.

Prayers – especially to my guardian angel and St. Raphael for my safe travel, and for everyone travelling down to the convention – would be much appreciated!

Right to Die? Watch Out. Another Forgotten Holocaust Fact

ChelseaAssisted Suicide, EuthanasiaLeave a Comment

William Oddie has a must-read post at the Catholic Herald UK blog responding to a program that ran on the BBC’s this week which featured fantasy author and campaigner for assisted suicide Sir Terry Pratchet, watching the physician-assisted death of Peter Smedley, badly afflicted by Motor Neurone Disease. Hundreds of complaints have been filed since accusing the BBC of running a pro-euthanasia campaign.

Responding specifically to Sir Pratchet’s article in the Guardian, defending the show, Oddie says:

It’s all, of course, a very reasonable-sounding explanation of what he called in a contribution to the Newsnight discussion his “right to death”. When I heard him use that phrase, however, I shuddered, for it has a sinister history: it recalls vividly the entire reasonableness of the successful campaign in Germany during the 1910s through to the 20s and 30s to convince the medical profession that “assisted dying” or “sterbehilfe” for those with an impaired “quality of life” (to use a modern expression which also has sinister historical overtones) as morally acceptable: a book published 13 years before Hitler took power, The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life, Binding and Hoche’s Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens, together with Jost’s Das Recht auf den Tod (The Right to Death) [remember Sir Terry’s “right to die”?] had a huge influence on the German medical profession and without doubt paved the way for the Nazi euthanasia programme.

These authors were far from being Nazis themselves. Professor Binding was an authority on constitutional law; Dr Hoche was a leading psychiatrist. They made it clear that “sterbehilfe” had to be voluntary. But we know what happened then. What happened was that the Nazis didn’t justify “sterbehilfe” for those they decided were unfit to live by declaring its basis in Nazi ideology: what they did instead was to use precisely the language of reason and compassion that underlay the arguments that had so influenced the medical profession that they were in no intellectual condition to resist the Nazi programme on moral grounds.

Nazi propaganda films portrayed euthanasia as essentially compassionate. In I Accuse! (Ich klage an!) (which I have seen: it’s very well made, and would actually be deeply moving if one didn’t know where it had come from) a woman with multiple sclerosis, a musician who is losing the power to play her instrument (the cello: that somehow makes it more poignant) asks her husband to give her a merciful death. He gives her a lethal injection of morphine while peaceful music is played on the piano in a neighbouring room (remember Sir Terry’s plan to put Thomas Tallis on his iPod?). He is tried for murder: at his trial he argues that this was not murder, since his motives were wholly compassionate. He is, of course, acquitted: and the bourgeois moralists are routed.

Fact: Hitler was inspired by a pre-existing eugenics movement propagated mostly by German doctors and other “medical professionals.” The concept of ending life unworthy of life was already a widespread and accepted ideal in Germany once the Nazis came to power. In fact, the first official victim of the Holocaust, “Baby Knauer,” an infant born blind and missing his leg and part of his arm, was actually killed by one of Hitler’s doctors at the request of the child’s own father.

Right to die? Watch out. It’s not a giant leap from “right” to “duty.”

Also recommended:
Twenty facts we did not learn from Terry Pratchett’s BBC ‘documentary’ on assisted suicide in Europe

How scientists helped usher in the Holocaust

Victims of America’s Eugenic History Tell Their Stories

ChelseaDisabled2 Comments

Unfortunately, it’s not a very distant history.

Many people forget, or don’t even know that the Nazi Holocaust began with the forced sterilization of so-called “undesirables,” namely, the physically and mentally handicapped. What even more people don’t know is that before Hitler, the United States lead the world in the forced sterilization of these “unfit” human beings and was likely a major Nazi influence.

Most states ended their state-enforced sterilization in the 1940s, but North Carolina didn’t pick it up til sometime after the 40s, and there it peaked during the 1950s and 1960s, before ending in the ’70s. Because it was so late to the game, several of these eugenic victims are still alive today in NC and they have recently been asked to share their stories with a governor’s task force and to suggest ways of compensation.

Former Gov. Mike Easley apologized to the 7,600 victims in 2002, but none of them have been compensated in any way.
…
“I hope the victims feel free to share their stories and thoughts on what the state can do to compensate them for the injustice that was done to them,” task force member Phoebe Zerwick said.

“I think it’s important for us not to decide on a package or a figure on behalf of a group of people,” said Zerwick, a former reporter and editor at the Winston-Salem Journal and now a lecturer at Wake Forest University.

After listening to the victims, the task force will submit a report to state legislators, who will then decide whether and how to compensate them.

For more than four decades the Eugenics Board of North Carolina had the legal power to sterilize people it deemed unfit to be parents: the poor, undereducated, epileptic, mentally unstable, etc… It is nice to know that we are not in the practice of forced sterilization anymore in this country and I’d like to say that means our attitude towards the genetically or socially “inferior” has changed as well. But with the majority of children with Down syndrome aborted and pro-choice heavy hitters lamenting that not enough poor babies are being killed in the womb (all victims who will never get to share their stories or seek justice here on earth), I’m not so sure.

Although, I must say, we have made many good advancements in recent decades helping people with disabilities to become more active and involved in our communities and work-forces.

The Difference Faith Makes

ChelseaAbortion, Disabled, FaithLeave a Comment

Yesterday I wrote about an article in the UK Daily Mail written by a mother who chose to kill her unborn son who was diagnosed with spina bifida. Today I was just struck by the stark contrast between her negative and fear based vision of life with a handicapped child and a recently uncovered email written by former Governor Sarah Palin on the news that her fifth child would be born with Down syndrome.

In “Sara Carpenter’s” column, all she could focus on were what she imagined would be the negative aspects of her child’s disability. She never mentioned faith, except to say that she was “raised in a staunchly Roman Catholic family”, participated in a pro-life march as a child, but later “felt a woman should have the right to terminate a pregnancy.” And, in the end, she gave in to hopelessness and ended her son’s life. Said Sara:

I tried to shake away the image I conjured in my head of a little boy, lonely and friendless, robbed of the most basic human functions. The prospect of watching a child I’d love just as much as his sisters suffer in this way made me howl. I hugged my stomach, as if I could in some way shield him from the misery that lay ahead.
…
I realised I couldn’t bring this child into the world, knowing the extent to which he would suffer.

trig.pngContrast that with Sarah Palin’s hope-filled email “from God” in which she tells her family and friends that Trig would have some challenges, but that his life was a gift and would bring “more joy, than what they ever may have imagined or ever asked for.” Said “God”:

At first the news seemed unreal and sad and confusing. But I gave Trig’s mom and dad lots of time to think about it because they needed lots of time to understand that everything will be OK, in fact, everything will be great, because I only want the best for you!

I’ve given Trig’s mom and dad peace and joy as they wait to meet their new son. I gave them a happy anticipation because they asked me for that.
…
Every child is created special, with awesome purpose and amazing potential. Children are the most precious and promising ingredient in this mixed up world you live in down there on earth. Trig is no different, except he has one extra chromosome. Doctors call it “Down’s Syndrome”, and Downs kids have challenges, but can bring you much delight and more love than you can ever imagine! Just wait and see, let me prove this, because I only want the best for you!

I don’t mean to imply that people of faith are the only ones who choose not to abort their handicapped children. But, I found the contrast between these two accounts striking, nevertheless. As Jen Fulwiler said in her recent comments on Sara Carpenter’s sad story:

Without a solid belief in an eternal afterlife, the redemptive nature of suffering, and the sovereignty of a loving God, it is the rare person who can engage in hope-based decision making.

Related:
Your Handicapped Child is a Blessing