Triuimph Of The Body Snatchers
by
Thomas A. Droleskey
As I have noted so many times in my speaking and writing in the past thirty years, cold-blooded killers walk amongst us every day. They are our neighbors. They make much money. They are well-educated. They are articulate and well-dressed. They show up at their children's' sporting events and musical performances in the concentration camps known as public schools. Many of these cold-blooded killers participate in various community activities. They are liked and respected. Some become socially and politically prominent. They are cold-blooded killers nevertheless, men and women who ply their blood trade of death-dealing to innocent human beings under cover of the civil law and with the applause and approval of most of their fellow citizens.
Who are these cold-blooded killers. Well, apart from those who participate in the daily slaughter of the innocent preborn (the "physicians," "physicians' assistants," nurses, orderlies, receptionists, pharmacists), the cold-blooded killers who walk among us every day are members of the medical profession and the larger "health-care" industry, including executives and representatives of insurance companies, attorneys, social workers, psychiatrists and psychologists and psychotherapists (all it takes to be a "psychotherapist" in the State of New York, for example, is to have ninety credits of college work to your name), judges, bureaucrats in various governmental agencies, and members of local, state and national legislative bodies.
These cold-blooded killers, oblivious to and/or contemptuous of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they have been entrusted by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to His Catholic Church for their eternal safekeeping and infallible explication, believe that they have the right to play God with the lives of others. Despite living according to various false slogans ("freedom of choice," "reproductive freedom," "death with dignity," "compassionate healthcare"), these cold-blooded killers are fascists who demand complete adherence to their "received insights." The very people who scoff at the notion of immutable moral truths and at the infallibility of Holy Mother Church in matters of Faith and Morals believe that they are infallible and that those who dissent from their efforts to impose upon all of society by means of the civil law are "bigoted," "judgmental," "reactionary" or otherwise "unenlightened."
The cold-blooded killers who walk amongst us in our anti-Incarnational world of Modernity are not only killers of bodies. They are also killers of souls. And one of the supreme ironies represented by the existence of these cold-blooded killers who walk amongst us every days is that many, if not most, of them are intent on taking all manner of draconian measures to "preserve" the physical health of the citizenry, believing that it is necessary by mandate by law the amount of salt and sugar and saturated fat that we can ingest every day. Some would like to mandate a regimen of exercise so as to cut health care costs by eliminating the "epidemic" of obesity that is said to plaque the United States of America. These cold-blooded killers know better than everyone else what is "best" for us and are willing to kill off some of us in order to preserve the lives and longevity of others.
These cold-blooded killers are, objectively speaking, mad. They are doing the work of the devil himself, who hates the zenith of God's creative handiwork, the human being, and wants to destroy as many bodies and souls as possible before his "number" is up on the Last Day.
One of the many ways that these cold-blood killers have acted in a utilitarian manner to save the lives of some living human beings in order is by mutilating other living human beings for their body parts. The harvesting of body parts from some human beings for purposes of transplanting them into other human beings has become a major industry in the United States of America and around the world. Dr. Harry Wu, who was imprisoned in a Red Chinese slave labor camp for nineteen years, said at a conference in Montvale, New Jersey, in 1987 at which I was also a speaker that it was a common practice in the laogais (Red Chinese slave labor camps) for political prisoners and other prisoners to be dissected without anesthesia while they were alive for their vital body parts. Obviously, this was a form of execution for those prisoners. The Red Chinese finally got around to admitting this last year as they instituted a Red Cross-sponsored program for "voluntary" organ donation in their so-called "people's republic:"
China launched a national organ donation system yesterday in a bid to gradually shake off its long-time dependence on executed prisoners as a major source of organs for transplants and as part of efforts to crack down on organ trafficking.
The system, operated mainly by the Red Cross Society of China with assistance from the Ministry of Health, will begin as pilot projects in 10 provinces and cities.
"The system is in the public interest and will benefit patients regardless of social status and wealth in terms of fairness in organ allocation and better procurement," said Vice-Minister of Health Huang Jiefu.
Under the system, the Red Cross is responsible for encouraging post-death organ donations among the public, receiving donor registrations, keeping a database, starting a fund to provide financial assistance for needy, surviving families of donors and overseeing the allocation of donated organs according to set principles.
"Transplants should not be a privilege for the rich," Huang said.
The late, famous Chinese actor Fu Biao received two liver transplants within several months in 2005, raising doubts about the fairness of organ allocation, given that the waiting time for the general public can be years - even if one is lucky enough to get a match, let alone have a second surgery.
Currently about one million people in China need organ transplants each year while only 1 percent receive one, official statistics show.
Only about 130 people on the mainland have signed up to donate their organs since 2003, according to research on the promotion of organ donation after death by professor Chen Zhonghua with the Institute of Organ Transplantation of Tongji Hospital.
The system will help find more willing donors who didn't know how to donate, said Jiang Yiman, the society's deputy director at the launch yesterday in Shanghai. "The Chinese have a tradition of helping others in need and the potential of organ donations from the public is yet to be tapped," she said.
Organ donors
Executed prisoners, who experts estimate account for more than 65 percent of total donors, "are definitely not a proper source for organ transplants," said Vice-Minister Huang.
That the rights of death-row prisoners to donate is fully respected and written consent from them is required, he told China Daily.
Qian Jianmin, chief transplant surgeon with the Shanghai Huashan Hospital, said hospitals performing transplants not only treat patients getting organs from executed prisoners, but have to deal with other levels of government, including the justice department.
"Corruption can arise during the process," he said.
Some just ignore legal procedures regarding organ donations from executed prisoners and make a fat profit, Huang said.
All costs are passed on to patients. Sometimes the recipient pays up to 200,000 yuan ($29,000) for a kidney, not including other medical services.
China issued an organ transplant law in 2007 that bans organ trafficking and only allows donations from living people to blood relatives and spouses, plus someone considered "emotionally connected."
However, organ middlemen have been faking documents in order to make a person who is desperately in need of money be considered "emotionally connected" to the recipients, reports said.
Living transplants increased to 40 percent of total transplants from 15 percent in 2006, Chen Zhonghua said.
"That's one of the daunting tasks facing us as we try to end the organ trade by establishing this system," Huang noted.
Other goals include preventing organ tourism, improving transplant quality, better defining donors' rights and satisfying patients' needs for transplants in an ethical manner.
"With more organ donations from the public, the total cost for transplants will decrease," he said.
The exact cost for transplants varies from place to place and largely remains an industry secret. But experts said it's at least 100,000 yuan.
Praise for initiative
"We welcome the emphasis put on fair practice in organ procurement, allocation and transplant, echoing the WHO guiding principles on transplantation," said Luc Noel, coordinator of clinical procedures in the essential health technologies department at World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva.
"China is establishing the national network and authority necessary to initiate and maximize organ donations from deceased donors and thus progress towards the global mainstream in organ donation and transplantation," he said.
The system will be operated at both State and provincial levels. Donated organs would be allocated locally first and then nationally.
"My colleagues and I welcome the system, which will facilitate our efforts to save more patients and help medical workers concentrate more on practicing medicine," said transplant surgeon Qian, whose hospital performs about 150 transplants each year.
Wang Yuling, a young white-collar worker in Beijing, said she'd donate if it really helps someone in need instead of making someone rich.
The pilot projects will take place across the country, including Shanghai, Tianjin, Fujian (Xiamen), Jiangsu (Nanjing), Hubei (Wuhan), Liaoning, Shandong and Jiangxi. The system will then be introduced nationwide, Jiang said.
When asked for a specific timetable when the system will cover the whole country, Huang said the process took 20 years in United States.
"I hope it'll be faster in China. We are still searching for the best way," he said.
"Details about the system, like how to clearly define responsibilities for all stakeholders under the system, including the Red Cross and health administrations, are still under discussion," Jiang said. (Public Call for Organs in Red China.)
Little details such as the simple fact that it is impossible to take a heart or a liver out of the body of a dead person for the sake transplantation are not included in this news story from China Daily last year. The nasty little secret that the body snatchers don't want most people to know is that living human beings must be killed in order to harvest their hearts or livers for purposes of being transplanted into other human beings. This is true in Red China. It is true in the United States of America. It is true everywhere. Although one can, if one chooses, donate a lung or a kidney, no one can remove a heart or a liver without killing the person from whom such organs are extracted. It is that simple. Moral truth always is simple.
Dr. Paul Byrne is an expert in the field of the myth that is called "brain death," which has been used in "civilized" countries such as the United States of America to justify the harvesting of vital organs from living human beings while they are still very much alive:
Editor: Dr. Byrne, how would you describe the body of a human being?
Dr. Byrne: A human person on earth is composed of body and soul. God creates the person. Biologically speaking, the body is composed of cells, tissues, organs and eleven systems, including three major vital systems. No one organ or system controls all other organs and systems. Interdependent functioning of organs and systems maintains unity, homeostasis, immune defenses, growth, healing and exchange with environment, e.g., oxygen and carbon dioxide. Life on earth is a continuum from its conception to its natural end. The natural end (true death) occurs when the soul separates from the body.
Editor: Most adults and children, even if they are not physicians, recognize signs of life, don’t they?
Dr. Byrne: Yes, of course. The vital signs of a living human being include temperature, pulse, blood pressure and respiration. Physicians, nurses and paramedics listen to the beating heart with a stethoscope. Patients in intensive care units have monitors to demonstrate the beating heart, blood pressure, respiration and oxygen in the blood.
Editor: What about the signs of death?
Dr. Byrne: Throughout the ages, death has been and is a negative, an absence – the state of the body without life. The soul has left the body and decomposition has begun. After death what is left on earth is a corpse. The remains are empty, cold, blue, rigid and unresponsive to all stimuli. There is no heartbeat, pulse or blood pressure. The patient has stopped breathing. There is poor color of the skin, nails, and mucous membranes. Ventilation will not restore respiration in a corpse. A pacemaker can send a signal but it cannot initiate the heartbeat in the corpse. Healing never occurs in a patient that is truly dead.
Editor: When we speak of vital organs, what organs are we talking about?
Dr. Byrne: Vital organs (from the Latin vita, meaning life) include the heart, liver, lungs, kidneys and pancreas. In order to be suitable for transplant, they need to be removed from the donor before respiration and circulation cease. Otherwise, these organs are not suitable, since damage to the organs occurs within a brief time after circulation of blood with oxygen stops. Removing vital organs from a living person prior to cessation of circulation and respiration will cause the donor’s death.
Editor: Are there some vital organs which can be removed without causing the death of the donor?
Dr. Byrne: Yes. For example, one of two kidneys, a lobe of a liver, or a lobe of a lung. The donors must be informed that removal of these organs decreases function of the donor. Unpaired vital organs however, like the heart or whole liver, cannot be removed without killing the donor.
Editor: Since vital organs taken from a dead person are of no use, and taking the heart of a living person will kill that person, how is vital organ donation now possible?
Dr. Byrne: That’s where “brain death” comes in. Prior to 1968, a person was declared dead only when his or her breathing and heart stopped for a sufficient period of time. Declaring “brain death” made the heart and other vital organs suitable for transplantation. Vital organs must be taken from a living body; removing vital organs will cause death.
Editor: I still recall the announcement of the first official heart transplant by Dr. Christian Barnard in Cape Town, South Africa in 1967. How was it possible for surgeons to overcome the obvious legal, moral and ethical obstacles of harvesting vital organs for transplant from a living human being?
Dr. Byrne: By declaring “brain death” as death.
Editor: You mean by replacing the traditional criteria for declaring death with a new criterion known as “brain death”?
Dr. Byrne: Yes. In 1968, an ad hoc committee was formed at Harvard University in Boston for the purpose of redefining death so that vital organs could be taken from persons declared “brain dead,” but who in fact, were not dead. Note that “brain death” did not originate or develop by way of application of the scientific method. The Harvard Committee did not determine if irreversible coma was an appropriate criterion for death. Rather, its mission was to see that it was established as a new criterion for death. In short, the report was made to fit the already arrived at conclusions.
Editor: Does this mean that a person who is in a cerebral coma or needs a ventilator to support breathing could be declared “brain dead”?
Dr. Byrne: Yes.
Editor: Even if his heart is pumping and the lungs are oxygenating blood?
Dr. Byrne: Yes. You see, vital organs need to be fresh and undamaged for transplantation. For example, once breathing and circulation ceases, in five minutes or less, the heart is so damaged that it is not suitable for transplantation. The sense of urgency is real. After all, who would want to receive a damaged heart?
Editor: Did the Harvard criterion of “brain death” lead to changes in state and federal laws?
Dr. Byrne: Indeed. Between 1968 and 1978, more than thirty different sets of criteria for “brain death” were adopted in the United States and elsewhere. Many more have been published since then. This means that a person can be declared "brain dead" by one set of criteria, but alive by another or perhaps all the others. Every set includes the apnea test. This involves taking the ventilator away for up to ten minutes to observe if the patient can demonstrate that he/she can breathe on his/her own. The patient always gets worse with this test. Seldom, if ever, is the patient or the relatives informed ahead of time what will happen during the test. If the patient does not breathe on his/her own, this becomes the signal not to stop the ventilator, but to continue the ventilator until the recipient/s is, or are, ready to receive the organs. After the organs are excised, the “donor” is truly dead.
Editor: What about the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA)?
Dr. Byrne: According to the UDDA, death may be declared when a person has sustained either “irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions” or “irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem.” Since then, all 50 states consider cessation of brain functioning as death.
Editor: How does the body of a truly dead person compare with the body of a person declared “brain dead”?
Dr. Byrne: The body of a truly dead person is characterized in terms of dissolution, destruction, disintegration and putrefaction. There is an absence of vital body functions and the destruction of the organs of the vital systems. As I have already noted, the dead body is cold, stiff and unresponsive to all stimuli.
Editor: What about the body of a human being declared to be “brain dead”?
Dr. Byrne: In this case, the body is warm and flexible. There is a beating heart, normal color, temperature, and blood pressure. Most functions continue, including digestion, excretion, and maintenance of fluid balance with normal urine output. There will often be a response to surgical incisions. Given a long enough period of observation, someone declared “brain dead” will show healing and growth, and will go through puberty if they are a child.
Editor: Dr. Byrne, you mentioned that “brain dead” people will often respond to surgical incisions. Is this referred to as “the Lazarus effect?”
Dr. Byrne: Yes. That is why during the excision of vital organs, doctors find the need to use anesthesia and paralyzing drugs to control muscle spasms, blood pressure and heart rate changes, and other bodily protective mechanisms common in living patients. In normal medical practice, a patient’s reaction to a surgical incision will indicate to the anesthesiologist that the anesthetic is too light. This increase in heart rate and blood pressure are reactions to pain. Anesthetics are used to take away pain. Anesthesiologists in Great Britain require the administration of anesthetic to take organs. A corpse does not feel pain.
Editor: I know that there have been instances where young pregnant women have sustained serious head injuries, declared “brain dead,” and have given birth to a live child.
Dr. Byrne: That is true. With careful management, these “brain dead” women have delivered a live baby. In the longest recorded instance, the child was carried for 107 days before delivery.
Editor: Are there other uses for “brain dead” patients besides being the source of fresh vital organs?
Dr. Byrne: Legally, “brain dead” patients are considered corpses or cadavers, and are called such by organ retrieval networks. These “corpses” can be used for teaching purposes and to try out new medical procedures. Yet these same “corpses” are carrying unborn children to successful delivery. Certainly this is extraordinary behavior by a “cadaver!”
Editor: What if a potential organ donor does not meet the criteria for “brain death,” but has sustained certain injuries or has an illness suggesting that death will soon occur?
Dr. Byrne: Such cases have brought about the development of a what is called “non heart-beating donation” (NHBD), more recently labeled “donation by cardiac death” (DCD)–in which treatments considered extraordinary means, such as mechanical ventilation, are discontinued and cause the patient to become pulseless. As soon as circulation stops, death is declared.
Editor: Then what?
Dr. Byrne: This stopping of life supporting treatments is done in the operating room. After a few minutes–the time varies in different institutions–procedures to take vital organs begins.
Editor: But how can this be accomplished if the person declared to be dead, is truly dead?
Dr. Byrne: It can’t.
Editor: What about insurance coverage for “brain dead” patients?
Dr. Byrne: Hospitals allow them to occupy a bed and insurance companies cover expenses as they do for other living patients. If the patients’ organs are suitable for transplantation, any transfer of the patients to another hospital is covered by insurance. Insurance also covers the cost of life support, blood transfusions, antibiotics and other medications needed to maintain organs in a healthy state. This also applies to “brain dead” patients to be used in medical teaching facilities.
Editor: I know that the federal government has taken an active role in promoting so-called “living wills.” Has it also played a role in promoting vital organ donations?
Dr. Byrne: The federal government has, for reasons that are unclear, been deeply involved in promoting vital organ transplantation. For example, a federal mandate issued in 1998 states that physicians, nurses, chaplains, and other health care workers may not speak to a family of a potential organ donor without first obtaining approval from the regional organ retrieval system. If the potential for transplantation exists, a trained “designated requester” visits with the family of the patient first, including families that adamantly oppose organ donation. If someone at the hospital speaks to the family of the patient first, the hospital risks losing its accreditation and possibly federal funding.
Editor: Why the “designated requester”?
Dr. Byrne: That’s because studies show that these specialists have a greater success obtaining permission for organ donations from grieving family members. They are trained to “sell” the concept of organ donation, using emotionally-laden phrases such as “giving the gift of life,” “your loved one’s heart will live on in someone else,” and other similar platitudes, all empty of true meaning. Don’t forget that the donation and transplant industry is a multi- billion dollar enterprise. In 1996, Forbes Magazine ran an informative series on this issue, but as a rule it is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain solid financial data. One thing, however, is clear: donor families do not receive any monetary benefit from their “gift of life.”
Editor: There appears to be a strong utilitarian aspect to vital organ transplantation.
Dr. Byrne: That is because the philosophy that inspires the practice is based on the error that man is an end to himself, and the sole maker with supreme control of his own destiny. Slavery bought, sold and treated enslaved persons as chattel. The human transplantation industry and the “bioethics” groups that promote vital organ transplantation also consider human beings to be chattel, that is, they can be used as a source of organs for transplantation. This utilitarian ethic should be rejected. “Brain death” and all forms of imposed death are contrary to the Natural Moral Order and against God’s Ordinance “Thou shall not kill.”
Editor: It is obvious that organ donation is a very serious matter – literally a matter of life and death for the potential donor and the family of a potential donor, and that everyone ought to be implicitly and explicitly informed about the true nature of so-called “brain death” and vital organ transplantation.
Would you review for our readers some of the questions they should ask themselves before signing an organ donor card or giving permission for a loved one to be declared “brain dead” in anticipation of organ transplantation?
Dr. Byrne: If there is any question in the mind of your readers as to the fact that “brain death” is not true death, perhaps they may want to ask themselves the following questions regarding “brain death” and vital organ transplantation:
· Why can health insurance cover intensive care costs on “bread dead” patients?
· Why do “brain dead” patients often receive intravenous fluids, antibiotics, ventilator care, and other life support measures?
· Is it right and just for physicians and “designated requesters” to tell families that their “bread-dead” loved one is dead when she or he is not dead?
· How can “brain dead” patients have normal body functions, including vital signs, if they are really dead?
· How can a “brain-dead” pregnant mother deliver a normal, healthy infant?
· Why does a ventilator work on someone declared “brain dead,” but not on a corpse?
· Why is it wrong to carry out the burial or cremation of a “brain-dead” person?
· Are persons who have been declared “brain dead” truly dead?
· If “brain-dead” persons are not truly dead, are they alive?
Editor: Thank you on behalf of The Michael Fund for providing this valuable information to our readership?
Dr. Byrne: Thank you for this opportunity to inform your readers about this vital issue of vital organ transplantation. If they don’t remember every thing that I have said, I hope that they will remember this one point: “brain death” is not true death. Instead of signing a donor organ card, I would encourage everyone to obtain a Life Support Directive. A free copy of this document is available from Citizens (Dr. Paul Byrne on Brain Death, From The Michael Fund Newsletter)
It's all about the money, folks. Baby-killing is big-money. Contraception is big money. Body-snatching is big money.
As Dr. Byrne noted in his 2007 interview with Mrs. Randy Engel of the U.S. Coalition for Life and the Michael Fund, insurance companies will pay for "brain dead" patients to be kept alive until their insurance runs out or until it is more profitable for them to kill of the person for his body parts. My father-in-law, the late Mr. John Collins, had a two heart valves replaced on January 12, 2007. He never regained consciousness after the surgery. Doctors proposed at one point to use increasingly higher does of morphine to, in effect, stop the heart. This prompted Sharon's only Catholic sister to say, "You've just made $100,000 on making this man's heart as good as new and now you want to stop the heart with morphine?" It's all very legal, very neat, very tidy. And it's all--every little bit of it--absolutely immoral, proscribed by the binding, immutable precepts of the Fifth Commandment.
Go tell that--and I wish that some of you will tell that--to New York State Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, who has introduced legislation to make all residents of my native state, the State of New York, "organ donors," requiring those who do not want to participate in such an "enlightened" program of "self-giving" to take pro-active steps to opt out of the program:
Organ donation has become a vital way to save lives around the world, but a vast shortage of donors continues to mean people are losing their lives while on waiting lists.
But there is a unique proposal that could change all that.
New York State Assemblyman Richard Brodsky nearly lost his daughter, Willie, at 4 years old when she needed a kidney transplant, and again 10 years later when her second kidney failed.
"We have 10,000 New Yorkers on the list today waiting for organs. We import half the organs we transplant. It is an unacceptable failed system," Brodsky said.
To fix that, Brodsky introduced a new bill in Albany that would enroll all New Yorkers as an organ donor, unless they actually opt out of organ donation. It would be the first law of its kind in the United States.
"Overseas, 24 nations have it. Israel has it. Others have it. And it works without a lot of controversy," Brodsky said.
Currently one of the biggest obstacles to being a donor is while 9 out of 10 are favorable to it only 1 out of 10 is signed up to be a donor.
On Wednesday, the New York Organ Donor Network honored families who've donated the organs of loved ones with a planting ceremony at New York Botanical Gardens. Jean Carnevale had a timely talk about organ donation with her 27-year-old son before he died in a fatal car accident.
"Michael and I had a conversation two weeks prior on the way to a family member's funeral," Carnevale said.
And Emily Melendez and her siblings made the choice for their 68-year-old mother.
"Although I lost my mom, she lives on in three other people," Melendez said.
"The thing about organ donor is we have the cure right now in our hands. It's not like trying to cure cancer," said Elaine Berg of the Organ Donor Network.
Legal experts said if the law is passed, it will likely face challenges in court from family members or some religious groups.
"I think it's a little heavy handed. I think we should have the right to choose that," said Rachel Rogers of Crown Heights.
But many are hoping this law will help people to make a choice -- one way or the other.
Currently, you can make your organ donation wishes known by signing the back of your driver's license, signing up online or through a health care proxy. We have more information (http://wcbstv.com/health/ny.organ.donor.2.1662437.html)
Contingent beings who did not create themselves and whose bodies are destined one day for the corruption of the grave are not the arbiters of their own lives or the lives of other innocent human beings. No one can authorize positive measures to be undertaken that can result in only one possible end: his death. Human beings cannot act collectively, whether in the institutions of civil governance or in various "advisory panels," to authorize positive measures to be undertaken that can result in only one possible end: the death of innocent human beings. The use of the coercive power of the civil state in this matter is immoral and unjust. And while it is indeed the case that all types of measures are being taken by the cold-blooded killers who walk amongst us and are such "vital" parts of our communities to kill off the "useless" or the "hopelessly incurable" by means in hospitals and hospices by means of removing their nutrition and hydration and by giving them increasing higher doses of morphine and/or potassium chloride, we are not far, not far at all, from the day when a full-scale Dutch system of killing of children after birth and killing off the "useless" and "hopeless" will become just another accepted evil in this country as people go about their business of "making money" and having "fun" just as they are now as over four thousand children each day are butchered in their mothers' wombs under cover of the civil law.
The thoroughly reprobate Dutch have gotten to such a point of decriminalized murder in their health-care system that the only thing that seems to matter to them now is keeping an accurate count of how many are killed off each year. Can anyone say Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the Weimar Republic/Third Reich in Germany?
Ah, the Dutch: Having jumped off a vertical moral cliff when it comes to doctors killing patients, they seek to replace virtue with “transparency” through official reporting. The idea is that control over such practices can be maintained if the homicides are done in front of an open window rather than behind a closed curtain. But it doesn't’ actually turn out that way. Several studies have shown that active euthanasia is dramatically under reported by death doctors–despite explicit legalization. The same is proving true of the quasi-decriminalized infanticide license–at least according to an article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. (“Dutch experience of monitoring active ending of life for newborns,” J Med Ethics 2010;36:234-237, no link, here’s the Abstract.)
One potential reason is the apparent increase in eugenic abortion:
The introduction of ultrasound examination in 2006 at 20 weeks’ gestation as part of the routine prenatal screening in The Netherlands is another relevant development in medical practice. Although our data provide no explanations, ultrasound examination is expected to result in higher detection rates of structural congenital abnormalities, as shown in other countries where routine ultrasound examination has been an integral part of prenatal care much longer. This increased prenatal detection rate may result in more induced abortions before 24 weeks of pregnancy, fewer infants born with a congenital abnormality, and fewer postnatal deaths as a result of congenital abnormalities.” The fact that the abortion ratio (the number of induced abortions per 1000 newborns) is still increasing in The Netherlands supports this assumption. The impact of such developments is probably that the frequency of end-of-life decisions in infants in The Netherlands has decreased.
Still, aborting infants who would be disabled or dying if they were allowed to be born does not fully account for the dearth of reported infanticides. Rather than the 15-20 cases expected (in contrast, the Lancet has published two studies claiming about 80 infanticides per year), apparently only one was reported for 2007. The authors–who are Dutch bioethicists and/or physicians with different university medical centers–aren’t buying that figure, and so they seek to find out the reasons for the under reporting of the killing. It is a sickening read because it presumes the propriety of infanticide, euphemistically called “active ending of life,” and further assumes that the only real problem with the whole pogrom against what are clearly presumed to be defective infants, is one of bureaucratic i-dotting and t-crossing. From the conclusion:
We identified several changes in the practice of end-of-life decision-making for infants that may explain the lack of reporting of cases of the active ending of life. Furthermore, it seems virtually impossible to comply with the requirements in the current regulation, due to either time constraints or the nature of the suffering that is addressed. If societal control of active ending of life in newborns is considered useful, a different regulation is needed. Attention should be paid to the requirements for careful practice in the current regulation, to physicians’ awareness of when they should report their act, and to a safe legal environment for reporting.
Yes, with euthanasia the impetus is to almost always to loosen regulations, in this case of babies, not to stop killing. But I don’t know why these authors are surprised. Killing is always best done in the dark.
Culture of death, Wesley? What culture of death? (Dutch Infanticide: Bioethicists Say It Isn’t the Killing That is Wrong, It is Insufficient Reporting of the Killing - Wesley J. Smith)
A nation that does not recognize Christ the King will come to place no value at all in the lives of the rational creatures He redeemed by the shedding of every single drop of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross. A nation that can endorse divorce and contraception and permit, in the name of "free speech" and "free press" and "personal liberty," mind you, pornography because it has no regard for the King of Heaven and Earth in its organic documents and its laws will come to endorse the execution of innocent as a matter of routine. As Dr. Charles E. Rice noted in his groundbreaking book, The Vanishing Right to Live (published by Doubleday Books in 1969), it would be only a matter of time before euthanasia under cover of the civil law would be a reality if baby-killing became the law of the land in the United States of America. That baby-killing and euthanasia and other evils have become the law of the land here and elsewhere, is but the logical result of the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist, and semi-Pelagian principles of Modernity. We are now witnessing the triumph of the body-snatchers here and around the world.
I explained to my students in the early-1980s, when teaching them in an Introduction to Political Science course at Nassau Community College about the horrors of utilitarianism, that the day was coming when a British-style system of socialized medicine would be adopted in this country, telling them that someone at that time, 1983, to be precise, who was sixty years old in the United Kingdom and who did not have his own medical insurance was denied government payment for various services, including heart surgery, as it was believed that the cost of the surgery was not warranted by the patient's future level of economic "productivity." One of the quotes that I liked to use in those classes to demonstrate that Our Lord had indeed given us Catholic writers to warn us most prophetically about the dangers of our own days was this one from Hilaire Belloc:
It is worth noting, by the way, that the most sentimental people, who are loudest against the right to wage a just war, to execute a criminal, are just the people who are most likely to be in favour of ‘putting incurables out of their pain,’ which the commandment against murder most emphatically forbids. (Hilaire Belloc, Characters of the Reformation.)
Recent commentaries on this site have stressed the fact that hospitals in a Catholic world would be staffed by true, believing Catholics who would give the sort of care to the indigent and the elderly and the disabled that was given by the likes of Saint John of God and Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini and Saint Camillus de Lellis and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, to name just a few. Catholic physicians would administer care to patients according to the truths of the Catholic Faith, advising patients--in conjunction with true priests--as to which course of treatment was most advisable according to their particular states-in-law. And those Catholic physicians would not be tied to "Big Pharm" as they would be open to the methods of Saint Hildegard that have, most tragically, been coopted largely by New Agers, thus giving these proven methods a stigma in the eyes of even many learned Catholics that does a disservice to the cause of the temporal and spiritual well-being of Catholics at a time when the pills and vials of "Big Pharm" are being pushed in front of their noses without any thought being given to true alternatives.
As Pope Leo XIII explained in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900, a world that is not governed according to Catholic truth will be one that is stained with crime:
God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to sin, should live to justice" (1 Peter ii., 24)-that is, to virtue and holiness. In this consists the moral life, with the certain hope of a happy eternity. This justice, in order to be advantageous to salvation, is nourished by Christian faith. "The just man liveth by faith" (Galatians iii., II). "Without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews xi., 6). Consequently Jesus Christ, the creator and preserver of faith, also preserves and nourishes our moral life. This He does chiefly by the ministry of His Church. To Her, in His wise and merciful counsel, He has entrusted certain agencies which engender the supernatural life, protect it, and revive it if it should fail. This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" (John xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime.
As I have noted in the past--and will keep noting until the day I die or until I am physically and/or mentally able to do this work, the triumph of the naturalistic forces of this mortal, passing world has been made all the more complete by the manner in which authentic Catholic Faith and Worship have been mutilated and murdered by the lords of conciliarism, including Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, who has blasphemed God openly by esteeming the symbols of false religions and by promulgating propositions that have been condemned by the teaching authority of the Catholic Church. The soul-killers of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism actually do more harm than such men as Richard Brodsky as they predispose many Catholics to accept the evils of naturalism by refusing to teach one and all that Catholicism is one and only foundation of personal and social order.
Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ told us to not to fear those who kill the body, fear only him who can destroy the soul:
And I say to you, my friends: Be not afraid of them who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will shew you whom you shall fear: fear ye him, who after he hath killed, hath power to cast into hell. Yea, I say to you, fear him.
Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? Yea, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: you are of more value than many sparrows. And I say to you, Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of man also confess before the angels of God. But he that shall deny me before men, shall be denied before the angels of God. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but to him that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven.
And when they shall bring you into the synagogues, and to magistrates and powers, be not solicitous how or what you shall answer, or what you shall say; For the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what you must say. (Luke 12: 4-12.)
We must always view the world through the eyes of the Faith, rejecting all of the deceits of naturalism that have produced this temporary triumph of the body-snatchers.
A book that was instrumental in convincing Therese Martin to seek entrance in the Carmel of Lisieux is The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life. This book, which consists in a series of conferences given in France by Father Charles Arminjon, has been translated in to English and published by Sophia Press. Father Arminjon's foreword to this book is an exhortation to flee the deceits of this world as we concentrate on getting home to Heaven as members of the Catholic Church:
It has seemed to us that one of the saddest fruits of rationalism, the fatal error and great plague of our century, the pestilential source from which our revolutions and social disasters arise, is the absence of the sense of the supernatural and the profound neglect of the great truths of the future life. The earth is afflicted with a dreadful desolation, because the majority of men, fascinated by the lure of fleeting pleasures, and absorbed in their worldly interests and the care of their material affairs, no longer fix their thoughts on the principal considerations of the Faith, and stubbornly refuse to recollect within themselves. It may be said of our present generation what the prophet Daniel said, in this time, of the two old men of Babylon: "They suppressed their consciences, they would not allow their eyes to look to heaven, and did not keep in mind God's just judgments.
The two causes of this terrifying indifferences and profound universal lethargy are, obviously, ignorance and the unrestrained love of sensual pleasures that, by darkening the interior eye of the human soul, bring all its aspirations down to the narrow level of the present life, and cut it off from the vision of the beauties and rewards to come. Now, since wise men have found at all times that contradictions are overcome with their opposites, it seemed to us that the most efficacious remedy with which to fight confidently against the inveterate evil of naturalism was a lucid, clear, and exact exposition, without diminution, of the essential truths dealing with the future life and the inevitable termination of human destinies.
Perhaps we shall be accused of expressing this or that assertion of ours too crudely and starkly, and of broaching the most serious and formidable points of Christian doctrine, without, at the same time, modifying and softening them so as to adapt them to the prejudices or apathy of certain souls, unacquainted with such grave considerations--like a physician who carefully allows only a limited amount of light to a sick friend, in order not to hurt his painful eyes by excessive glare. However, in the religious and supernatural order, the phenomena and effects wrought upon the soul are often the reverse of those that occur in the physical and material order. In the visible world, an excessive amount of light dazzles: it leads to dimness of vision and causes blindness.
On the other hand, as soon as the mind enters the intellectual realm, and is transported into the vast sphere of invisible and uncreated matter, excess is no longer to be feared. Jesus Christ is the great luminary of our intellects, the food and life of our hearts. He is never better understood, or more loved, than when He manifests Himself liberally in the integrity of His doctrine and the most eminent splendors of His divine personality. The example of the Apostles announcing the gospel amidst the twilight of paganism, and boldly preaching Jesus Christ crucified before the Roman Senate and amidst the philosophers of the Areopagus, is enough to tell us that truth is attractive to souls naturally Christian, and that it enlightens and convinces them only insofar as it is presented to them in all its strength and in all its clarity.
Our trial is limited to the duration to the period of the present life. If, as the rationalists maintain, this life is only a link in the chain of our destiny, and if the course of time wherein man is subject to strife, temptation, and the blandishments of the senses and of creatures should continue indefinitely, then Jesus Christ will never be king, virtue brings no hope, and evil will remain eternally triumphant. Thus, it is quite certain that the scene being played here below will sooner or later, reach its climax and end. Mankind will then enter upon a new phase of existence, and all that we cherish, all that we search after in this present life, will be less than a shadow, and vain smoke. This is a certain fact, which will all our discoveries and the marvels of our genius will not be able to participate. (Father Charles Arminjon,The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life, translated by Susan Conroy and Peter McEnerny. Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press, 2008, pp. xvii-xix.)
We must never deny Christ the King before men. We must always raise the standard of Christ the King as we exhort one and all to recognize that Our King, Who awaits in tabernacles for our acts of love and thanksgiving and reparation and petition, must reign over each man and each nation and that His Most Blessed Mother, Mary our Immaculate Queen, is to be honored publicly by each man and each nation, including by the government of the United States of America, in order to know what it is to be blessed abundantly by the true God of Revelation. May each Rosary we pray this day and every day help to plant seeds for this as we seek to serve Christ the King through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary our Immaculate Queen.
Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now ?
Viva Cristo Rey!
