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Greetings to all, and I am
extremely grateful to the organizers of this conference to have invited me to
speak to you today. My topic, in union with the overall theme of this Congress,
is “Legalized Euthanasia or Family Care.”
Lack of reverence for life
Human Life International, the
organization which I am privileged to serve, has as its fundamental mission the
defense of life, marriage and family around the world wherever these sacred
realities are threatened or attacked. While the main offense against human
dignity and violation of basic human rights is undoubtedly the reality of
abortion, it is undeniably clear that, as Albert Schweitzer said, “If a man
loses his reverence for any part of life, he loses his reverence for all of
life.” Malcolm Muggeridge said something similar: “Either life is always, and in
all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable
that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.” The pro-life
movement’s defense of life is and must be a defense of all human life, from the
moment of fertilization to the moment of natural death.
As such, the trend of abortion
legalization in the world has led, as night follows day, to increasing pressures
to legalize euthanasia. There is no necessary chronological order to this trend:
abortion does not have to come first although it often does because the abortion
victim is more hidden, has no lawyer to defend his cause and is thus easier to
kill; however, there is always a symbiotic relationship between one form of
killing and another. In Nazi Germany, for example, the legalization of
physician-assisted suicide led to the extermination of Jews, Catholics and
others in the concentration camps. Killing always generates more killing.
Family as the defense against
the culture of death
Today all societies of the world
are being invaded by what is known as a pervasive “culture of death,” and it is
a phenomenon that is anti-human-culture, anti-society and anti-human. Its
apostles are men and women in medical uniforms, business suits and judicial
robes, and it roams around the world like a gruesome skeleton that is looking
for societies where he can settle down and do his killing.
In contrast to this devastating
ethic of death, God in His Wisdom has decreed that human beings should be taught
from the very beginning of our lives in another school that, by definition,
abhors the very idea of killing: this school is the family. In God’s plan, the
family is a natural extension of marriage where human life is regarded as a gift
and the fruit of the parents’ love. This life is welcomed into a small community
of persons and respected in the child’s individuality and as a person with
rights and duties. Within the family, natural and human virtues are taught and
learned—love, honesty, selflessness, justice, mercy—which can later be
transferred to the larger human community as fundamental attitudes and habits
which contribute to the wellbeing of society or at least can help keep it from
collapsing.
In short, the family is that
school of profound respect for human life which is so callously regarded in the
modern age and whose demise signals the increasing power of the culture of death
over us. As goes the family so goes every society. The strength of the
family is directly related to the strength of the ethic of respect for life in a
society and it is therefore one of the strongest means of social pressure
against the killing of innocents. A society may be affluent and have an
abundance of material resources, but its wealth is not a guarantee of this ethic
of respect for human life. Only a society that has a healthy family structure
will reaffirm the concept of respect for life written into the very fabric of
our being because healthy family life affirms and supports all of life.
Where family life is broken down,
weakened or attacked, the ethic of killing will enter as if through an unguarded
door. The culture of death attacks at the most vulnerable parts of the family
structure, at the beginning and end of life, and that is why abortion and
euthanasia are always to be considered and dealt with as two sides of the same
coin. Indeed after three decades of legalized abortion in the developed world,
we have seen an alarming rise in the past decade of attempts and actual
successes in the legalization of euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide.
The specter of Euthanasia is
stalking our world
When I was serving as a parish
priest in my diocese in the State of Florida in 1995, I was asked to help some
lawyers fight the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in that state. The
reason the State of Florida was chosen by the euthanasia advocates was that it
had a high percentage of elderly citizens and an overburdened healthcare system
that made it more likely for the medical profession to want permission to
legally kill vulnerable people. Thankfully, the initiative was turned down at
that time, only to rear its ugly head a few years later in another elderly-heavy
American state. I am not surprised either that it was the same state in which
the euthanasia death of Terri Schiavo took place (about which I will speak more
later.)
The first actual
physician-assisted suicide law passed after the Second World War went into
effect in 1996 in the Northern Territory of Australia but was quickly repealed
the next year. This temporary victory of the euthanasia lobby only emboldened
the purveyors of the culture of death to fight harder. The US State of Oregon in
the northwest corner of our country was the next special target due not only to
its substantial elderly population but also to the fact that a large percentage
of people in that state had no religious affiliation and so were most likely not
to fight the initiative or even care about it! This time, the euthanasia lobby
scored a victory. In 1998 Oregon legalized physician-assisted suicide and became
not just the first American state but also the first legislature anywhere
to successfully uphold a right to killing of this type.
The infamous and high-profile
euthanasia activist, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, had been pushing the agenda of
physician-assisted suicide for many years before this. He created a “suicide
machine” which could be used to enable people to administer lethal doses of
drugs to themselves, and with it he successfully killed over 100 patients before
the police actually arrested him in 1999 and charged him with murder under the
laws of the State of Michigan. Dr. Kevorkian actually filmed the killing of his
last patient and then had the event shown on national television! He is now in
jail for up to 25 years for this crime but that is only because he made such a
spectacle of his case. He should have been jailed 99 deaths earlier.
Incredible as it may seem, the
countries of Holland and Belgium only officially legalized euthanasia in the
years 2000 and 2002 respectively, but as we all know, they had tolerated and
practiced euthanasia for decades prior to that. It is estimated that Dutch
doctors kill as many as five patients a day by euthanasia (around 2000 cases in
2005). It is also likely that about half of the actual euthanasia deaths are not
even reported (LifeSiteNews, May 2, 2006). The protocol which applies the
Dutch law allows for the killing of patients who, for various reasons, are not
able to give their free consent, including handicapped infants, the
mentally-disabled and the comatose, and it is estimated that perhaps 1000 people
have been killed in Holland without their consent since euthanasia was legalized
in that country. Truly, Holland has become the land where the Grim Reaper has
free reign.
But it is not only Holland and
Belgium where euthanasia are practiced. Switzerland is rapidly becoming a haven
for euthanasia activists thanks to the extremist group called Dignitas which has
established a series of clinics in order to assist people through the process of
killing themselves. According to the UK Independent newspaper 76 Britons
have ended their lives in the Dignitas clinic in Zurich since 1999, about half
of whom have done so in the past year alone which indicates an alarming rise in
popularity of the practice. Other countries such as Italy and Russia have active
and aggressive euthanasia lobbies promoting this agenda especially among their
rapidly ageing populations.
Activists and their Propaganda
As with abortion, in the movement
to legalize euthanasia, there is no lack of fanatical promoters of killing. With
modern communications and travel, movements such as these take on a universal
character in a very short time utilizing and exchanging the same tools of social
manipulation that they find effective. The activists inevitably come from the
white, so-called developed nations and are funded to the teeth by extremist
foundations and individuals. They are obsessively committed to their cause and
are often very patient in promoting their agenda knowing that in time they will
gain a wider acceptance through the clever use of propaganda.
Some activists, like Australian
Dr. Philip Nitschke and Derek Humphrey in the United States, gained their fame
through championing the legalization of euthanasia in their respective countries
and are still active today with exactly the same agenda just dressed in more
attractive garb. Humphrey in particular was the founder of an organization known
as the “Hemlock Society” which has sought to disguise its true identity and
agenda by changing its name to a more socially-acceptable name such as
“Compassion and Choices.” Humphrey wrote an extremely popular “how to” book on
suicide called Final Exit and now has his own weblog to update people on
the status of the euthanasia movement around the world.
Other groups have similarly
euphemistic names such as the fanatical Swiss groups called “Dignitas” and
“Dignity in Dying” or the American groups “Compassion in Dying” and
“Compassionate Friends.” Of course no one would say that compassion or dignity
are bad things, especially in the final moments of a person’s life when the
process of dying leads is often filled with great grief and degradation.
Yet, these names identify two
primary points of connection that the euthanasia promoters have copied from the
abortion movement. One is an appeal to “compassion” in dealing with a difficult
human situation such as death (analogous to the “hard cases” related to
pregnancy.) The other is an assertion of some individual autonomous and
seemingly absolute legal right to kill, in this case, the so-called “right to
die” (analogous to the “right to choose.”)
The slogans ”death with dignity,”
“aid in dying,” “mercy killing” and the like, all attempt to sanitize the very
cruel reality that a human being’s death is being deliberately chosen by the
individual himself or the right to kill him is being legally given to another.
The propaganda glosses over the potential for abuse and the Darwinian game of
survival of the fittest that society enters into when a false sense of
compassion is allowed to take over a nation’s health care system, for it is
always in a context of health care that these agendas are promoted. Slogans such
as “the right to die,” “self-determination” and “choice in dying” all divorce
the individual’s freedom from the concept of the common good or isolate the
individual choice from its moral or familial context.
Furthermore, medical professionals
who accept such a distortion of both moral reasoning and medical ethical
standards must renounce the most sacred of obligations enshrined in the
Hippocratic Oath which is to “first, do no harm” and give no harmful drug to
cause anyone’s death. The medical profession itself becomes dehumanized and
turned into a profession of killers through these movements, and the legal
system becomes corrupted in its sanction of objectively evil acts or objectively
harmful practices for the culture.
Euthanasia’s greatest irony
As has been made clear, the
connection between euthanasia and abortion is almost like the workings of two
sisters of different ages who pass on the same clothing from the older to the
younger. They use the same arguments and slogans; they almost always accompany
or follow one another in corrupting the social fabric of a nation, and they have
the same types of missionaries and organizations that promote them.
But there is also a divine irony
in their twin evils of killing at both ends of the life spectrum. Namely, the
children who survive the abortion holocaust are members of a generation that has
taken for granted the “right” to kill. That generation has learned well the
tactics of asserting rights or disguising the killing practice in euphemistic
terms—or even worse, of looking the other way when the killing takes place. This
same generation, therefore, has little compunction in putting to death, on the
same terms of convenience, rights and self-determination, those who have given
them life when those persons become burdensome to them.
Along these lines, the very stage
is now being set for a euthanasia holocaust which will likely dwarf the 75,000
innocent people who were killed in the Nazi euthanasia campaign in the 1930s and
1940s. This campaign was exposed, rebuked and stopped by the valiant Catholic
Bishop August Clemens Von Galen of the Diocese of Muenster. We have not learned
from history however, not even our own recent history. In our times, the
affluent western world has laid out the ideological rationale, created the legal
framework, sufficiently numbed the consciences of people and formed the shock
troops for the coming euthanasia explosion.
As mentioned above, the social
reasons for killing will undoubtedly be the excessive cost of keeping sick
elderly parents alive for many years when the costs of healthcare are
skyrocketing and the fertility rates are declining. The parents themselves did
not produce enough children for the common good, and they could very well find
that their self-centered view of the world will come back to penalize them when
their selfish children decide that it costs too much to keep mother and father
alive.
All this reaffirms the basic
message of this Congress, namely, that where the natural family is strong,
society thrives. Where family life is corrupted or broken down, the family
itself becomes the place of death for those who are weak and vulnerable.
The shocking revelations of the
Terri Schiavo case
This truth was most perfectly
illustrated in 2005 when the whole world witnessed the pitiless euthanasia
killing of a young woman named Terri Schiavo who, as I mentioned earlier, was a
resident of the State of Florida and whose case revealed in a forceful way the
whole ugly reality of the culture of death. Terri was forced to die by
starvation in a 13-day ordeal which left her family and our nation traumatized.
Terri Schiavo had suffered severe
brain damage in a mysterious accident in 1990 and lived in a nursing home under
total care for 15 years. Contrary to popular belief, she was not brain dead,
only brain damaged, and although she needed 24-hour medical care, she was
healthy and not in any way dying or even declining. She was capable of
expressing human emotions and affections, and she was able to move in limited
ways with assistance. She was in every way human and vulnerable but not dying or
dehumanized by her condition. She had a very high “quality of life.”
Furthermore, she had loving parents and a brother and a sister who were willing
to do anything for her even though they were not her legal guardians, and their
suffering has been a witness for the whole world—indeed, in the eyes of many of
us who known them, a martyrdom like that of their daughter.
I would like to describe briefly
the several dimensions of this situation in order to show how this phenomenon
displayed the brutality of the culture of death and which is I believe a dress
rehearsal for what faces our western civilization in the decades to come.
The marital situation
Terri Schiavo had the misfortune
to be married to a man who was an adulterer but who had legal control over her
life. Michael Schiavo had an illegitimate second wife and two children from that
union which gave him perfect cause to want the death of Terri although he
claimed to love her. His expressed motive for promoting the removal of her
feeding tube was that it was her “choice”! He claimed that he had heard her make
a comment while watching television 15 years previously that she would never
want to live in a state of medical dependency with poor “quality of life.” His
whole campaign to cause her murder was supposedly to honor that one “wish” of
Terri’s. Pertinent to the issue was that not one other person witnessed her
saying that, and Terri did not have any other written evidence that she wanted
to live. She was unable to say that she wanted to live because she could not
speak. Michael, being her legal guardian, decided that she had to die so that he
could “get on with his life.”
Michael was particularly ugly and
brutal about the whole matter. He had received a settlement of more than
$700,000 for her perpetual care a good portion of which he used to pay his
lawyers to advocate her death. He was accused of not taking good physical and
emotional care of his wife, and there is abundant evidence to support this. For
example, he had not brought her to a dentist in years or allowed her to have
sufficient therapy for her muscles to strengthen them. Furthermore, he forced
her to receive food through a feeding tube in the stomach even though she could
have been trained to take some food by mouth. This caused many to accuse him of
setting Terri up for her death because the State of Florida had unfortunately
defined a simple feeding tube as “extraordinary means” of life support, and
reducing her food intake to a feeding tube in Florida puts her life at great
risk.
The legal situation
Once the State defined food and
water through a feeding tube as “extraordinary” medical care, then it was a
simple step to withdraw the feeding tube and supposedly allow Terri to exercise
her “choice” and her “right” to “self-determination” in a legal fashion. This
time-tested language and strategy of the abortion movement was fully utilized by
her husband’s lawyer, George Felos, who, not ironically, happened to be the
State of Florida’s top euthanasia activist.
The activist lawyer was aided by
an activist judge named George Greer, who through years of litigation refused to
allow significant testimony in favor of keeping Terri alive and refused to order
treatments and investigations which could have helped her and provided more
relevant information on her situation. For example, the medical scan that was
done on her brain was with a technology that was inadequate to show the actual
status of the brain tissues. Another, more sophisticated technology, could have
very easily been used to prove that she was not in a “persistent vegetative
state” as had been concluded with the other technology, but the judge would not
allow this medical test to be taken. Furthermore, he relied entirely on the
testimony of one doctor named Dr. Robert Cranford whose so-called “expert”
testimony had led to the deaths of others in previous euthanasia cases!
This was a complete miscarriage of
justice if there ever was one.
The family situation
Meanwhile, Terri’s poor mother and
father, brother and sister, were pleading with the court to take legal
responsibility for Terri away from the adulterous husband and grant custody of
their daughter to them because they wanted to take care of her and were even
willing to absorb the entire cost of all medical treatments and care for her
entire life. The judge adamantly refused to grant them this right in more
than three years of court battles.
Terri’s family hired a strong
legal team, appealed to the Florida Governor and Florida Legislature for help
and appealed even to the Congress of the United States to see if they could
overturn this complete legal farce that was taking place and threatening to kill
their daughter. There were hundreds and even thousands of people at the end who
came out in support of the family and traveled to the State of Florida to stand
in front of the facility where Terri was kept to show their solidarity with the
dying innocent woman and her family.
The social situation
The very fanatical euthanasia
activists were also very good at public relations and held press conferences for
the sympathetic media and got Michael Schiavo some high-profile speaking
engagements on national television to draw public sympathy away from Terri and
appeal to the public’s false sense of “compassion” and pragmatism for cases such
as these. A well-trained army of pro-euthanasia, abortion-style liars were
mobilized to fill the public with confusion about the issue and did everything
they could to dehumanize this woman and defame her family. The vast majority of
people who paid attention to the case thought that Terri was brain dead and
dying or in a persistent vegetative state. They were told that Terri had no
“quality of life” and that her life therefore was meaningless or that she lived
with less dignity than an animal.
Thankfully there were some
exceptions to the media frenzy in favor of killing Terri, and the tremendous
worldwide exposure of the case was in large part due to some very helpful
conservative commentators and news outlets that made it possible for people to
have access to all the facts of the case. Terri’s parents were constantly doing
interviews asking for justice for their daughter, and they too were reviled by
the agents of death in the media and society.
It is interesting to note that the
media campaign followed exactly the same lines of reasoning that the
pro-abortion campaigns always followed in manipulating public opinion: the
pro-abortion instruments of “freedom of choice” and false “compassion” were the
rallying cries for killing her which in the end overrode the messages of her
fundamental right to life and the compassion and care that we owe to handicapped
people as a society.
The political situation
Terri’s family made numerous
appeals to the Florida legislature and the state’s Governor to override the
dictatorial will of the activist judge who was presiding over the case. Both the
legislature and the Governor assisted through the creation of protective
legislation for handicapped persons in 2003, but the legislation was declared
unconstitutional by the equally-activist Supreme Court of the State of Florida,
and it ultimately failed to protect Terri from the “right to die” movement which
by 2005 had turned into a “duty to die.”
The lawyers followed the political
and judicial appeal process all the way up to the United States Congress which
attempted to save her life by mandating that the whole case be reviewed again
from the beginning. Court after court, including the United States Supreme
Court, refused to review the case and rebuke the murderous judge who was seeking
to kill Terri by legal “fiat,” and in the end the family ran out of legal
options to save their daughter’s life.
The most dramatic moment came when
the Governor of the State of Florida, Jeb Bush, the brother of President George
Bush, claimed publicly that he had the legal authority to take custody of Terri
and keep her from being killed but then lost the moral courage to enforce his
authority. He had actually sent the state law enforcement agents to her facility
to take custody of her but then called them back because he was unwilling to
force a constitutional crisis of authority and take the political risk that
would have been necessary to stop the killing.
The defenders of Terri all knew
that the strength of the euthanasia movement would be hard to break and that it
would take a coordinated legal effort and strength of will to stop the killing.
Those of us who were on the front lines of the battle could not fight the battle
in the courts or the legislatures, and we depended upon men and women in public
office to make conscientious decisions or take the necessary risks in order to
defend this innocent woman. In the end, those who were in positions to do
something for Terri, failed to uphold basic concepts of truth and justice, or
failed to act with the necessary courage to stop the euthanasia death of an
innocent woman.
It still remains inconceivable
that in the United States of America, “the land of the free and the home of the
brave” as one of our national songs calls it, we were unable to find arguments
and legal protections to stop this perfectly innocent and dependant woman from
being brutally murdered. This failure was not only a political failure in the
case of Terri Schiavo but reflects a failure of the entire society for the past
34 years to stop the brutal killing of equally innocent and dependent children
in the womb from abortion. As we have failed the babies so we also failed Terri
Schiavo, and regretfully our failure to save her also established a precedent
for euthanasia in America and further abuses to come.
The religious situation
The most disappointing failure of
this drama was the abject refusal of the local Catholic diocese, in particular
the local Catholic bishop, to come to the aid of one of their own. The Bishop of
the Diocese of St. Petersburg, Florida, refused to assist the family in any
significant way, refusing after a certain point even to speak to them and only
making ambiguous public statements which emboldened the radical elements who
were promoting the killing. His diocesan chancery office published these
statements on the diocesan website and refused to answer any calls, emails or
letters related to the issue. Furthermore, it is reported that this bishop
actually prohibited his priests from taking any active part in the
defense of this woman and left the diocese on an international trip during the
week of her final starvation to go help victims of the tsunami in Asia. It is
hard to imagine a greater example of episcopal malfeasance than this.
By the grace of God several voices
from the Vatican rang out in defense of Terri Schiavo, above all Cardinal Renato
Martino of the Pontifical Council for Peace and Justice who called this an act
of “murder.” The head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Bishop Elio Sgreccia,
also spoke with clarity against this killing saying that he was doing so for
fear that the Vatican’s silence could be interpreted as approval. Those of us
who were fighting the good fight for Terri’s life will be forever grateful for
these particular interventions.
Ironically, or perhaps
providentially, Pope John Paul II was in his last week of life the very same
week that Terri Schiavo was being murdered. He too had to be fed through a
feeding tube at one point, and I am convinced that he was spiritually united to
Terri in those last moments and would have gladly given his feeding tube to her
if he had been able. Sources tell us that he was following the case. It was only
three days after her death that the venerable pontiff passed into eternal life
himself.
The Passion of Terri Schiavo
This euthanasia drama that took
place in America was described by many as a “Passion Story” of biblical
proportions, and they are right. The religious interpretation of this case
simply underscores the nature of the battle that we face against the culture of
death. It is not only a battle of political and social significance, it
is also, as St. Paul says in Ephesians 6, a battle against the “principalities
and powers of this world of darkness.”
The elements of the Passion of
Terri Schiavo parallel the Passion of Christ so clearly:
-
There was an innocent victim
and a mother standing by her cross (in this case a whole family);
-
There was Judas (the husband)
who betrayed her for 40 pieces of silver;
-
Unjust judges and false
witnesses were present at every stage of this passion story;
-
The governor of the state was
a Pontius Pilate figure who washed his hands of her safety when it became too
politically expensive for him to try to save her;
-
The religious authorities
renounced their solemn obligation to protect the sheep of Christ’s flock and a
whole cohort of blasphemers and activists were there at Calvary to make sure
to defame the very memory of the victim;
-
The police (like the Roman
soldiers) and certain of medical personnel collaborated in the killing and
ultimately drove in the nails to cause her death (in this case removing her
feeding tube);
-
And finally there was a
faithful remnant of people who came from every corner of our county to stand
there in solidarity with the innocent victim and who were like Mary and John
unable to help her except through prayer. It is not ironic that many of these
same people were also those who stand in front of abortion clinics defending
innocent babies from a similar unjust death sentence.
Terri Schiavo died a martyr for
the cause of life and was in her own way an icon of the innocence and vulnerable
humanity that the pro-life movement seeks to protect every day. Without being
able to speak herself, she was an eloquent spokesperson for the unborn children
killed by abortion and the other vulnerable individuals put to death by
euthanasia. Given the international media exposure, this message of life and
hope went to all corners of the earth and exposed not only the evil that was
done to her, but also the heroism of those who tried to save her.
The future
We do not know what the future
holds for the euthanasia movement in our world, but we can take the Terri
Schiavo case as an illustration of one possible scenario. To repeat the quote
from Albert Schweitzer above, “If a man loses his reverence for any part of
life, he loses his reverence for all of life,” we can see that the dramatic loss
of even basic respect for human life in our modern world will ultimately lead to
increasing violations of human rights and dignity unless the human community
utterly rejects the culture of death and all of its dictatorial mandates like
abortion and euthanasia.
I return to the theme of this
Congress as my conclusion. When in any society, the natural family is denied its
basic rights to care for its members or when it is deprived of it social and
legal protections, it very soon becomes victim of the aggressive forces that
promote killing on a massive scale and stands before these forces vulnerable to
their depredations. It is my sincere hope that this Congress will inspire many
men and women to strengthen the family and protect it from all attempts to harm
it or weaken it, because where the family is strong, society remains strong.
Many thanks for listening to this
presentation, and may God bless you all! | 
