By Judie Brown
“Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.” That positive message is one that I can recall my mother attributing to Norman Vincent Peale, one of the affirmative voices in her generation. Both he and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who graced our black-and-white television sets every Saturday night in the fifties, fostered healthy attitudes toward life’s many challenges. They brought life-affirming messages to anyone interested in listening.
Today we really need such voices as we struggle to comprehend the social negativity that causes babies and the ailing to become perceived threats to the status quo. We kill a lot of people in this nation without batting an eyelash. We call it choice, but it is actually a bloody crime.
Doctor Fritz Baumgartner, an early medical advisor to American Life League, recently wrote an article entitled “Abortion Is a Satanic Perversion of Both Motherhood and Medicine.” He wisely reminded us that because motherhood is creative, the devil cannot tolerate it.
Such an insight is sorely needed in these days of arrogant ignorance when man usurps the powers that belong only to God. Thus we take great joy when the occasional judge or legislative body actually affirms life rather than condones its elimination.
But we fear those who, like presidential candidate Donald Trump who claims to be pro-life while supporting the direct killing of preborn children until they are 16 weeks gestational age, fail to see the flaw in their position. It seems pride blinds such people to the truth that man choosing who should live and who should die is a fool’s errand.
We see this with assisted suicide as well. There are currently 19 states where proposed legislation governing how to treat or dispose of patients with terminal conditions is being considered. I find it hard to imagine that nearly half of the lawmakers in the United States have chosen to address their own power as a means of providing guidelines that will affect the lives of perhaps millions of Americans. According to the Daily Signal, “‘Virginia’s bill SB280 offers no real protection for vulnerable patients.’ . . . ‘Instead, it embraces a profit-driven industry that seeks to exploit patient suffering. This extreme, out-of-touch legislation erodes the trust of the heath care profession.’”
In Oregon, where an assisted suicide law has been on the books for a quarter of a century, one study found that while the average age of those ending their lives by assisted suicide has remained more or less constant at 72 years old, the number of prescriptions for lethal drugs has increased by 13% each year, and the number of patients who have died through their ingestion has increased 16% each year.
The clear message we receive from these reports is that for perhaps most Americans it has become acceptable to agree with regulating who lives and who dies without a thought to the reality of what this means.
Saint John Paul II addressed this perhaps better than anyone when he wrote in Evangelium Vitae: “While the climate of widespread moral uncertainty can in some way be explained by the multiplicity and gravity of today’s social problems, and these can sometimes mitigate the subjective responsibility of individuals, it is no less true that we are confronted by an even larger reality, which can be described as a veritable structure of sin. This reality is characterized by the emergence of a culture which denies solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable ‘culture of death.’”
Today we are living in such a time. Our fellow human beings have become anesthetized toward the cruelty in our midst, choosing perhaps willfully to ignore the truth that a single human being’s life is more precious than all the wealth one could imagine.
It is only through prayer, education, and ministry that we can hope to provide positive alternatives for America’s penchant to promote such deadly business.
