Being pro-Life means more than opposing abortion

Being pro-Life is so much more than being anti-abortion. Being truly pro-Life pro-Life means being concerned for every human life at every stage, stage and eventuality -- especially in the face of increasingly aggressive cultural forces tat say otherwise. It not only means opposing the destruction of all human life but also providing constructive alternatives that uphold human life.

Critics of the pro-Life movement often accuse pro-lifers of only being concerned about saving unborn babies. This is not true, and I think the accusers know it -- or they are woefully uninformed about the pro-Life movement.

For years I've worked with pro-Life groups across North America; I have encountered
an extensive network of programs and services offering life-affirming alternatives to women in crisis pregnancies. Pro-Life activists work in partnership with local crisis pregnancy centres and churches to provide support and inclusion for women and their babies.

Many crisis pregnancy centres offer crucial life skills training to young mothers, employment assistance in concert with existing community resources, or help women to get educational upgrading and/or further education. Other groups work with adoption agencies if women in crisis pregnancies wish to take this option.

Many pro-Life groups have established counselling services for post-abortive women.

These are essential pro-Life responses in a era when abortion on demand is widely accepted.

But things must not end there and they have not.

The pro-Life movement has evolved over the decades from solely trying to stop abortion to actively working to check the acceptance of euthanasia and assisted suicide. This is necessary because, with the passage of time, western society has hardened its attitudes toward vulnerable, inconvenient or unwanted human life.

The thought of assisting the suicides of defeated people has gone from being unthinkable to acceptable to legislatively supported in places like Oregon and Washington state. Advocates of euthanasia and assisted suicide are vociferously lobbying in other jurisdictions for laws that allow killing of terminally and chronically ill people.

Even without legislation, euthanasia and infanticide of incurably ill and profoundly disabled newborns and adults are being quietly practised in hospitals across North America. It's often a subtle practice cloaked in nuances of health care decision making and cryptic medical terminology designed to convince families and caregivers to allow people with terminal or chronic illnesses or serious disabilities to be euthanized.

What is the usual method of killing? Withholding nutrition (food) and hydration (water). Sadly, in certain bioethical and medical circles, imperfect or inconvenient human life has become as cheap as grass clippings.

Many pro-Life groups are quickly expanding their work to respond to this new assault against vulnerable humanity. They must shift gears to become proactive and encourage community based strategies to educate people about caring for loved ones who acquire disabilities of diseases.

This may involve promoting or establishing community faith-based hospices, special supports for parents expecting a disabled child or befriending families where early onset of dementia has been diagnosed in a parent or spouse. New pro-Life responses should involve development or coordination of respite services for primary caregivers of profoundly disabled people.*

[Sometimes a proper response to such families may be as simple and practical as help with yard work, providing transportation to and from medical appointments, or helping them research where to access services and advocacy when needed.]

Society's aversion to disability and the myth that death is preferable to disability must be challenged at every turn. It must be challenged because it is a lie.

The pro-Life movement must promote a new cultural paradigm that sees people with disabilities as indispensable to community life. We must get the message out that people with disabilities have unique gifts to bring to the table of human experience. Even those who are comatose or unresponsive unknowingly call their caregivers and community to a higher standard of love.

Mark Pickup
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*My wife's experience with abortion, post-abortion grief and living for 26-plus years with my degenerative multiple sclerosis, as well as helping aged family members with end of life care has equipped her with a heart and understanding for appropriate and well-rounded community pro-Life responses. This blog entry is largely based upon her insights.

See Mark Pickup's latest blog "One woman's pro-Life message for a time such as this".

Go to http://markpickup.org

HLM

Alberta's 2009 March for Life

Last Thursday (May 7th) the second annual March for Life was held in Alberta's Capital city of Edmonton. It was supported by all Alberta's Catholic bishops, and attended by clergy from Eastern Orthodox and Ukrainian Catholic denominations. Sadly representation from evangelical denominations were conspicuous in their absence. Still, hundreds of people from throughout the province showed up at the steps of the provincial legislature to hear speakers of which I was one. My speaking notes are at the end of this post for information of readers.


The crowd marched through the streets of downtown Edmonton. It stretched three and a half blocks long, four and five marchers deep, and required police escort as traffic and the hustle of commerce was disrupted while we snaked through the streets with placards and banners declaring the sanctity, dignity and equality of all human life. Bystanders watched respectfully from the sidelines at the striking witness for Life before their eyes.

It was interesting but expected to note that Edmonton's major daily newspaper, The Edmonton Journal,did not report the event at all. According to their censorship of ideas the event did not occur. It was reminiscent of another pro-Life march that occurred in the city of Toronto in 1984. Twenty-five thousand people (police estimate of crowd size) silently march past the Morgentaler abortuary. Participants said it was eery to hear feet walking in silent protest of the killing of innocents occurring inside that terrible place. The silence was complete: The Globe and Mail, the CBC and other media did not report it. It was as though the massive protest of citizenry didn't happen. Shhh!

(Yet if a dozen abortion advocates, homosexuals or transvestites hold a demonstration and its news for days.)

When the marchers arrived back at the steps of the provincial legislature, I delivered the following short address:

We have entered a moral storm that’s breaking the ancient western moral code that governed the moral ethos of generations. Although people may have occasionally failed to behave the way they instinctively knew to be right, there was a consensus that the most vulnerable and weak of society must be protected.

For centuries, abortion was considered a serious crime. The Hippocratic Oath for doctors dating back thousands of years forbade abortion (and euthanasia). The Catholic Church has maintained the moral evil of abortion since the 1st Century. Ancient and persistent Common Law traditions dating back into the Middle Ages treated abortion as a “grave crime.” In 1802, England codified in to law what had been considered a criminal offence by custom, and made abortion a criminal act. What I am trying to illustrate to you is that considering abortion on demand as a right (as Canada and the US do) is a recent development and an aberration from the course of human history.

As I speak these words to you there are preborn children being slaughtered not more than 10 blocks away from us. These children are being killed because they are unwanted or inconvenient to their parents. All across Canada abortion can be obtained for any reason at all, or no reason whatsoever.

Now Canada is about to consider decriminalizing assisted suicide. It has already been embraced by Oregon, Washington state, Holland and elsewhere. This, too, is a deviation from centuries of Common law that discouraged, prohibited or punished assisting in the suicide of a person. Civilized and compassion societies did not kill their weakest or those who had sunk beneath the waves of circumstance.

Canada has abandoned its Christian roots. It has abandoned the ideal that there is something sacred to human life. The nation of my birth has coarsened to the point that I can scarcely recognize it. I feel like an alien in my own country. Public opinion polls consistently reveal that 70 % of Canadians agree with euthanizing (or helping the suicides) of the terminally or chronically ill people and the severely handicapped (people like me). That means that 7 out of 10 of my fellow Canadian citizens I pass on the street agree with helping me to kill myself if I despair of my situation. Apparently they believe it’s my freedom to choose.

But choices made from the perspective of abandonment, depression or desperation are not free at all. Do not talk to me about the freedom to choose unless all my choices are equally weighted and people have access to good supportive services and feel included within a tender embrace of community. There is no freedom of choice for the incurably ill person who feels the cold winds of abandonment or sees the world from beneath the dark veil of depression. There is no freedom to choose for a desperate woman is crisis pregnancy who is being pressured to have an abortion.

If Canadians really are “pro-choice”, why is only one choice so heavily funded? I propose a balanced approach. Provide equal funding for women who choose life for their babies. Provide funding to homes for unwed mothers where they can finish their education and receive prenatal care and life skills training. Provide funding for community and faith based partnerships with government for shepherding homes where women in crisis pregnancies can be mentored and establish or re-establish community connections. Give women positive choices not just negative choices.

Ensure modern techniques of palliation, pain management are strengthen in medical schools. Create government and community based hospice options where the dying and incurably sick are loved and included within their communities.

Until the choices for desperate people have equal attention, the idea of the freedom to choose is a hollow lie.

You are a critical minority who still believe in the sanctity, dignity and equality of all human life. Stand firm in the present Dark Age. Make your witness matter for a culture of life in a prevail culture of death. Do not tire or flag. Do not succumb to intimidation. You can turn the tide! I believe this with all my heart. I have to, the alternative is unthinkable.

Mark Pickup