Health Care Action Alert 

We have a pro-life statesman in Washington.

And he’s a Democrat.

Why burden persons in the “vegetative” state and their families by keeping them “alive” by force feeding them through various kinds of tubes?
On February 8 the Chicago Tribune interviewed elderly Catholics who were horrified at the thought of lingering unconsciousness. "My pleasure is in being part of the human race," said one of them. "If that's gone, if I can't interact with other people, even if they could give me nutrition and keep me hydrated, I'm not interested in being preserved." This reaction is quite common and reflects the views, I think, of most ordinary men and women. I believe that most ordinary persons think that it is ridiculous to keep persons in the “persistent vegetative state” alive by “force feeding” them through various kinds of tubes. They believe that doing so is futile and in addition imposes horrible burdens on those kept “alive” in this way and on their families. I fully appreciate why so many people think this way. I did so for many years myself. I will tell you why I did in a future piece for the Culture of Life Foundation. In this one I will summarize recent scientific studies that bear on some of the reasons why I changed my mind.

Working at home last week, I heard my son’s voice penetrating the French doors of my office shouting, “You IDIOT!”  I gently called out, “Son, please come here.”  Knowing he’s not allowed to call his sister an idiot, he dutifully and somewhat nervously entered my office.  I got down on my knees to look him in the eyes at his own height, took his little hands lightly in my own, and said to my three year old boy: “Son, did you call your sister an idiot?”  He looked at me with his perfectly round eyes perched atop two perfectly round cheeks and centered in his perfectly round head, and said with solemn confidence, “No.”  I said, “You didn’t just shout ‘idiot’ to her in the kitchen?”  Unblinking, he repeated his confident denial.  With my disciplinary back to the wall, I decided to repeat firmly the family’s negative norm—“No call Maymay,” (his sister, Mary) “an idiot… Yes, daddy?”  “Yes, daddy,” he replied.  And I excused him.

Introduction
Here I intend to present the Bishops’ teaching in Part Two of the Pastoral Letter, which they call “Marriage in the Order of the New Creation: The Sacrament of Marriage,” from the perspective of a husband, father, and grandfather. I want to do so because I have now been married more than fifty-one years to a wonderful, loving wife, and God has blessed us with seven loving children, four boys and three girls. Six of them are now married to great daughters- and sons-in-law whom God has blessed with fifteen children and in doing so has blessed us with fifteen grandchildren, ten girls and five boys ranging in age from twenty to seven months. I think this puts me into a position to appreciate the message our Bishops want to communicate in this fine document.

Pro-Abortion Health Care Bill is Not Dead.

Three troubling facts you should know about:  

We recently welcomed Thomas Athanasius into the world, our sixth child and third son.  As with our other two boys, we had to decide whether to circumcise him.  We’ve never found the question easy to resolve.  The opinions of family and acquaintances on the issue tend to be shallow.  Websites can be unreasonably prejudiced in favor or against.  Even the views of doctors we’ve found to mirror the biases of the community.  The following reflections are my attempt ethically to work through the question.  I offer them to our readers for whatever they’re worth.

This Pastoral Letter of November, 2009, presents Church teaching on marriage and family life in light of the documents of Vatican Council II, the encyclicals, apostolic exhortations, and other writings of Pope John Paul II, in particular in his celebrated Wednesday “catecheses” on the “theology of the body,” and the writings of Pope Benedict XVI.

Meilaender takes these topics up in chapters 4 and 5, of his Bioethics: A Primer for Christians. I will devote more space to the first issue.

CHAPTER 4, GENETIC ADVANCE (pp. 38-47)
Summary and Comment
Meilaender’s principal concern in this chapter centers on a new kind of medical therapy aimed at curing persons suffering from or genetically disposed to different genetically caused diseases such as Down Syndrome, sickle-cell anemia, diabetes, and many, many others. After describing how some of these diseases are caused genetically, Meilaender then examines the basic forms of genetic therapy: germ cell therapy and somatic cell therapy. Modifications of germ cells (i.e., the cells proper to males and females, sperm and ova respectively, that when united become a newly conceived human person) are passed on to future generations whereas modifications of somatic cells (=equals the cells found in different parts of an individual’s body, e.g., in one’s brain, pancreas, liver, colon, etc.) are not and affect only the individual whose somatic cells are modified (39-41). Meilaender repudiates germ cell therapy, judging its supposed great benefit—the overcoming of disease not just in one person but in future generations--to be its “greatest danger…[which] C. S. Lewis memorably characterized as the ‘abolition of man.’” By this Meilaender and Lewis mean that the risks of such therapy and the harmful effects it might have on our children and grandchildren are not known to man but only to God—and we are not God and ought not “play” God. On the other hand, the moral questions raised by somatic cell therapy do not call for “the no that should be spoken to germ cell modification but for caution and a willingness to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable aims of therapy” (42-43).

By now the whole world (and several worlds beyond) has heard the news that because of the upset election in Massachusetts yesterday, the Senate Democrats have lost their supermajority.  This is indeed extraordinary news, especially for critics of universal health care.

STATUS QUESTIONIS
As you know, the U.S. Senate on December 24 passed its version of universal health care (H.R. 3590: the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”).  Unfortunately, the bill passed with a robust abortion mandate at its center.  Defenders of the unborn had put their political hopes in ‘pro-life’ Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who was threatening to oppose the bill unless Senate leadership included a Stupak-like amendment excluding all federal abortion funding.  Under pressure from the White House and Senate leadership, Nelson broke at the eleventh hour and vowed his support for the bill as amended by Harry Reid’s “Manager’s Amendment.”  The bill passed in a perfect party line vote without a single Republican supporting it.

“First, the family must be remade as an expression of communion.”
Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I., The Difference God Makes: A Catholic Vision of Faith, Communion, and Culture (2009), 23.

The Archbishop of Chicago, Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I., has written a wonderful book containing (among many other good things) some highly useful ideas for speaking about the family in America. Marriage and the family are not featured topics in the book; communion with God and among all human beings is its theme. Cardinal George explores this theme widely throughout the book as it applies, for example, to members of the Catholic Church, to interfaith dialogue, to all members of the human family.  Yet he notes in Chapter One how our work to transform culture -- in order to “remake ourselves” in the “paradigm of the heavenly communio” -- needs to begin with our remaking the “family ….as an expression of communio.” (23)  In Chapters Two and Three, he offers ways of approaching and evangelizing American culture in particular, which I would like to consider from the point of view of this family project.  I should note here that Cardinal George’s work is theologically rich, and important for anyone who wishes to join him in pursuing John Paul II’s project to “evangelize culture.”  I can only hope in this essay to draw out a few of its implications for the culture of the family.

This is the subject of Chapter 3 of Meilaender’s Bioethics: A Primer for Christians (2nd ed. 2005). I devote one essay to this matter because in my judgment the chapter, while excellent in many respects, includes a defense of abortion in some very limited circumstances—when necessary to save the mother’s life and when the pregnancy results from forcible or incestuous sexual relations. Not only do I disagree with Meilaender here I also think that his defense of abortion in these circumstances is not compatible with his own basic convictions as expressed in other parts of the same chapter.

Every presidential administration in Washington DC does some things that appear stupid in hindsight.  It gets caught up in the moment, pandering to this or that political constituency, or reacting too precipitously to some big or newsworthy event.  In our 24-hour-news-cycle world, and especially if we’re sophisticated news consumers, we simply discount the importance of poor presidential decisions and move on, even as we might grow incrementally more cynical over time about government in general.

This is the second part of a two-part series on the U.S. Bishops’ newdocument on reproductive technology, Life-Giving Love in an Age ofTechnology, issued on November 17(www.usccb.org/LifeGivingLove/lifegivinglovedocument.pdf ).  In thefirst essay I discussed the document’s ethical framework for analyzingparticular forms of reproductive assistance.  In this essay I reviewthe document’s ethical teaching on the following forms: using gametedonors, surrogate motherhood, homologous artificial insemination, invitro fertilization, and cloning.  Each consideration is brief.  Ifinterest is expressed, I’d be happy to develop one or another of thearguments in a future blast.

Health Care

Action Alert!

Pro-life amendment killed

- By now you have probably heard that yesterday Senator Barbara Boxer offered a motion to table (i.e., eliminate chances of voting on) the Pro-life Nelson Amendment, which would have excluded federal funding for abortion in the Senate Health Care Bill.

“I want to have children with you.”  These are the opening words of the U.S. Bishops’ new document on reproductive technology, Life-Giving Love in an Age of Technology,
issued on November 17 (www.usccb.org/LifeGivingLove/lifegivinglovedocument.pdf ).  The document is addressed specifically to married couples suffering from infertility and considering their options.  It attempts to balance a sincere empathy for their bitter experience of loss with clear guidance on ethically legitimate alternatives: “The Church has compassion for couples suffering from infertility and wants to be of real
help to them.”  The text acknowledges the temptation they can experience to cut a ‘faustian bargain’ in order to secure the object of their desperate desires.  And it encourages them to hope in God even in the face of human disappointment.  Specifically, it asks whether certain forms of assisted reproduction are consistent with the flourishing of marriage and with the duties we owe to nascent human life.  In the words of the statement: “Some solutions offer real hope for restoring a couple’s natural, healthy ability to have children. Others pose serious moral problems by failing to respect the dignity of the couple’s marital relationship, of their sexuality, or of the child.”

In this Part I summarize Chapters 5 though 8 and offer reflections and comments on this very important book.

This book is so important and rich in content that I will devote two reports to it. In Part I, I will summarize chapters 1 through 4; in Part II I will summarize chapter 5 through 8 and offer brief reflections.

As debate rages over healthcare legislation currently under consideration in Congress and, specifically, whether abortion should be taxpayer-funded under the guise of “healthcare reform,” it would be easy to overlook an important and very inauspicious milestone:  the 20th anniversary of the federal “Freedom of Choice” Act (FOCA).

The Catholic Church in the United States and globally, can ordinarily count on praise for its services to and teachings about the poor, and jeers for its interventions about sex, marriage and abortion. Now, it appears as though the Church can kiss even this limited approval goodbye.  The Archdiocese of Washington DC has announced that its charitable institutions will no longer be able to partner with the District of Columbia’s (DC) government due to the absence of conscience protection for religious actors in DC’s proposed “Religious Freedom [sic] and Civil Marriage Equality Amendment Act of 2009.”  This bill would redefine marriage as the “legally recognized union of 2 people…regardless of gender.”  The bill fails to protect individual religious persons or enterprises who serve the public, from cooperating with same sex marriages. It also has the effect of requiring Catholic institutions to provide the same benefits to employees who enter a same-sex union, as those provided to an employee with an opposite-sex marriage.  The accreditations and/or licenses of Catholic educational institutions, and professionals are also at stake.

Progress on research creating induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs):
I have written several times on the blockbuster breakthrough in stem cell research known as direct reprogramming, a technique for converting (“inducing”) common body cells (“somatic cells”) into pluripotent stem cells or iPSCs.  In November 2007 the team of Shinya Yamanaka of Japan’s University of Kyoto first published on the successful production of human iPSCs [1].  By injecting four select proteins delivered on the back of retroviruses into a skin cell, they were able to reprogram the highly differentiated skin cell back into the state of a pluripotent stem cell.  Amidst the well-deserved enthusiasm generated by the success, questions were raised at once about the retroviral delivery system.  Because the viruses tended to incorporate themselves into the new cell’s DNA, the technique risked tumor formation if ever used in clinical trials with humans.  Finding a harmless delivery system for the reprogramming proteins became the new challenge.

“Jon and Kate plus Eight.” “Kate plus Eight.” “Jon and the Other Kate.” If there was ever a time we wanted to shield our eyes from supermarket tabloids, this must be it.  Yet, while their story is topping the pop culture charts, it seems fitting to look more closely at it in order to acknowledge not only the emotional wreckage involved, but also the light it sheds on the travesty we call our divorce laws.

Introduction
Contraception is usually considered an issue of sexual ethics rather than one proper to bioethics. But contraception is quite relevant to respect for human life. Contraception is not itself a sexual act but rather accompanies a sexual act. Obviously one can engage in sex and not contracept; copulating couples who contracept engage in two acts: they choose to copulate and they choose to contracept. Here I will argue that contraception is an anti-life kind of act and leads to the “culture of death.”

My apologies for writing again on health care.  There are many other issues worth addressing (e.g., mandatory H1N1 vaccinations, ethical advances and declines in stem cell research, the state of the economy, war in Afghanistan, etc.), but this one is of critical importance at the moment.  The debate will soon be history.  If we lose, which seems increasingly likely, defenders of the unborn will be fighting a fiercer rear-guard battle than ever before.  The President’s party is resolute on pushing through the largest pro-abortion legislative reform in U.S. history (Roe v. Wade was not an act of the legislature).  And it appears it will be successful.  Here’s a brief update to keep you at real-time in the national discussion.

This is the last in my series of columns on out of wedlock births.  By now you know that 4 in 10 U.S. births are nonmarital; this rises to 7 in 10 for African-American Women, and  5 in 10 for Hispanic women, our fastest growing minority population. Women in their 20s and 30s account for the lion’s share of the trend. [1]  Reactions to our predicament are suitably alarmist, but still terribly predictable. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy will push for both more abstinence, and higher rates of contraceptive usage among the unmarried. They will call for less complacency and more parental involvement.[2]  Planned Parenthood took the occasion to bash abstinence programs while abstinence programs linked the rise to the fact that 68% of public schools employ contraceptive instruction, which has a 4 to 1 funding advantage over abstinence in the United States. [3]

I would like to update CLF readers on the status of the abortion provision in the U.S. health care debate.  President Obama and high ranking Democrats in both Houses (e.g., Rep. Nancy Pelosi [D-CA], Sen. Claire McCaskill [D-MO], Rep. Ron Klein [D-FL], Sen. Arlin Specter [D-PA]) have been recently quoted as stating that no federal tax dollars will be used to fund abortion under universal healthcare.  The most highly publicized statement came from the President in his address to the joint session of congress on Sept. 9th: “One more misunderstanding I want to clear up – under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.”  I felt genuinely optimistic when I heard these words.  It seemed implausible to me that despite the President’s proclivities to stretch the truth he would bold-facedly lie to the American people during an internationally televised speech.  It shortly became clear that the President’s statement was false.  Its falsity however is cleverly disguised.  To remove the disguise, I need to review a couple provisions from the health care bill being debated in the House of Representatives.

One of the issues most heatedly debated by Catholic bioethicists addressed by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s recent document on bioethical issues, Dignitas personae, concerned the morality of prenatally adopting abandoned frozen embryos. Some Catholic bioethicists had argued that such prenatal adoption is intrinsically evil and can never rightly be practiced, whereas others had concluded that it is not and can rightly be practiced.

Introduction. This first part of a two-part essay addresses the matters identified in the title above. Part II will examine the thought of leading proponents of the “new biology’s” eugenic program.

Historical background
Definition and status during 19th, early 20th, and late 20th centuries
Eugenics is based on the  belief that it is possible to improve the human species by means such as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesired traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics). Among early advocates of eugenics in the 19th century were Francis Dalton and Charles Darwin in England, and Margaret Sanger in the United States. A strong opponent of eugenics in the early 20th century was Gilbert Keith Chesterton, whose Eugenics and Other Evils unmasked this movement’s inhuman philosophy.  Hitler’s program of eugenics brought the movement into disrepute in the middle of the 20th century.

“It is better to be fit than unfit.” Who could disagree?  Health is good and desirable, sickness is bad and repugnant.  Pursuing the former and avoiding the latter are eminently worthwhile goals. But merely stating them in the form of goals leaves us in an overly abstract position.  Some goals are so basic and common-sensical that they literally cannot be criticized.  Concreteness and hence criticizability enters in when we begin considering practical means to achieving our goals: “the devil’s in the details.”  This is why so many things said in a State of the Union Address are unobjectionable: “Everyone deserves access to healthcare!” “We’re after an economy where all who want a good job can find one!” “I’m committed to lowering the out of wedlock birthrate!” “Nothing will stand between my administration and equality for all!”  The devil indeed is in the details.  Constructing a euphemism therefore involves among other things placing rhetorical emphasis for controversial ideas on readily acceptable values: pro-choice, planned parenthood, therapeutic medicine, hereditary improvement techniques.  Eugenics is a fertile ground for the use of euphemisms.

Given that Dr. Jack Kevorkian, Karen Anne Quinlan and Terri Schiavo are no longer making daily headlines, it’s a little surprising that the subject of “eugenics” is back in the news. This time, it’s coming to us via the national debate about proposed federal health care legislation, as well as the news of the Obama administration’s “end of life counseling” materials for veterans. Written by an assisted suicide advocate, the booklet at issue includes, in the words of commentator Jim Towey, “guilt-inducing scenarios such as ‘I can no longer contribute to my family's well being,’ ‘I am a severe financial burden on my family’ and my situation ‘causes severe emotional burden for my family.’ ” [1] The booklet seems to suggest, in other words, that illness, disability or financial distress might make life not worth living.

Brenda Vise, a 38-year old pharmaceutical representative, died on September 12, 2001.  Holly Patterson, an 18-year old student, died on September 17, 2003.  Chanelle Bryant, 22-years old, died on January 14, 2004.  Vivian Tran, also 22 years old, died on December 29, 2003.  Orianne Shevin, a 34-year old attorney and mother of two, died on June 14, 2005.

Introduction
At the conclusion of the presentation I made when the Culture of Life Foundation gave me the first annual award named after me in September 2008, I offered a “Suggested Strategy for Helping Adversaries Understand Culture of Life Arguments.” Here I will recapitulate and develop that strategy. Before doing so, however, I think it important to point out why excellent arguments developed by those who propose the “culture of life” are not able to persuade advocates of the “culture of death” to change their minds.

The Church has identified herself as an “expert in humanity” [1].  But who has the temerity to claim to be an expert in the female half of humanity?  The complete identity of the female—call it the nature of ‘femaleness’—is hidden in the complex body-soul unity which constitutes the human person.  And so an understanding of the female body is one key to unlock this complex reality.  But an understanding of the body is not enough to understand the person.  Although human persons are always bodily and human bodies always personal, persons are not reducible to their bodies. They are their bodies, but they are more than their bodies, because the animating principle that makes their bodies to be living bodies is a non-material soul.  But is there such thing as a properly “female soul”?  Can spirit per se be engendered?  These are weighty questions.

ETHICAL QUESTIONS A CATHOLIC SHOULD ASK

Dear Friends of a Culture of Life,

We think that significant moral questions are raised by the universal health debate and would like to formulate several for you.  Our purpose is not to draw a one-size-fits-all conclusion about the merits of all current health care bills.  These raise complex questions and there are reasons to support and/or oppose various pieces of different bills. 

The Catholic Church has affirmed for some time a right to a minimum of decent, humane and accessible health care.[1]  This does not imply that a nationalized health care system is a good idea, nor its establishment a fundamental right.  But it does imply that Catholics should work for some kind of improvement or reform in the current system on behalf of those who cannot afford adequate care.