euthanasia – Mama Needs Coffee

Abortion, Bioethics, Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Parenting, Pro Life

Eradicating people, not disease

August 16, 2017

Perhaps you’ve seen the headlines that Iceland is on track to “virtually eliminate Down Syndrome,” having achieved a close to 98% success rate in preventing DS fetuses from coming to term.

The energy and enthusiasm with which this is being reported belongs to a cancer-research breakthrough, not to what essentially amounts to a successfully-executed eugenics campaign. Make no mistake, advancements have not been made in ameliorating the negative effects of Trisomy 21 on human beings suffering from said condition, but rather, in the field of prenatal diagnosis and the dissemination of information to expectant women on the likelihood of their fetuses being “defective:”

“Since prenatal screening tests were introduced in Iceland in the early 2000s, the vast majority of women — close to 100 percent — who received a positive test for Down syndrome terminated their pregnancy.

While the tests are optional, the government states that all expectant mothers must be informed about availability of screening tests, which reveal the likelihood of a child being born with Down syndrome. Around 80 to 85 percent of pregnant women choose to take the prenatal screening test.”

Maybe Icelanders are just particularly harsh? I mean, they do have some long, dark winters up there. But wait, there’s more:

“Other countries aren’t lagging too far behind in Down syndrome termination rates. According to the most recent data available, the United States has an estimated termination rate for Down syndrome of 67 percent (1995-2011); in France it’s 77 percent (2015); and Denmark, 98 percent (2015). The law in Iceland permits abortion after 16 weeks if the fetus has a deformity — and Down syndrome is included in this category.”

Let’s explore an analogy here. Suppose we are able to craft foolproof, super-effective predictive prenatal testing that determines with near 100% accuracy whether or not your child will get cancer and whether that cancer will be a fatal, particularly virulent form that will end in certain death.

Perhaps they’ll survive infancy but succumb to leukemia in toddlerhood. Perhaps a sarcoma will claim them in the tween years. Maybe they’ll make it to their early 20s, but then carcinoma takes them down. Imagine, for a moment, the medical community rejoicing in this innovative predictive technique, exclaiming that now at last we have defeated the big C. Cancer-free fetuses can be virtually guaranteed, provided the little tykes still make good lifestyle choices and don’t smoke.

Do we rejoice? Has a disease truly been defeated, in this scenario? Are kids who are genetically doomed to cancer better off being aborted before their parents have a chance to bond with “defective” babies who will only end up breaking their hearts by dying young? Is the greater community served by not having to bear the brunt of their medical costs and the resource-draining care they will require?

It’s a little more shocking put in those terms, isn’t it?

We ought to be shocked. We ought to be mortally offended, in fact, by the suggestion that a nation claims to have nearly “eradicated Down Syndrome” when in fact they’ve just gotten really, really good at pushing prenatal testing and recommending selective termination of “undesirable” outcomes of conception.

Look, no parent gets any real choice in terms of how their kid turns out, health wise or otherwise.

Little Johnny may grow up to be a serial killer through no fault of his mother or father. Sarah might drop out of college and burn out on weed and work in an auto parts shop and get divorced at 29 and never buy a home. Isaac might win a Nobel Prize and negotiate lasting peace in the Middle East. Any given child might be a human being, in other words: wildly unpredictable and beyond the grasp of foolproof human manipulation.

And guess what? That’s the way it was designed.

Look how profoundly God’s first two children screwed things up. There is surely no clearer precedent for not being fully in control of one’s offspring’s destiny, from time immemorial.

And speaking of destiny and screwing up, who are we to say what “quality of life” really means?

Would a child destined for death by leukemia at age 7 be better off dead rather than being born only to suffer and die? Does a kid with DS have less inherent value than a typically-developing kid, or experience an impoverished version of reality simply because he has 3 chromosomes in a location where most of us have only two?

This is a dangerous path we’re treading down. Dangerous for what it signifies in terms of worth, value, and human rights, and dangerous for what it says about a society willing to blithely accept the lie that only certain “kinds” of human persons are valuable, are acceptable, are worth having around.

Look where that kind of thinking is getting us in our political and cultural landscape here at home in the US.

But, but, that’s totally different! Racism is a whole different disgusting animal apart from prenatal screening and selective termination. You can’t compare the two.

Can’t I? Isn’t there a common thread running through both philosophies, that certain people are less suited to live with the rest of us, that certain people are worth more or less than other types?

If we think that we can live in a civilized, post-racial society and at the same time celebrate the willful eradication of a certain “kind” of people, we are fooling ourselves.

Until we embrace the value of every human life: frail, fallible, weak, unwanted, unreliable and ultimately straight up mortal, same as the rest of us….we will continue to reap the whirlwind of violence and social unrest.

Culture of Death, euthanasia, Parenting, Pro Life, Suffering

Charlie Gard: martyr of the culture of death

July 28, 2017

Sorry, is that language too strong for you?

It must be the pregnancy hormones rendering me a raging, maternal she-bear grieved over the state-sanctioned murder of an innocent child.

But, but, he was going to die anyway. Extraordinary means! The Cathechism says! Etc. Etc. Etc.

True. All true. And yet, his parents wanted to pursue further treatment. His mother and his father, the two human beings who, entrusted by the God with whom they co-created a child with an immortal soul, were tasked with the immense, universe-altering task of making decisions on his behalf.

It’s called parenting.

And when the state steps over the bounds of parental interests – nay, tramples upon them – insisting that government knows best what is best for its citizens, (particularly when government is footing the medical bills as is the case with the socialized NHS) then we should all of us, no matter our religions or our socioeconomic statuses or our nationalities, be alarmed.

Charlie Gard was a victim of the the most heinous sort of public power struggle: a child whose humanity was reduced to a legal case and an avalanche of global publicity. And no man, not the President of the United States or the Pope himself, could do a thing to turn the tide in little Charlie’s favor once the momentum was surging against him.

The British courts and the Great Ormond Street Hospital, convinced of their own magnanimity and virtue, ruled again and again against the wishes of Charlie’s parents, frustrating at every turn their attempts to seek a second option, to try experimental treatments, to spend privately-raised funds to secure care for their child not available in their home country.

To no avail.

Charlie Gard, baptized earlier this week into the Catholic Church, went home to be with Jesus today. His innocent soul in a state of grace, we can be confident of his intimate proximity now to the sacred heart of Jesus and to the sorrowful heart of Mary. May his parents feel the comfort of knowing that they fought the good fight, and that they brought their child to the font of eternal life by baptizing him into Christ’s Church and surrendering him into heaven’s embrace as he passed from this life.

And may they find, through the powerful intercession of their little son, now whole and free from suffering, the grace to forgive his tormentors and executioners here on earth.

Charlie Gard, pray for us.

(*Comments are closed because I won’t spend my weekend arguing with people about how this particular baby is better off dead.)

Abortion, Bioethics, Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, euthanasia, guest post, Parenting, Pro Life, Suffering

On Charlie Gard

July 7, 2017

(I’m honored to introduce today’s guest author: JD Flynn. He is a husband, a father, a canon lawyer, and a great friend.)

In the middle of the night, when she was just six days old, our daughter Pia went into cardiac arrest. Twice. Pia was in the hospital already, and so doctors and nurses rushed into the room and saved her life. Twice. It was terrifying, and we were powerless. Pia is alive because of the Providence of God, and the medical care she received.

There are, doubtlessly, some people who might have asked if saving Pia’s life was the right thing to do. Pia has trisomy-21, the chromosomal defect known as Down syndrome. And the day before her heart stopped pumping blood, Pia had been diagnosed with a rare and untreatable kind of cancer. We didn’t know whether it would run its course, develop into something worse, or end her life. We accepted this prognosis, and we knew that her diagnosis would lead to suffering.

There are, I’m sure, some people who might have thought that a disabled girl facing a battle with cancer would have no meaningful, worthwhile, or comfortable life. People with Down syndrome are aborted at staggeringly high rates, in part because of a false compassion that believes their sometimes-difficult lives are not worth living. Three years ago, some ethicists began suggesting that aborting children with Down syndrome is a morally virtuous—and ethically normative—thing to do. And the euthanasia of sick and suffering children—children facing battles like cancer—is also becoming acceptable in many parts of the world.

I shudder to think it, but there are doubtlessly people who thought that a sick and disabled little girl, like our daughter, would have been better off dying that night. That her suffering wasn’t worth it.

But doctors saved Pia’s life anyway, because saving lives is what medicine is all about. Pia has Medicaid: the government paid for her treatment because supporting families in need is what government is supposed to be about.

Today she’s four. She has endured a lot of suffering. But she is also the most joyful person I’ve ever met. And we, Pia’s parents, don’t see “Down syndrome” when we look at her. We don’t see “cancer.” We see our daughter. We see a person, not a calculation. We can’t help that: we’re her parents. We would have done anything possible to make sure she lived through that terrible night.

Charlie Gard’s situation is not the same as Pia’s. Charlie Gard will almost certainly die, and soon. But I can imagine what his parents might be feeling right now. They don’t see Charlie as a media sensation, the center of an international debate over human and family rights. They don’t see him as a tragic medical phenomenon. They don’t see him as the sum of a dispassionate calculation of suffering, usefulness, and “quality of life.”

Charlie Gard’s parents see their little boy. They see his mother’s nose, and his father’s eyes. They see a baby they just love to be with. They see, maybe, a gift from God. And they’re hoping that someone—some doctor or scientist– will rush into the room, and save Charlie’s life. They’re willing to do anything—to go the ends of the earth—to try to help their little boy.

The treatment Charlie’s parents hoped to try had very little chance of success. But they wanted to try. Not to become culture-warriors or advocates for parental rights. Just to save their little boy.

The court did not support Charlie’s parents because, in the words of Charlie Camosy, they “do not think Charlie’s life is a benefit to him. They think it is in his best interest to die.”

Charlie Gard’s parents are not allowed to try, because powerful people think that the life of a seriously disabled boy is not worth living.

Pope St. John Paul II wrote that the culture of death is “a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favored tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated. In this way a kind of ‘conspiracy against life.’ is unleashed. This conspiracy involves not only individuals in their personal, family or group relationships, but goes far beyond, to the point of damaging and distorting, at the international level, relations between peoples and States.”

Charlie Gard is the victim of a “conspiracy against life.”

Doctors, governments, and courts which can look at parents like Charlie’s, and judge that they must give up the fight—that dying is in the best interests of their suffering little boy—have lost their humanity. They’ve forgotten, or rejected, that even difficult lives are gifts worth protecting, supporting, and saving. A case like Charlie’s reveals the inhumanity, the callousness, and the dictatorship of the culture of death.

Charlie Gard will likely die soon, and we’ll move on to some other media sensation. Some other tragedy will show up in our Facebook and Twitter feeds. We’ll read think pieces about something else. But Charlie’s parents won’t move on. They’ll mourn their son, whom they know in a way that no one else does, and whom they love in a way that all of us should understand. And they’ll wonder why, as their son lay dying, no one rushed in to help them try to save his life.

(Find more of JD Flynn’s writing here.)

Charlie Gard. Photo: Facebook, Charlie Gard’s Fight.

Abortion, Bioethics, Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Evangelization, Homosexuality, politics, Pro Life, reality check, relativism, sin, Suffering

The power of language and the witness of words

August 9, 2016

It is a curious time to be a Catholic Christian. (Is it ever not, though? I think maybe we all fall prey to a little good old fashioned chronological snobbery, whether or not we care to admit it.)

On the one hand, I live in America and for the most part, shuttered adoption agencies and defunct bakeries and cancelled after-school Bible clubs aside, the persecution that Christians face here is still on the lightish side. And many would shrug off the aforementioned incidences not as persecution at all, but as the rightful assertion of a collective morality over defiant and wrong-headed individual dissenters.

On the other hand, it is gravely concerning how very much the pace of things has accelerated, for society to embrace, wholesale, things that a decade and a half ago would have registered clearly on our collective consciences as “wrong.” There are now plenty of Christians who wouldn’t bat an eye at a 12-week abortion, embryonic stem cell research performed “for a good cause” to fight the horrors of ALS, of helping an elderly parent or terminal cancer patient end his or her life with a prescription written by the hand of their own physician.

In Colorado this last piece is coming to the ballot this November, under the tidy euphemism “physician-assisted suicide,” but more popularly nicknamed “death with dignity.” So as you exit your favorite natural grocery store you might be intercepted by a cheerful, clipboard-wielding volunteer in a neon green t-shirt earnestly inquiring into your concern that sick and elderly people have “dignified end of life choices.” Which is a whole lot harder to answer “no thanks” to than, say, “should Coloradans vote to let people who want to die kill themselves with a prescription written by a doctor?”

Language carries the day. As it always has. And it becomes essential for those of us who believe in a God Who is the Author of life to reclaim these conversations on a linguistic level.

It seems a small thing, a popular word or commonly-accepted term here, a turn of phrase there. Look how much traction gay “marriage” has gotten in a few short years.

When the phrase first came into existence, Christians and other people who recognized the impossibility of two same-sex individuals, however sincere their love, contracting what we all commonly understood to be marriage, had no problem throwing quotes around the term, because it was an imprecise and incorrect application of a recognized reality. But repeated loudly and often enough, we’ve now all but lost that point.

There’s no longer any room in the national conversation to point out “actually, marriage is a covenant contracted between two consenting opposite-sex adults, for the purpose of creating and raising a family and contributing to the development and continuation of civilization.”

I guarantee if you bust out that last sentence at the neighborhood block party, you’d either get a drink tossed in your face or find yourself with a semi-circle of bewildered acquaintances backing away from you in a hurry.

Because we’ve conceded that point on a linguist level and on a legal level. And now we must hide behind our “personal beliefs” or “chosen religious faith” when making the point, which, in a secular society governed almost exclusively by the court of public opinion, is a weak position to operate from indeed.

By forcing religious belief and morality into a corner, meant now to be tucked handily into one’s pocket and not revealed in polite company, the secular Left have employed a chillingly effective strategy, with hardly any real persecution necessary. We zip our own lips instead, avoiding tough topics with friends and coworkers, afraid of causing a scene, afraid of professional fallout, not looking to start a fight.

Guess what? That isn’t going to work much longer.

Every inch that Christians give over as a forgone conclusion: that children don’t deserve to be protected by their parents, that religious belief is a private matter that must be exorcised from the public square, that the government dictates morality to the people, and not vice versa…every one of these small skirmishes that we offer up in embarrassed silence, not wanting to muddy the waters, brings us closer and closer to a civilization in which we have no voice.

Because we stopped using our words.

Because we stopped having conversations at the only level that truly matters: personal, one-on-one, and rooted in trust and authentic relationship.

How on earth can we expect our gay neighbor to ever understand our position, however rooted in love and respect, if she does not hear it from our lips, but relies instead on Rachel Maddow’s punditry to inform her how we – Me! Her friend next door! – really see “them.”

How can our children defend their position on abortion to a school bus full of teammates if they’ve never participated in compassionate and nuanced conversations around the dinner table about human dignity and real feminism and authentic healthcare?

How can we expect our leaders to legislate based on objective morality rather than creating morality based on subjective legislation if all of our voices fall silent, all at once, afraid to break the peace, afraid to ruffle feathers, afraid to look foolish.

It is time to look foolish.

It is past time.

It is time to answer truthfully to the question “do you plan to have more children?” Or “have you thought about scheduling a vasectomy” with His truth, not the truth of the day. It is time to explain to a curious coworker that no, you couldn’t vote for a woman who holds up abortion as a fundamental human right, no matter how compelling the circumstances might seem. To defend your position on the intrinsic evil of torture around the campfire at a guy’s fishing weekend. To explain to a friend with an aging parent that some things are worse than suffering, and that some choices are always wrong.

It is time to struggle with hard topics and harder choices out loud, in a way that is authentic and vulnerable and worthwhile, so that someone else who is searching for the truth might see a glimpse of it reflected in your life, however much you might be screwing it up and failing.

Because that is what it means to be a Christian. It means to wrestle with God, accommodating ourselves to His reality, humbly admitting that we don’t understand, that we aren’t doing it perfectly, and that we’ll get back up again and try – with His grace – to do better next time.

But it does not mean falling silent while evil is perpetrated all around us. It doesn’t mean (guilty here!) sliding into a comfortable, surface-level relationship devoid of authenticity with your neighbors so that nothing unpleasant ever comes up to muddy the waters.

We must use our voices while we still have them, because our words have power, power given to us by the One in whose image and likeness we are created.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Christians, it is time to speak up.

“The days of socially acceptable Christianity are over, the days of comfortable Catholicism are past…It is no longer easy to be a faithful Christian, a good Catholic, an authentic witness to the truths of the Gospel. A price is demanded and must be paid.”

– Professor Robert P. George, Princeton

Bioethics, Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, euthanasia, relativism, sin, Suffering

What’s wrong with the world today?

June 23, 2016

I am.

Me, me, meeeeeeee.

GK Chesterton was and is and will be until kingdom comes, right about that.

As any sense of sin and evil and wrongdoing has receded into the background of our collective consciousness, I’ve noticed an alarming uptick in the propensity for people to sling vicious mud at one another all the while maintaining that notions like wrong, evil, and immoral fade into antiquity.

How can a culture embrace atheistic secularism wholesale, jettisoning any shared code of moral ethics, and expect to remain cohesive? How, if there are no objective standards of reality, of common decency, of truth tethered not in fads and feelings but in time-tested knowledge about reality and human nature, can we go forward?

The past several months have seemed increasingly insane. Because the world is going mad.

How can we converse in earnest about women’s safety, bemoaning the rise in rape culture while all the while continuing to protect the “rights” of hardcore pornographers and pimps in the entertainment industry?

How can we pontificate on the horrors of modern day slavery and sex trafficking while continuing to champion – and publicly fund – Planned Parenthood, perhaps the largest corporate enabler in the West of underaged victimization?

How can we champion inclusivity and acceptance for some disabled persons, while actively campaigning for the deaths of others?

Easy. Because we’ve jettisoned our individual consciences.

When human beings outsource morality, which was designed to operate in accordance with a well-formed conscience, we get the tyranny of the now.

When we allow the larger culture to dictate morality back to us rather than speaking wisdom and life into the culture from the knowledge contained in our own soul, meant to be the dwelling place of Wisdom, then we are met with chaos. An anarchy of opinions and competing worldviews, and an utter lack of consensus on what it means to be good, to do good, and to refrain from evil.

If you carry relativism to its logical conclusion, you arrive at a world so totally unmoored from reality that there is hardly room for a conversation about anything of substance.

When we stop informing our own hearts and forming our own consciences with something – Someone – greater than ourselves, we become enslaved to sin. Even if we won’t admit sin exists.

And only a world bereft of properly-formed consciences and selfish, small hearts (raises hand) could produce times such as those we are living in.

Rejecting the notion of sin has not liberated us, as was promised.

Plugging our ears and closing our eyes to the reality of evil has not rendered for us a more humane planet on which to dwell. If anything, the less religious our society becomes, the more cruel and the more brutal – however masked by convenience and technology – our lives become.

Jettisoning traditional religious practices and a stodgy, smothering Deist worldview was supposed to make us more free. So why then is our society coarsening as we strip away traditional values and reject moral norms?

Because we weren’t made to work this way.

Because original sin.

Because everything that’s wrong with the world we’re living in, past, present, and future, has its locus in human frailty. And the moment I forget that and try to remake myself in some benign, secular post-modern image is the moment I begin to lose sight of my neighbor’s humanity.

Of her needs and her pain. Of her fundamental orientation to love and to be loved, in her entirety. Of the truth that certain rights belong to her, utterly separate from my opinions or ideas about her, by virtue of her human nature itself, created in the image and likeness of a Creator.

Otherwise, if her rights depend upon my capricious appetites and ideas? Quite frankly, she doesn’t stand a chance.

Listen, I believe people can be good and just and noble apart from practicing a traditional religion. But only when they behave accordingly: justly, nobly, and with goodness. And noble pagans such as these are practicing the essence of Christianity, whether or not they acknowledge it as such. And that’s how civilizations flourish. Because without it, there is only suffering.

Plato, in his Republic, said as much: “In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature,” and “there is no conceivable folly or crime which . . . when he has parted company with all shame and sense, a man may not be ready to commit.”

This thing we’re giving a go right now here in 2016, with individual “rights” rooted in appetites and passions and personal opinions unmoored from reason or reality, is not gonna fly. And to the extent that I can properly form my conscience and then (the hard part) behave accordingly, I can help to save the world.

Because we each of us, simultaneously, both “what’s wrong with the world,” and also the antidote.

Chesterton was right, And Plato was too. We are what’s wrong.

And we can become what is right, to the extent that each of us makes the effort to form and then follow our consciences, based not in passing trends, but in timeless truths, which are far less likely to be persuaded that some lives, after all, may be more valuable than others.

Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Evangelization, Family Life, relativism, social media, Suffering

What can we do? Practical steps for living in an age of terror

June 13, 2016

God, I’m sick of this.

I’m sick of opening my computer in the morning and seeing the latest body count splashed across my newsfeed. Of my husband cautiously, almost furtively asking me over the din of a weekend breakfast table, masking the gravity of the situation from tiny ears, “did you see the news about Orlando?”

You don’t even have to wonder, anymore, when someone asks “Did you see …” Heart sinking, thoughts racing, inevitably, another terror attack.

Maybe it’s not any more dangerous to raise children in this age than in any other, and maybe that’s the illusion of an unceasing news cycle and the flat, digital world we dwell in, but it seems a hell of a time, just the same.

One week we’re agitating for more death, for death enshrined by law, slickly sterilized for public consumption by that convenient mechanism dubbed “privacy,” and the next we’re reeling from another mortal blow, more death, death in unprecedented numbers, death by ambush.

Death begets death.

And reading the news today makes me want to cry. To curl up into a ball and gather my children under my arms – not that they all quite fit there – and hide.

I didn’t sign up for this. For raising kids in a culture that is self destructing. For growing a family in an age of terror and hatred and so much uncertainty.

Except that I did.

Yesterday at Mass, before we’d had news of Orlando, our parish welcomed two new Christians into the family. As their parents held squirming toddlers over the baptismal font and their godparents clutched newly-lit flames kindled from the Easter candle, from Christ Himself, the adults promised on behalf of those squirming babies to reject Satan, and all his works, and all his empty promises.

To reject the glamor of death, the allure of evil.

Because it’s real.

And, for reasons God felt sufficient to merit the decision, our free will allows us to choose evil.

I choose evil every day. I give in to a surge of anger at a traffic light, tapping my horn in frustration, muttering under my breath about a texting driver (like I’ve never done the same.) I raise my voice to my children. I spend too much time surfing the internet and not enough time on my knees. I have a moment of pure rage towards someone well up in my heart, and rather than reject it outright, I nurse it, just for a moment or two, relishing the feeling of being angry. Of being right.

The only real answer to the problem of evil in our world is the very same answer to the problem of evil in my own life: conversion.

Continual, frustrating, and sometimes humiliating conversion. Because life without Christ is hopeless.

This world is a mess, and truthfully, it always has been. And yet He saw fit to redeem it.

But we must participate in that redemption, because He loves us so much He drew up the contract along those lines: active participation.

So here are some practical ways we can fight terror in our own homes.

1. Mother Teresa will be canonized this Fall, and one of my favorite one-liners from her is the best medicine for our age:

“What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.”

Love begins at home, in the family. It is where our children will learn – or will not learn – their intrinsic value. It is where they will learn to share, to give and receive a sincere gift of self, to witness sacrificial love, to be heard and to be seen, to be convicted of the inestimable value of every single human life. Give your children, your siblings, your family members more love than you can bear to give. Ask God for more patience, more humility, more courage, and love your children and your spouse with a love that is truly outside your self. I fail at this every day. I must keep trying.

2. Frequent confession and reception of Holy Communion.

Look, the world we’re living in, even if the internet is contributing a bit to the impression, is bat.shit.crazy. It’s not okay that I think about terrorism when I’m queuing up for my next flight, when I take my kids to a museum or a baseball game. But the number one thing I can do to protect them – and myself – is to live, as much as possible, in a sacramental state of grace. That means daily Mass when possible (note to self: even when 2 year old is kicking me in the throat), Confession every couple of weeks, and making a daily examination of conscience.

Not only does this contribute to a higher likelihood that I will die in a state of grace, please Lord, but it makes me a better person.

Without Jesus and the grace of the Sacraments, I am, as I’m sure is evident in some way from this blog, a fairly miserable loser. That’s just me being honest. If I can continually be redeemed and recreated as a better, happier, holier person, how far might that go in influencing my immediate neighbors for the good?

3. Devotion to the Rosary, and to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

We’ve been meaning to get our home enshrined to the Sacred Heart for a couple months now. We bought a beautiful icon, hung it in a prominent place, and have since somehow failed to have a priest come over for the official “enthronement,” despite knowing, oh, 2 dozen or so, personally. (If that’s not commitment to laziness, I don’t know what is. But I digress.)

We do plan to do it soon. But just having the image in our living room has me stopping multiple times per day to place a finger or a kiss across Jesus’ heart, reminding myself as I look at His image what I’m supposed to be doing, and for Whom. (For a quick explanation of how keeping pictures of your loved ones in your home is not idolatry, click here.)

I try (and mostly fail) to pray a Rosary each night. We’ve had off and on success praying a decade with the kids at some point during the day, this season being more on the “fail” side. Our kids sleep with rosaries at their bedsides for easy access during the night. They’re comforting sacramentals – tangible reminders of the real graces available to us through prayer and devotion – and, as my 4-year-old likes to remind us, “Mary kicks the devil’s butt.”

Yeah she does.

4. Smile.

Smile at strangers. Stop and help someone who’s car is broken down, if you’re in a safe area and you’re able to do so. Give that guy a dollar. Buy someone’s coffee behind you in line. Call your sister or your friend and offer to pick up some extra milk and diapers while you’re at Costco. Tell your husband to sleep in while you get up and make the oatmeal. Call your mother in law and tell her you love her. Put your phone away and talk to the checker, the barista, the girl sitting next to you at the pool. Tell your server if you like her nails, his glasses, her hair cut.

Reach out, reach out, reach out.

We live in a lonely world. We can each be a little light in the loneliness, and give someone else the gift of knowing that, at least in that moment, they aren’t living in an age of terror.

Hatred needn’t have the final word.

Bioethics, Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Pro Life, relativism

The unsexiness of death (or what ‘Me Before You’ is missing)

June 3, 2016

One of these days I’m going to write a nice, fluffy post aaaaaaall about my favorite organic non-hormone disrupting eco-friendly non-GMO spray sunscreen. Or something like that.

Today is not that day.

This weekend marks the opening of Hollywood’s latest offering in the relatively new genre of “death porn,” and it’s a doozie.

I haven’t (and probably won’t) see the movie, because I prefer to remember Finnick losing his life in a heroic act of self sacrifice in the fetid sewers beneath the Capitol, not (spoiler alert) committing suicide while his approving-yet-heartbroken girlfriend holds his hand, and the bottle of pills.

But I did read the book.

And this story, this little love-story-that-actually-wasn’t, is, I think, more dangerous than some of Hollywood’s earlier attempts. Million Dollar Baby sent a depressing message about the value of an elite athlete’s life post-major-trauma, but the confused message of “loving someone enough to kill them” at least wasn’t mixed in with romantic love. It’s a small “at least,” but a notable one, I think, for our culture which has sexual love on a perilous pedestal indeed.

This story is a little different, because the main character is already paralyzed and clinically depressed when he meets his would-be lover and eventual suicide accomplice. It wasn’t a tale of knowing the man before the profoundly life-altering trauma, but knowing – and falling in love with – only the man he was afterwards: the crippled man in the power chair.

So it’s possible, then, to fall in love with a human being who has been profoundly damaged by disease or accident. Because his essence, his intrinsic value, is unchanged. But what this movie gets so wrong is it’s seminal manifestation of love. The climax in this love story isn’t a sex scene, but a suicide scene.

Hollywood has sex pretty backwards, as it is, but things take a complicated cultural turn when we move from letting our feelings be the sole barometer for our sexuality (check) to letting our feelings be the criterion against which we measure the goodness of our continued existence.

Do I feel like I’d be better off dead? Do I have a plan for how I’d like to make this happen? Could I get my loved ones to endorse and even participate in this plan? (This used to be called clinical depression with suicidal ideation, and I’m pretty sure it’s still in the DSM. For now.) Great! Cue next major Social Movement of Great Significance, which you’d better get behind or else you might be a Bigot with a capital-B.

Eons ago, the year before last, Brittany Maynard was catapulted into global fame for her own battle for “death with dignity.” Physician-assisted suicide enthusiasts “Compassion and Choices” jumped onto her bandwagon and road it hard and fast to her eventual suicide death, on November 1st, 2014. It was, by that point, such a Truman Show-esque spectacle, one wonders whether she was able to exercise complete freedom, in the end, or if the intensity of nearly worldwide scrutiny and a nasty public debate signed her death certificate months before the actual event. It was a tragedy.

Telling clinically depressed, chronically ill, and paralyzed people that their lives are not worth living is a tragedy.

Inviting millions of viewers into the complicated, imaginary love triangle between Lou, Will, and his quadriplegia and driving home the message the the charitable, noble, and humane solution to his suffering is death, is a tragedy.

I hope this movie’s legacy is that it gets people talking about the chilling double standard which exists between disabled people – cripples, as one feisty wheelchair-user prefers we call her – as opposed to us able bodied “regular” folks.

Is a human life only as valuable as the sum of a body’s working parts? To the extent that it’s wanted? The right color? The preferred age, weight and gender?

Either all human life is valuable, or none of our lives have value. Not yours, not mine, not Barack Obama’s or Pope Francis’ or Taylor Swift’s.

Our value does not fluctuate with age. Ability. Wealth. Employment status. Health.

Stand up for life this weekend by having a conversation with someone about this movie, and about the idea that a person with a disability is somehow exempt from being assessed against the same mental health criterion as an able-bodied being. Be prepared for some discomfort. But don’t be surprised if, 5 years from now, we’re not watching romantic dramas about euthanasia between consenting adults, but about parents dispatching terminally ill children “out of love.”

Ever read The Giver?

Things always sounds crazy and far-fetched until suddenly they start to sound a little more like common sense. Maybe because we’ve heard them repeated loudly, and frequently, enough.

Bioethics, Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Evangelization, Pro Life, relativism, sin

Gorillas, internet mobs, and the culture of the living dead

May 31, 2016

“The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual . . . what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.”

So reads an excerpt from a 2012 study from the Journal of Medical Ethics, edited by Prof Julian Savulescu, (the director of Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, who will presumably have his ass kicked by CS Lewis at the moment of his death. But I digress.)

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons,” the study explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.

Simcha Fisher wrote a piece last month that resonated deep, and wiped the last vestiges of hope from my brain that Western civilization could be rehabilitated, wholesale. We’re beyond that. Once death becomes an option, Simcha reasoned, then it becomes the only option. For there will always be a perfectly reasonable explanation for culling the herd of humanity for someone else’s sake.

When our lives cease to be acknowledged as divine in origin, the claim to any sort of inalienable right falls on deaf, progressively aloof ears.

How can a clump of cells be valuable, except to the host who carries it in her womb, and even then, only to the extent that she desires it?

How can a tangled, palsied mess of stiff limbs and a vacant stare be valuable to parents who signed up for a baby, doesn’t matter boy or girl, “as long as it’s healthy,”?

How can a defiant, aggressive, self or sibling-harming 2 year-0ld (most of whom are borderline feral, as any honest parent will admit) be anything other than a mistake we could perhaps scrub from the roster and make another go at?

How could an ailing, demented parent with glaucoma and the first stirrings of Alzheimer’s be worth keeping, to the tune of $20,000 a month, in an assistant living facility, fading in and out of twilight and burning through the grandchildren’s inheritance?

How, indeed.

How, any of us?

Who among us is universally convenient. Useful. Pleasant. Smart. Sweet-smelling.

Who among us has never been a burden to another human soul, and can solemnly swear to avoid the near occasion of burden for all their days, so long as they live?

People have become so very disposable. And real love, the 21st century reasons, means learning to say “I’d kill you” should the circumstances demanded it.

(Oddly enough, real, live disabled people – or differently abled, as it were – don’t seem to share that opinion.)

A 4 year-old falls into a gorilla enclosure because his reckless, negligent mother had the audacity to lose him in a crowded zoo, and the world falls to pieces over the death of, wait for it … the ape. The mother of the nasty little boy who I presume ought to have been left to face the consequences of his own poor choices, Hunger Games style, is now receiving death threats by the hundreds and angry, internet-fueled hate missives by the thousands.

The two leading presidential candidates for the United States of America have either tacitly or explicitly endorsed the wonderful work done by Planned Parenthood, that behemoth of death, again and again.

We’re not sure if we want to live any longer.

We’re not sure if it’s worth living any longer.

Welcome to the dictatorship of relativism. Welcome to an existence so tentatively fixed in reality that one rough semester of junior high could determine whether you live to see your high school graduation, and which locker room you’ll use to change into your cap and gown, should you begin as Brad but end up as Brittany.

Everything is fluid, nothing is certain, and a subjective emotionalism seems to have swept into the vacuum left by our collectively-vacated common sense. Can a society survive the complete abdication of reason? And is it possible to maintain peace without an objective standard of goodness to which we all of us citizens aspire and cling?

I’m not talking about multiculturalism or pluralism, because of course, civilizations have flourished in their diversity, and precisely because of their diversity. But even pluralistic societies tended to be composed of citizens who hold to objective moral truths and adhered to a shared moral order, something along the lines of “don’t kill, don’t cheat, don’t steal.”

We’re beyond that, now. We’ve thresholded to a new echelon of humanity, where the old stodgy moral norms of the Abrahamic religious traditions can at last be swept away like so much patriarchal tartar, built up over millennia of brainwashing.

We have new gods: convenience and technology. All the rest can be jettisoned.

This is depressing as hell to read, isn’t it?

Because it is hell. This is actually what hell is like: an utter disregard for the good of the other, a complete rejection of God, and profound, terminal selfishness. So when you look up, bewildered, from another spiraling news cycle and wonder what in the hell is going on in the world, you’re on the right track.

Hell is precisely what is going on, in the world.

And that is why He came. That is why He’ll come again.

Jesus is the only possible solution to a world as broken as ours. And whether or not it’s broken any worse than Nazareth circa 2 BC is up for debate. But He is and has always been The Only Possible Solution.

It’s not a nice story. He’s not a happy, aspirational character from the annuls of history. He came so that we might have life, and life in abundance.

Because without Him? There is only death.

Look around.

birth story, Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Pope Francis, Pro Life

Is having kids “sustainable?”

May 10, 2016

(Perhaps I could have called this one “does green sex = green babies?” but older, wiser Jenny is actually a little embarrassed to have gotten that term rolling.)

A couple months back a reader messaged me with a good – and weird – question. Like the great blogger and expert time juggler that I am, I promptly never answered her message and lost it in the bowels of Facebook. But! I remembered the inquiry all these months, and I wanted to take a stab at it today.

Her trouble was with a friend of a more progressive stripe who’d been bending her ear on how profoundly “unsustainable” children are, and for this reason, that no one could possibly justify having more than 1 of them.

My reader, troubled though she was by her acquaintance’s apparent disdain for the continuation of the human race, was hard pressed for an appropriate response.

My initial response was to snort laugh through my nose. But then I sobered up, because hadn’t I just driven my gas guzzling mini van to Whole Foods just that past week in search of the cheapest organic formula this side of the internet?

Granted, I had the vehicle filled nearly to capacity and was therefore a candidate for the HOV lane. But I did see her point.

From a purely secular and ecological perspective, things have gotten so crazily out of focus that I suppose it is possible to make the case that HUMAN LIFE ITSELF IS NOT SUSTAINABLE OR RESPONSIBLE.

But what does that mean? Have we come to such a profound depth of self-loathing as a species that we’ve begun to philosophically self destruct over the very meaning and purpose of existence?

Is this the inheritance of relativism and materialistic humanism?

I think (for now) no, to the first, but yes to the second.

I don’t believe that most people are hellbent on human destruction in the name of good stewardship of creation. That rather flies in the face of the essence of creation, at any rate, does it not?

Can’t have a creation without creatures, and creatures gonna imitate their Creator.

But therein lies the bigger problem, a very real fruit of the harvest of a relativistic and materialistic worldview: people are no longer uniquely paramount in the created order, and people are no longer valued based on who they are, but instead are measured increasingly by what they do.

In plainer terms, people only have as much worth as what they can offer back to the world.

Which is why we abort babies with Down Syndrome.

Which is why elderly Canadians are waitlisted for basic medical services in the name of “conservation of resources.”

Which is why babies born out of wedlock to poor, single, black women are targeted more ruthlessly by Planned Parenthood than any other subset of humanity.

If you don’t have something readily apparent to offer in the marketplace, you may excuse yourself from society.

Babies, of course, are about the most useless of all humans. They consume endlessly. Milk, diapers, energy, affection. They produce nothing but waste, quite literally. And so, by the standards outlined above, they are in no way “sustainable.”

Crazy thing is, they’re also who every one of us once was.

It is a foolish bias for the here and now that drives an adult population to utterly devalue the past and the future for the sake of the almighty present.

If there’s one way to easily sum up most of our cultural woes in the year 2016, selfishness might be it.

My body, my free time, my best life now; my convenience and my prosperity and my mental health and my infinite disposable income and leisure.

Children threaten all of those, sometimes terminally. And so children have become one of the enemies of the hip new economy of self realization and fun.

For fear of missing out, we’ve traded away the one thing that really matters: relationship with the other, and that uniquely human capacity to love exponentially into the future, willing the good for a society that does not yet exist, but which will one day utterly replace your own.

(Presumably, that society will still be comprised of people, not just dogs and iPhones.)

Relationships are tricky, though. And they’re often costly. They’re unpredictable and the benefits do not, emphatically, always outweigh the costs.

But if new life coming into this sad, old world isn’t the very essence of what we’re doing here…then what else matters?

Yolo, indeed. Emphasis on the “you.”

But if it does matter? If the future is not some faceless wasteland of McDonald’s wrappers and water bottles and overcrowded parking lots with double parked hovercrafts, but a continuation of the human story? Then it matters very much indeed what we’re spending our time and money and yes, our non-renewable resources into.

Investments wisely made yield dividends into the future.

I could go into the myriad ways that children can be “sustainable” and “green” because hand me downs, carpools, shared toy economies and limited carbon footprints from expensive air travel. But those essays already exist, and the more fundamental problem in my mind isn’t demonstrating whether having a small or medium or large family can be super socially conscious, but rather the fact that the question itself is being raised: are human beings themselves, sustainable?

Without an eternal worldview and an end game sunk deep into immortality, I don’t know how one answers that question.

Which is perhaps precisely why we’re asking it in the first place.

Lose sight of the Creator, lose sight of the dignity of the creature. And the rest of creation, along with it. Which is what Pope Francis has been telling us all along.

Bioethics, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Pro Life, reality check, Women's Health, Women's Rights

Boiling frogs and silent lambs

July 15, 2015

The last thing I want to write about, now that my belly is proceeding me into every room by approximately 2.3 seconds, is wholesaling baby parts. But dammit if that’s not what’s trending in my newsfeed these past 24 hours.

But you and I both know that Facebook has fundamentally myopic tendencies, meaning it caters to your specific likes/beliefs/interests/sexual preferences/cat food brands/etc., and that you won’t see something you disagree with, most of the time. Because you’ve probably unfriended and distanced yourself from anyone with whom you disagree in real life.

I’ve never personally unfriended anyone for such a thought crime, but I’ve been jettisoned from quite a few former college classmate’s lists myself, so I know how it works. And I know that without their presence in my own little echo chamber, things sound a lot more homogenous.

Which is hardly helpful for the purpose of debate and ongoing discussion. But I guess it reinforces our little bubbles. And I guess it’s part of why I was not at all surprised to see that although every other hashtag in my social networks yesterday was #ppsellsbabyparts, it was nothing but crickets from CNN, MSNBC, ABC and the like (oh, but this gem from Cosmopolitan is rich). I even forced myself to stroll through 30 minutes of Anderson Cooper last night on the treadmill, knowing full well that he wasn’t going to cover the story. But I had to see for myself.

Before I go any further I want to confess this: I’m disgusted, first and foremost, by my own deep apathy for the situation. When the news broke yesterday that Planned Parenthood had fallen victim to yet another undercover investigative journalism sting, this one featuring a high-ranking medical officer in the company discussing selling dead baby parts for profit over a leafy kale salad and red wine lunch, my blood pressure was unchanged.

My first reaction, internally, was something like “well of course they’re selling human organs for profit. Why wouldn’t they?”

Blase. Utterly unsurprised. And the longer I sit with the news, the more disgusted and disturbed I am by my own emotionally-neutral state. For God’s sake, I’m 9 months pregnant. I should be sobbing when I listen to testimony about “carefully crushing above the neck and below the pelvis, to keep abdominal organs intact;” because I can’t even get through most bedtimes without tears, lately.

But there’s nothing.

Sure, I’m disgusted on an intellectual level. But the gut reaction of horror, pain, and revulsion is notably absent.

And I blame myself as much as I blame our violent, twisted, sadistic media – both news and entertainment.

When I was a young teenager, maybe 13 or 14 years old, I saw my first real horror movie: Silence of the Lambs. (I’m almost 100% sure without my parent’s knowledge.) It horrified me on such a deep level that I honestly cannot, to this day, look at Anthony Hopkins in photographs or in any other movies. The evil he so convincingly portrayed in the character of Hannibal Lector was so profound that I was shaken to my very core.

My developing teenage mind was assaulted by the idea that a anyone could eat human beings, that this man could be so intellectually superior to the average person and yet ensnared by such demonic evil as to be able to casually remark about “nice chianti and Fava beans” whilst dabbing traces of his victim’s blood from his lips with a fine linen napkin.

Fast forward 15 years or so and we find ourselves immersed in such a culture of violence, both on the news and in our so-called entertainment, that I doubt Hopkin’s performance would push any envelopes or raise any eyebrows today.

Cannibalism? Yawn. Saw that on CSI last week. Scalping and skinning? Ho-hum, isn’t ISIS doing that in Siberia or somewhere right now?

And that’s why this can happen. That’s why a corporate behemoth like Planned Parenthood can continue to gobble up tax dollars and butcher up babies all while convincing the public of their benevolent generosity towards “underprivileged” women and minorities.

Feminism, my ass.

Turns out it might be closer to cannibalism, of all the possible isms it could resemble. And that even when such a story breaks, the news rolls upon deaf ears and hardened, calloused hearts, worn weary by decades of daily doses of demonic violence and evil emanating from our screens and from our newspapers.

Shame on us. Shame on a world that, when news of the trafficking of tiny human hearts and livers hits 1% of the mainstream news, good men and women don’t take up arms and rush to the defense of the defenseless. Don’t start a revolution.

When I was younger I used to wonder about the German people and why nobody tried to get out ahead of Hitler, how an entire nation could have fallen under his evil spell.

Now I know. Now I see, firsthand, that none of us are immune to the horrors of our day. And that as the temperature rises, the frog slowly cooks, oblivious to his own imminent peril as the mercury creeps ever upward. And that at a certain point the human mind, when confronted with such appalling and obvious wickedness, shuts down or short circuits in cowardice or fear or apathy or, or, or …

I’m still searching for my “or.” I’m still trying to figure out why I’m not physically standing in front of a Planned Parenthood clinic this morning, blocking the doorway with my enormous pregnant belly so that not one more woman, not one more child is destroyed at their hands.

Instead I’m writing this up in a coffee shop, my own unborn collection of human parts rolling around beneath my too-tight skin, kicks visible to the nearest barista even through a layer of fat and muscle and spandex.

And I don’t understand.

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