So, a quick review: one problem I have with The Shack is the idea that it makes it appear that God wants us to completely surrender our self-will to God and rely on His will alone. While I agree that the main goal of the Christian’s life is to submit his will to the will of God, in the fullness of truth is ever-paradoxical. God calls us to submit our wills to His by exercising our free will – by freely choosing to make His will our will rather than passively surrendering ourselves to God’s will. As C.S. Lewis puts it in the Screwtape Letters, God wants us to surrender our will to His, only to give it back to us in ultimate freedom.

Do I sound like I’m splitting hairs here? An illustration will make my point clearer.

I have been reading / reviewing used books for the Bookstore. I came across Journey Without End by Carlo Carretto, an insightful mixture of pro-life teaching, mystical experience and spiritual direction. The only real problem I have with the book is that the author takes a strong stance against Natural Family Planning. Fortunately, the author is not in favor of contraception. Rather, he is opposed to any attempt to regulate births within a marriage. However, his position on NFP has many of the same problems as the anti-institution arguments made in The Shack.

This quotation reflects the core of his position.

‘I don’t hold with the Billings meth~d, I don’t hold with those who exclusively study the method but neglect reading
the Bible – which teaches how much God loves life and wants o ~r~pagate it and how his providence lovingly watches over each life, over every human being – and so contrive by artifice and selfishness to frustrate the programming done by God. My mother, I heard it said at home, w~s very regular in her cycles and always had her temperature just right.

‘In a word then, with this well-tried method, I should never have come into the world at all.

‘Morality would have been intact, but the divine programming designed to bring me to birth would have been mocked by my mother’s scheming and selfishness.

· cAs luck would have it, she got her sums wrong and 1 was born all the same; yes, I was born.

‘I was lucky enough to be born, though entirely by mistake, with the full consecration of ~morali;y.

cy ou can see these methods aren’t any good, since they get believers used to paying more attention to morality than to love, more to the act than to the intention.

‘In a word, the methods make them self-centred.

‘Wouldn’t it be better to promote faith in God, the hope that he is the true Father, that there’s no need to be afraid of babies, that food won’t run out since God is almighty?

. . .

‘When God programmes the birth of a baby, it’s better to trust absolutely and totally in him.

Like The Shack, this book sets up a false dichotomy between morality and love. Legalism is the error of following the moral law without love, but properly understood morality and love are one and the same thing. The Church is the way the Holy Spirit now guides us to moral truth, which guides us to love. The Church says that Natural Family Planning is in harmony with selfless love, as long as it is used for the proper (unselfish) reasons. Those proper (unselfish) reasons fall under the realm of responsible parenthood.

Yes, we are called to trust in God’s providence. That is where morality calls us to generosity in love. However, God always deals with us as free beings – not seeing freedom as a necessary evil, but seeing it as the way He created us to reflect His image. We are to seek God’s will by use of our free will to pray, discern, and reason what the greatest good is in each situation.

God, should we have another child right now?

• Pray about it and be open to God’s voice
• Evaluate your physical resources – finances, physical space, etc. – with consideration of the good of your family (not selfish desires to hoard physical goods for yourself)
• Evaluate your psychological resources – stress levels, etc
• Remind yourself that you are called to self-sacrifice and generosity in love
• Make a reasoned, prayerful decision based on what is good for your family

It’s not either free will or God’s will; it’s not either morality or love. Truth is most often both and. We are created and called to use our intellect and our will to seek God’s will and to follow Him as free, loving persons.

Check out the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis! Highly recommended! Click on the image to go to the bookstore.

Despite my disagreement with the author about NFP, I do recommend this book as a wonderful perspective on abortion. Only one available (used). Click on the image to go to the store.

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• Government has overstepped its bounds, once again meddling in affairs that should be left to market forces?

No

• the law puts undue burden on small business who now have to pay a higher premium to insure their employees?

No

• the law does not do enough to help children born deaf or severely hard of hearing?

Nope, not that either

So what is the complaint? It comes from Audism Free America:

The notion that being deaf is an affliction and an abomination which alienates one from society and leaves (one) dependent and isolated is a myth,” the petition states. “We do not wish for your state to be mislabeled as promoting eugenics and linguistic and cultural genocide.

Taken from “Ear-implant law draws dissent“, Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune.

What this petition seems to be saying is that deafness is not a disability but just another part of cultural diversity. Therefore, to mandate a procedure that could enable children who are deaf or severely hard of hearing to hear more is like trying to bleach African-American skin white so that African Americans can fit into a white culture better.

Such a ridiculous statement has its roots in modernism, the philosophy that truth is created by personal experience and perception. Modernism celebrates diversity, not because every human person has innate dignity, but because every individual has his own truth. In the case of the petition from Audism Free America, modernism is saying, “Who are you to call deafness a disability. From our perspective, deafness is normal and hearing is an abomination.” Yes, I have heard some proponents of “deaf culture” take the argument that far.

The problem with Audism free America’s position is that deafness is a disorder. Human nature includes the five senses as a normative and universal constituent. In other words, the senses make up part of what it means to be human, and a diminishment of the senses is a diminishment of something that a human person should have (however not a diminishment of their humanity or dignity). Therefore, deafness is a disability based on the standard of human health. Modernism does not believe in disability because it does not believe in a universal standard of human life or of human health.

The problem comes in how we look at disabilities. We tend to look at people with obvious and severe disabilities and say they are disabled and we are not. I have been around severely disabled people all of my life, and I have learned that there is no “they” and “us.” Fallen human nature is fallen for all of us. Disability is not a matter of having one or not having one, but a matter of degree and of kind. People who are disabled in one area of life are also extremely able in other areas of life. The term “disabled” becomes a problem only when we let it define a specific segment of the human family.

One can see the same line of thought in the homosexuality movement. The Church calls same-sex attraction “disordered” because it is opposed to the universal human purpose of sexuality. Modernists see this as an insult that alienates a specific segment of the population. However, the Church realizes that every person’s sexuality is disordered to one degree or another, so calling same-sex attraction disordered is actually a statement of solidarity, not one of divisiveness. Again, modernists rankle because they do not believe that a standard for “normal” sexuality even exists.

I had friends in high school and college who were deaf and hard of hearing, and I learned sign language in the course of our friendship. One of these friends had been brought up in the “deaf world” and had a difficult time relating to the “hearing.” The others tried very hard to interact with everybody, and counted a number of the “hearing” among their friends, even those who did not learn sign language. It was not the deafness that isolated them. In the case of my one friend, it was his desire to see his deafness as something that set him apart and his consequent unwillingness to form relationships with those who would not share his unique “culture.” He had implicitly bought the lie of modernism.

In the end, the petition from Audism Free America isolates deaf people from the rest of us by accentuating the differences rather than acknowledging the fact and universal nature of disability. And their modernist bent would keep children from getting help to overcome their disability. That is just not acceptable.

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Some commentators have criticized Vermont and Ohio for not taking sexting (which is done especially by teenagers) seriously enough. Others have lauded them for saving young adults from a lifetime of stigma and legal problems due to youthful indiscretion. At the heart of this debate is the question, “How much should government legislate morality?”

I have to say that I agree with those who support removing sexting from the felony class of crimes. Sexting is not a sign of a sexual predator (though it can certainly be used for sexual harassment). It is a sign that young adults are not being taught to respect their body or their sexuality. This is the kind of respect that has to be taught in the home. While the government and law enforcement may need to back off from punishing texting, parents, teachers and our society need to step up.

The good thing about the various responses to sexting is that I have not yet heard anyone claim that it is a good thing, or that it is no big deal. Even Ellen Goodman, known for her lack of sexual wisdom, went no further than coming close to calling it good:

The vast majority of pictures are sent to romantic partners. A lot of what we are seeing is young people exploring trust and intimacy. But it’s often boyfriends — or ex-boyfriends — who hold the trump photos. And when that trust is broken and photos hit cyberspace, it’s girls who pay a social price in humiliation and ruined reputation.

Eighteen-year-old Jessica Logan of Ohio committed suicide after her boyfriend put her naked photos out in public, but it was also girls who bullied and harassed her. The girl who trusted was socially ostracized more than the boy who violated that trust. Go figure.

Of course, she cannot resist finding within the issue a feminist cause. That aside, she almost assumes that what’s happening with sexting is part of a healthy process of “exploring trust and intimacy.” Of course, to “explore” trust and intimacy by sending naked pictures of yourself to your “lover” is like “exploring” a financial investment by selling your home and all of your belongings to make an initial investment to see how things go. Sex is the physical sign of a willingness to totally give yourself in trust and intimacy to another person. It should be the last step in the growth of a relationship after trust and intimacy have been explored through friendship and a lifelong commitment to raising a family together has been made.

However, to Ms. Goodman’s credit, she does actually admit that sexting is misguided – a bad idea.

We do not need to criminalize sexting. Instead, parents need to step up and ask themselves some serious questions:

1. Is my adolescent child mature enough to use new technology wisely?

I’ll give you a hint -for most high school students the answer is no, despite the fact that most high school students have cell phones with cameras, etc.

2. Does my adolescent child need a cell phone?

Again, just because all of her friends do doesn’t mean your daughter needs one too. The answer is probably no.

3. Does my child know how to honor his or her body and fertility?

Having “The Talk” is not enough — and students in high school do not learn how to respect the bodies and their fertility even in “sex ed.” Parents – this is your job and it takes commitment, time and knowledge!

4. Does my child focus on developing friendships first before starting to date?

Dating in high school is focused on two things – status and sex. Students who do not have a boyfriend or a girlfriend feel unwanted, like they are losers. Many times dating relationships become a selfish quest for how much two people can snatch from each other – emotionally, financially and/or sexually. Selfless love is best learned when a romantic relationship starts out as a friendship and slowly progresses toward romance, giving two people a chance to know each other and slowly grow in trust and intimacy.

Parents, if you need help teaching your children to respect their bodies and their fertility, and to grow in trust and intimacy the right way, check out the Parent’s Place website. This is a parenting resource put out by the Diocese of La Crosse Office of Family Life. I had the honor of working on this website as designer and secondary writer. It is a great resource for parents.

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Any hint of ugliness mars the fantasy. And so does any reminder that women who put themselves completely in the service of men could be taken advantage of, sometimes badly.

I agree with Basu’s criticism of Hooters wholeheartedly. The feminist twist of her statement needs some adjustment, though. A woman who puts herself completely in the service of a man within the context of a relationship of love (wherein the man also puts himself in the service of the woman) will not be taken advantage of. Here we get to the real problem. Hooters – along with many other elements of our culture – treat women as things to be used rather than as people to be loved.

Hooters is really selling to porn-mystique of a woman who offers herself as an object of sexual gratification. This same mystique is sold by “exotic dance” clubs and “adult” bookstores, with which we as a society are getting increasingly comfortable. The porn-mystique does lead to abuse because it puts the relationship between man and woman into the context of power rather than love. This past year, an “exotic dancer” from a club in our own was brutally attacked and raped by a patron of the club where she danced. As far as I know, the club took no responsibility for her, either. The same fantasy leads to the same results.

Hooters should be called to task. Gina Sheedy was indeed given unemployment after court action. But was the lesson learned? After all, we idolize people like Hugh Hefner and Robert Brooks (the founder of the Hooters chain) as men who live the dream every man dreams (i.e. the porn-mystique) and lets us share in it a little. Again, Basu hits the issue dead on:

Of course [Hooters] should have protected [Gina Sheedy], but isn’t that a contradiction, when the whole set-up encourages waitresses to at least appear to welcome male attention, even when it is actually unwanted?

The thing is, this criticism should be leveled not only at Hooters, but at our entire culture. The same set-up of the porn-mystique is promoted by every company that practices the advertising cliche, “sex sells.” It is promoted by everyone who cries “censorship!” when a community tries to cleanse itself of exotic dance clubs, adult bookstores and other forms of the sex industry. It is promoted by television programs that take it for granted that every man’s dream is the porn-mystique (Man Answers, for example). It should also be leveled at feminists who insist on relating to men in the paradigm of power rather than love, and who even at times promote pornography and prostitution as ways for women to gain power over men by exchanging their bodies for favors in return. Recently three young women were praised by such feminists for selling their virginity to the highest bidder. These are all ways that our culture promotes women (and men) as things to be used rather than people to be loved. Not only does this cultural set-up lead to abuse, the message itself is abuse.
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1. Voluntary organ donation (opt-in)
2. Automatic organ donation with an opt-out option (i.e. you would have to sign a document if you did not want your organs harvested after your death)
3. Buying and selling of human organs.

“If giving is better than routinely taking organs to prolong the lives of patients needing transplants, then it must aslo be said that routinely taking them in hospital practice would be better than for us to make medical progress and extend treatment ot patients by means of buying and selling cadaver organs. That society is a better and more civilized one, I have said, in which men join together in a consensual community to effect these purposes, than a society in which lives are saved routinely without positive consent and will of all concerned to do so. It must also be said, however, that a society would be better and more civilized in which men are joined together routinely in making cadaver organs available to prolong the lives of others than one in which this is done ostensibly by consent to the ‘gift’ but actually for the monetary gain of the ‘donor.’”

Meilaender makes many of the same points I made in my previous post on this topic, though he follows Ramsey in showing that the problems inherent in selling body parts are also inherent in the very act of transplanting body parts. These acts put our culture on the path of seeing the human body as a resource, a commodity, and a collection of parts rather than as an embodied human person.

However, he also does a great job explaining why voluntarily donating organs is less of a problem than an involuntary (opt-out) system or a commodity system. When someone gives a gift, he or she cannot so easily be severed from that gift. The act of giving a gift (of a body organ, for example) is an inherently personal act. Taking organs involuntarily or buying and selling them separates the organs and the persons from which they came. The person becomes a collection of parts, a resource, a commodity.

The main point made by Ramsey and Meilaender is that how we go about saving lives is of even greater importance than the ability to save lives. Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, argued for an involuntary (opt-out) organ collection system, stating that such an act would be necessary to avert “an avoidable human tragedy.” This was much the same comment elicited by my previous post on this subject. I like Meilaender’s response:

It is the sort of language that can be used to justify almost anything that promises to help avoid the tragedy of death. And this is exactly the sort of language that, we have come to see, has often distorted the practice of medicine, teaching us to suppose that anything that can be done to ward off death must be done. But the deeper moral truth is that how we live, not how long, is what matters most. And among the possible “tragedies” with which we must recond would be to live longer by means that debase or undermine our humanity.

Critics call appeals to human dignity “ivory tower proselytizing.” As our culture makes the shift from a concern with human dignity to the utilitarian, materialistic concerns of the here-and-now, I think we will find ourselves realizing that the view from the ivory tower was better than the view of those who cannot see the forest for the trees. We have already sacrificed human dignity in the areas of preborn life, sexuality and fertility. We are beginning to downplay the dignity of the dying. In the end, what will we find we sacrificed for the sake of the quick fix?
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Utilitarianism shows itself again in an editorial that appeared in our local newspaper. The syndicated editorial can also be read here: Bring on the Organ Market, Mr. Obama. Bill Steigerwald argues that the legalization of the human organ market would save lives, and all other considerations pale in comparison to the importance of saving lives.

With just the power of his oratory and his yet-untarnished moral authority, our new changer-in-chief could save 7,000 American lives a year, put an end to the physical and mental suffering of another 100,000 men, women and children and save billions of dollars in unnecessary medical costs.

All he has to do on Jan. 20 is call for the repeal of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984. That’s the terrible federal law that criminalizes the buying and selling of human organs for transplant operations — and therefore makes it a virtual certainty that the supply of kidneys, livers and hearts will never meet our demand for them.

Citing an article in The Economist, Steigerwald dismisses concerns forwarded by opponents of human organ sales by calling them “irrational, exaggerated or bogus.”

Outlawing organs does what outlawing drugs, booze or any other highly demanded product does: it creates a dangerous black market with no regulatory or judicial oversight.

The line that caught my attention was:

Meanwhile, the “moral” arguments of the ivory-towered medical ethicists, who think treating human body parts like a commercial commodity is an indignity that trumps saving lives, are indefensible.

Here is the quintessential utilitarian argument. Saving lives is a tangible and obvious benefit. Protecting human dignity is an ambiguous, unobservable value. Therefore saving lives trumps human dignity.

There is no doubt that saving lives is a good thing to do. Pope John Paul II has called human organ donation a morally heroic act of service. However, buying and selling human organs presents a number of evils

• First and foremost, buying and selling human organs treats the human body as a commodity. The human body is part of the human person, and human persons should never be bought and sold.
• Buying and selling human organs turns an act of heroic love into an act of self-interest, destroying the virtuous value of the act of self-donation
• Buying and selling human organs strengthens the utilitarian philosophy in the medical community, which already sees itself in the business of providing products and services in exchange for money rather than serving the needs of the sick and vulnerable.
• To call the concerns that the rich would benefit at the expense of the poor is naive, considering human history. Questions need to be answered — who would profit from the sale of human organs, who would pay for these organs and how?, etc.

These concerns are less important than saving human life only if you believe that this life is all there is. If the end of earthly life is the end of our existence, then it makes sense that the extension of earthly life should be our primary priority. Or does it?

It is a great irony that the same utilitarian philosophy that embraces the sale of human organs for the sake of saving lives also embraces abortion and euthanasia. While life is an observable good, valuing life only really makes sense if the human person has dignity, and if human life has meaning beyond earthly existence. If these elements of human life are missing, then what’s the point of preserving human life that has no value?

On the other hand, if our human life has dignity, then saving human life makes even more sense. We are called to see our lives as a gift exactly because human persons have dignity. To sacrifice human dignity for the sake of saving life makes no sense. If life continues beyond this earthly existence (and contrary to popular “intellectual” diatribe, it is reasonable to believe that it does), how we face our inevitable death is also very important. Equally important is the attitude that human beings take toward each other. In the face of life in heaven, there is a point when we say that preserving human dignity is more important than saving our life.

Finally, Steigerwald’s claim that medical ethicists sit in ivory towers, detached from the real suffering of real people, is just plain ignorant. Medical ethicists are in the trenches every day, working with real people who are experiencing real suffering and real moral dilemmas. Their task is to help people embrace the greatest possible good within their specific difficult circumstances so that patients and families can live or die with true human dignity and in the peace that they have embraced goodness to the best of their ability. Modernists, utilitarians, and materialists who ignore the devastation their derision of transcendent goods such as human dignity rains on our culture live in a fantasy world that will in the end bring us doom in the name of healing.

Steigerwald’s own fantasy world is exposed when he claims that Barak Obama would not alienate anyone by legalizing international organ sale. He has obviously not been listening to the voices debating the value of human dignity vs. human autonomy. By abolishing the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, Obama would open up a can of worms that would take his administration by surprise. America does not need yet one more way to treat the human person as a commodity to be bought and sold.

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There is little doubt that bullying is a real problem in our public and private schools. However, to accept that there is a real problem is not to accept the proposed solution. According to the editors of our local newspaper, the solution includes a state law against bullying. Wisconsin is apparently only one of 14 states that has not already passed one. A state law against bullying would

. . .give every child in the state the same protection against intimidation and establish a procedure for complaints to be filed and cases investigated.

It also would mean that bullying outside of the school setting would be banned.

A state law against bullying seems so reasonable. I have to ask, though, why is a state law against bullying necessary? While a state law would give authorities leverage to investigate cases of bullying, I doubt that it would actually do much to protect children against intimidation. A law will definitely not teach a child to become lovers of peace and justice rather than tyrants. The only thing a law will do is provide a penalty for those who are caught – after they have already become bullies. Such penalties do little to actually stop negative behavior.

The very fact that a state law against bullying seems reasonable to us shows the failure of our society to embrace the family as the first school of love. Our culture has grown dependent on social institutions, form daycare to the school system, to raise our children for us. A school system does not have the power of a family to teach our children virtue.

Our social systems are doing their best to address the problem

In recent years, school districts across Wisconsin have adopted policies against bullying and many have backed this up with in-service programs for teachers and programs in the classrooms.

We applaud all of these efforts to put an end to something that can have both a serious and damaging impact on children.

In addition, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has developed “Bullying Prevention Curriculum” guides that have been sent to all school districts.

The guides contain instructional units targeted to students in grades three to five and six to eight. The guides also include bullying prevention policy guidelines that describe elements schools and districts should consider in developing a policy related to the prevention of and response to bullying behaviors.

That’s a pretty standard school system response to negative student behavior – policies, inservices and curricula. Such interventions do not compare to the power of a family’s daily personal interaction with the individual child.

The problem of bullying will not be completely solved this side of the Kingdom. It is a result of our sinful nature. However, our sinful nature can be overcome in each individual through the power of Divine Grace and by learning to cooperate with that grace to turn our hearts away from evil and toward authentic goodness. We learn to cooperate with grace – to live lives of faith and virtue – within and from our family.

A call for a state law against bullying is a sign of failure. It means that we have given up on forming lives of virtue and have resorted only to doling out penalties. I am not necessarily against such a law. It is possibly within the interest of public safety. On the other hand, we need to ask if it is an overreaching attempt to legislate morality that is best learned in the family. Our culture has come to see parenthood as a temporary interruption in “real life.” We expect parenting to be as little an inconvenience as possible. Falling for the allure of educational experts claiming to make our children more productive and successful if they can get them into school as early as possible, we have abrogated our responsibililty for raising our own children, expecting the State or the Church to do it for us. But social institutions that treat children in the plural are largely incapable of instilling virtue in the individual. The family is the school of love. The only real solution to bullying is to rethink the way we are raising and educating our children. The solution starts in the home.

End Note

“Anti-bullying law long overdue.” Marshfield News Herald 10 November 2008. Gannett Press. 6A.

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On the personal level, a woman undergoing in vitro fertilization allows her body to be manipulated like a machine. Reproduction, which is supposed to be a beautiful act of love, becomes a mechanical act of fertilization.

On the social level, reproduction and its “product” (children) become a commodity to be bought and sold. We start to see family as a material right (like our i-phones, ipods, laptops, etc) rather than as a calling to love.

Are you scoffing? Perhaps an insider’s look into the professional medical community would help. A professional Ob-Gyn journal ran the following two ads:

Embryos piling up? Let us take care of your embryo storage needs.

These fertilized ovum are tiny human beings. Are they being loved? No – they have become a storage problem. How about this one?

Who’s watching the kids? Cryolert tank alarms offer true peace of mind, safeguarding your priceless biologicals.”

Now these children are “priceless biologicals.”

Dr. Hilgers briefly discussed these ads at the NaPro TECHNOLOGY conference I attended last Saturday. His comment was that doctors can now look at these ads without batting an eye. “Our profession has become awfully cold-hearted.”

It is no secret that most medical professionals and many people in the culture at large do not see fertilized ovum as human beings. What is less known is that abortion is not the only cause of this callous redefinition of human personhood. In vitro fertilization has done a lot of damage to our capacity to keep love and life united.

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A Dublin Supreme Court recently ruled that at least one class of human beings don’t have human rights.

Irish Court Refuses Woman’s Plea for Her Own Frozen Embryos

In Roche v. Roche, a woman sued her now-estranged husband for refusing to let her use their embryos; the man said he does not want to father any more children. The woman argued that the protection offered in the Irish Constitution to the unborn child included embryos, but the High Court ruled that the three frozen embryos in question are not to be given the rights of unborn children, because they are outside the womb.

The embryos in question came to life during an in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure. They were the three “remaining” embryos from the process that resulted in the birth of their daughter. The woman’s husband had signed a contract saying that he agreed to be a father to any children produced through the IVF process. Now that the couple is separated, the father states that he does not want to be a father to any more children born by the process.

Three months later, the couple separated, and the woman asked for custody of her three remaining embryos. However, her husband argued that the visit to the IVF clinic was purely for “one more go” at a second child, and he does not want to act as father to the embryos, in the event that the implantation were successful.

“I have a right to say no. It is my human right,” he said.

The woman persisted in her desire to carry her own children to term. “These embryos constituted human life, I treat them as our children,” she said. “That is how our daughter came into the world.”

The bad news for this man is that he is already a father. These fertilized embryos are already living human persons. He is already a father to all six embryos (including the two that died during the first implantation). He may not be legally bound to pay childcare for them, but he is their father nonetheless.

Both the father of these children and the Supreme Court have made the assumption that these embryonic human beings are not human persons. What makes them different from unborn children who are protected by the law? Location. The fact that these tiny human babies are located outside of a mother’s womb is the only criteria the Supreme Court gave for their ruling that they did not deserve human rights.

Illogical? You bet. The same kind of illogic that continues to deprive unborn babies in the womb of human rights in the United States and most of Europe. Ireland is catching on. It won’t be long before they’re as pro-death as the rest of us.

Please pray.

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End Notes

Gilbert, Kathleen. “Irish Courts Refuses Woman’s Plea for Her Own Frozen Embryos.” Lifesite News. [www] 9 October 2008. Available http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/oct/08100904.html.

¹ Please note the sarcasm with which this statement is intended. I certainly hope that Ireland not only stays well behind the developing Culture of Death in the United States and Europe, but that they actually retreat back to the Culture of Life and become a light unto the nations.

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While many medical care professionals are caring, compassionate individuals who diligently care for all patients no matter what their state, utilitarian attitudes continue to creep into the medical culture. Evidence can be found in articles such as, “The undead” from the December 9, 2007 issue of The Sunday Times.

The overarching attitude is that to live in a state of unresponsiveness is a terrible cause of suffering. The author of this article borders on adopting this attitude,

More certain is the grim reality of hospital wards and long-term care homes where the persistently vegetative and the minimally conscious languish, sometimes for decades.

To write this article I have had the sobering experience of witnessing the plight of patients with severely impaired consciousness – the intubations, the double incontinence, the stricken semicircle of wheelchairs parked before the unwatched day-room TV. And I have met the anguished families of those who are denied final grieving and closure for a loved one condemned to what appears a living death. All too often I have spoken to a wife or husband, or mother or father, who will travel anything up to two hours each way by taxi, every day, to spend time with an unresponsive child or spouse.

There is no doubt that an unresponsive state causes suffering for the patient and for the family. However, as I explored most recently in “The Language of the Culture of Death,”, suffering can have great value. The quote above shows how much a patient’s suffering can draw her family toward love.

The article offers anecdotal evidence that unresponsive patients are often neglected. They are given poor care and no therapy. It is almost as if the medical establishment says, “Oh well – he’s not really alive anyway. Let’s not waste our time.”

Up to 12,000 people under 40 in this country suffer traumatic brain injury every year, and there are serious deficiencies in their rehabilitation, according to Professor John Pickard, head of neurosurgery at Addenbrooke’s hospital, Cambridge: “The tendency for patients to be left to languish on general medical, surgical and orthopaedic wards continues to their detriment.” The shocking term being used by campaigning neurologists and neurosurgeons is that unknown numbers of patients are being just “warehoused”.

The depersonalization of these patients is much to their detriment, especially since mounting evidence shows that the assumption that a patient is in a “persistent vegetative state” is often wrong.

The biggest, most tragic clinical myth about brain injury today is that PVS can be reliably diagnosed by bedside observation alone. It has in fact been known for at least a decade, ever since a key survey of brain-injured patients, that misdiagnosis of the condition runs at more than 40%, a statistic originally calculated by Professor Keith Andrews, former head of the Putney hospital, and confirmed by recent surveys in Europe and North America. This means that valuable rehabilitation strategies are routinely neglected, and misdiagnosed patients end up on unsuitable wards or in care homes where their needs are neither understood nor met.

One rehabilitation psychologist pointed out that consciousness needs to be exercised just like a muscle. If a patient is neglected and denied treatment (as was Terri Schiavo, for example), there will be no progress toward awareness. If consciousness is exercised (balanced with periods of rest), consciousness can strengthen. Patients who are neglected due the assumption that their lives are useless are denied this chance.

However, even patients who have no chance for recovery deserve better than they often get. Loss of awareness does not mean loss of human dignity or personhood. Once again we see the weakness of the naturalistic “personal autonomy” ethic that is trying to replace the ethic of human dignity. As the article points out (after a quick anecdote),

Even minimally aware patients can retain emotions, personality, a capacity to suffer – and, as the young biker showed, attitude.

While the main point of this article was to point out that patients are often misdiagnosed with PVS, and that doctors are devising scans that can offer a more accurate diagnosis of the extent of brain damage, the article also brings up the question of the treatment of any unresponsive patient.

The Cambridge project is not, however, without potential ethical and social problems. Scanning for minimal consciousness in those who appear vegetative can in some cases yield ambiguous results. Evident brain reactions can sometimes be fickle: now here, now gone. Some experts worry the technology could have drastic consequences for relatives where there is scant prospect of a patient’s return to interaction. At the Putney hospital, which houses more than 220 brain-injured and neurological patients, I was told by a research psychologist about a patient in a PVS of about three years’ duration, known as Mrs K, whose family might well be devastated if a scan were to reveal indications of awareness.

The main reason for removing nutrition and hydration from unresponsive patients is to release the family from the obligations of love – to “allow them to get on with the grieving process.” However, these people are not in “the dying process.” Their bodies are not shutting down. They are not brain dead (which leads to the failure of bodily functions). They are simply unresponsive. When nutrition and hydration are removed, these patients die of thirst just like any fully responsive person denied of food and water would.

More heinously, the article points out that there is increasing pressure to declare PVS patients dead so that their organs can be harvested. The attitude that feeds this pressure is that their lives are useless, so their death may as well benefit someone who has a chance to live a “real” (productive) life. This is the same attitude that attempts to justify cannibalizing unborn babies to benefit the health of “really living” human beings.

Brain damage that leaves a patient unresponsive causes great suffering from everyone touched by it. We need to decide if that suffering will draw us to love or if we will give in to the philosophy that would devalue our loved ones in their time of greatest need.

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