Our People

“Abortion and Euthanasia: Merciful Solutions?”

University of Sydney Catholic Chaplaincy Mission week

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
11/10/2006

Christ the Divine Mercy

This week the University of Sydney Chaplaincy Team have been conducting a mission under the beautiful title: “Christ the Divine Mercy”. It evokes a long tradition most recently enriched by St Faustina’s devotions, but tracing back through St Margaret Mary, St Francis de Sales, St Catherine of Siena and other devotees of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, all the way back to the Scriptures where God is celebrated as “rich in mercy and steadfast love”. If there is some specifically Catholic wisdom about mercy and compassion – as well as much that is shared with people of other religions and none – then we would expect it to have some practical implications for real life questions. So today I have been asked to reflect upon two hot-button issues in contemporary Western society at the beginning and end of life – abortion and euthanasia – and to ask whether these are the ‘merciful’ solutions to people’s problems that they might first appear to be.

First a few thoughts about what ‘mercy’ is. Catholic wisdom holds that mercy is a divine quality in which human beings can share. Not only can they be merciful, they must be if they are to be truly the people God and their own natures call them to be, and if they are to live well in community together. Of course concepts such as love, mercy and compassion can be over-used or misused and in the process demeaned. Giving in to people and giving them whatever they want, for instance, is not always mercy. Letting everyone who is accused or convicted of crimes go free might not in the end be respectful of the victims, the community or even the criminals themselves. Acquiescing to every request for clemency might be a misuse of compassion.

Mercy is about empathizing with people in their suffering, brokenness, fear, confusion, vulnerability or powerlessness, staying by their side, and offering them a kind of love, forgiveness and reconciliation that best respects and serves their nature and calling as well as ours. It requires real self-investment on the part of the merciful person. In the process it creates or restores good relationships with others. It tells a story and shapes the character of both the person who is merciful and the one who receives mercy. The story Jesus told of the Good Samaritan is the story of humanity beaten and left for dead and restored by Christ the Divine Pity who pours oil and wine, bandages our wounds, and carries us to that inn which is the Church that we might be cared for properly. Christ teaches us human mercy and divine mercy, a human mercy of divine proportions, a mercy which has the heavenly power to heal and elevate, to transform and transfigure: a mercy we call ‘grace’.

And so to our present topic. The question I have been set today is: are abortion and euthanasia merciful solutions? In other words, does killing at the beginning or end of life express that kind of self-donation and reverence and relationship?

Before I offer any quick or glib answer to that question, I want to acknowledge two things. First, that being a merciful solution is not the only reason some people ask for or support abortion or euthanasia. There can be other reasons, such as ‘autonomy’, the desire to be free to live and die as one wishes, without interference from others. There is a lot that might be said about that, but this is not the time. Today I want to examine whether these are really merciful solutions to people’s problems: if people have other reasons for wanting abortion and euthanasia – and I recognize that they might – we will have to discuss them another day.

I also want to acknowledge that many people who seek or provide or support the availability of abortion and/or euthanasia do so really believing they are being compassionate in doing so. I would not presume that all ‘pro-choicers’ are merciful in their motivation or equally so – any more than I would presume all ‘pro-lifers’ were – but I recognize that many are driven by a kind of benevolence and genuinely want to serve others well. Just as it is unhelpful to label all ‘pro-lifers’ as hot-heated religious fanatics, so I think it is false to presume all ‘pro-choicers’ are cold-hearted killers.

Let us presume, therefore, that from the point of view of those proposing or supporting abortion and/or euthanasia that they do so as a sort of ‘mercy killing’. They believe that it is an act of kindness. In the case of abortion, it is thought to be an act of kindness towards the child whose life is ended or towards the mother whose pregnancy is ‘terminated’ or towards others. In the case of euthanasia, it is thought to be an act of mercy towards the suffering person whose life is thereby shortened or towards the family having trouble coping, or towards others such as the society whose resources are limited.

Abortion as mercy-killing

Not long before I entered this University in the 1970s the number of abortions in Australia had begun to spiral out of control. After thirty years’ experience of effective abortion-on-demand and abortion rates amongst the highest in the Western world, the recent national debate about abortion suggests that people are far from comfortable with where we’ve come to. They are ready to query some of the assumptions upon which Australia’s uneasy compact with the abortion industry was based. Until now the unspoken agreement was: turn a legal blind-eye to abortion; publicly fund it but rarely talk about it in public; never really come to terms with it in private; provide no serious alternatives; give it to all comers; but require women to shut up about it afterwards. No one likes it; but abortion is “a necessary evil” – so the logic of this compact goes – and sometimes it’s the best thing all round, especially for the woman, maybe for the child (or the child who would have been) and perhaps for others too. Abortion, then, is mercy-killing.

A new generation of women (and men) has emerged with a very different agenda to that of the generation which fought for (and against) the abortion spiral of the 1970s and ’80s. As a young woman at a gathering of Women’s Forum Australia put it recently: “The abortion issue was debated and decided before my generation was born…My age group haven’t had the opportunity publicly to discuss the kinds of policies and approaches we would like to see implemented.” Most of the 800 women who attended that meeting were less than 40 years of age and most of them had doubts about how truly ‘merciful’ abortion is. Clearly young people do not think that abortion is something which was resolved long ago by their elders and betters, which is now ‘none of their business’.

Another new factor is the technological revolution which has taken ultrasound imaging right into the womb, allowing people to see the unborn child for the human being he or she is and to bond to that child much earlier. Pregnancy testing and other technologies have made women surer, earlier, that there is a child growing within them. The unravelling of DNA means no-one who has done Year 8 Science believes that the early human organism is just a clump of the mother’s tissue or a vegetable awaiting a soul. The more we know about the science of the unborn, the greater community unease about abortion in general and repugnance regarding late abortion in particular.

Of course there are plenty of philosophical rationales on offer for treating very young human beings as ‘non-persons’ or ‘rightless persons’. Some cut the deck at birth or at some earlier stage. But to each such attempt to justify abortion or other attacks on the unborn by defining them out of the class of protected persons, we might ask: what is the unborn child before ‘it’ is morally human? What makes the unborn child suddenly become human? Ask any grieving mother after a miscarriage or the birth of a still-born child whether it was her child that died. Try telling her it was “a pre-personal organism of doubtful moral status”. What feminist writer Naomi Wolff called this “the fœtus as nothing paradigm” is no longer intellectually or emotionally tenable for most people. Recent polling research demonstrates that the ‘foetus isn’t a human person’ line just does not persuade most Australians anymore, if ever it did.

Another philosophical challenge to the old abortion consensus has been the issue of what standard of personhood we can invent which excludes the unborn from personhood (or protection) but which does not at the same time exclude various other unwanted people from the class of persons or protected persons. Whatever characteristic is chosen by which to exclude the unborn — such as smallness, dependence, irrationality, unwantedness or unresponsiveness — clearly excludes many other, born people. Indeed the unborn child, especially in the weeks before birth, can demonstrate more of these characteristics than many born people do. Philosophically, such lines reduce to mere arbitrariness. Whatever the characteristics we value in human beings, those human beings only ever demonstrate those characteristics because are already human.

Thus if abortion is to be justified today, it is in many people’s minds because it is a mercy to the mother – whose life will in some sense be ended if she doesn’t have an abortion – or to the child whom it is presumed will have an dreadful life if brought to term. Pretending there is no child at issue or that the woman is pregnant with something other than a child doesn’t wash anymore. Thus polls suggest that Australians are most comfortable with abortions to save a woman from some awful situation such as a threat to her life or having to carry the child of rape or incest, or to save the child from growing up with a severe disability. Most abortions in Australia are not of course for such reasons. Most do not fit comfortably within the category of ‘mercy killing’. No wonder the polls show that almost all Australians, including most who support a legal right to abortion, think there are too many abortions and that they should be reduced.

Apart from generational change and developments in science and philosophy, our religious climate has also evolved. A lasting legacy of Pope John Paul II will undoubtedly be his having positioned Catholicism as a defender of the unborn and a builder of an alternative civilisation of life and love to that of the “culture of death”. Catholics are not alone in this. Evangelical churches and other major world religions are increasingly outspoken in their pro-life beliefs. It is, in fact, only the more pro-life churches and religions that are growing anymore, while the groupings of liberal, pro-abortion believers are in terminal decline. And the latest theological explorations — such as David Jones’ excellent book, The Soul of the Embryo (Continuum 2004) — reveal a new generation amongst theologians and moralists more pro-life than many of its immediate predecessors.

Biology, philosophy and theology have given little comfort to the abortion ideologues in the past three decades: how about women’s experience? The wholesale experience of abortion — touching perhaps 1 in 3 women directly, and through them everyone else — has meant there is an enormous emotional investment in keeping abortion available and respectable. But, paradoxically, the abortion experience has left so many women (and men) hurting that the old ‘abortion is safe and easy’ line just doesn’t wash with people any more. There is too much suffering, too much silence. The shocking lack of aftercare for these women matches the disturbing lack of pre-abortion information and option-giving. Stories are emerging and studies following of the physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual ill-effects of the abortion revolution.

Whatever the costs, abortion was supposed to be good for women, a mercy to them. Yet as Australia’s most famous feminist campaigner Germain Greer has observed: “What women ‘won’ was the ‘right’ to undergo invasive procedures in order to terminate unwanted pregnancies, unwanted not just by them but by their parents, their sexual partners, the governments who would not support mothers, the employers who would not employ mothers, the landlords who would not accept tenants with children, the schools that would not accept students with children. Historically the only thing pro-abortion agitation achieved was to make an illiberal establishment look far more feminist than it was.” (The Whole Woman, Doubleday, 1999, p. 86) The days when ‘pro-choicers’ could claim a monopoly on compassion for women over the ‘pro-lifers’ in the public debate are long over. It is in fact the pro-lifers who are now fighting to ensure that pregnant women have real options and are really supported.

The experience of over two million abortions here in Australia since I was an undergrad at this university means that we can no longer pretend abortion is used only as a last resort for a few women in grave difficulties or to prevent babies being born doomed to a short life of horrible disability. Abortion is now a commonplace. The sexual revolution and abortion explosion promised us more intimate and enduring relationships, every child being a wanted child, love-making replacing war-making and the rest. Instead our relationships are more provisional and fractured than ever, women still feel used, children are only rarely welcomed. Sure, there’s more sex, with fewer strings attached, but does it make us happy? The personal and emotional cost has been enormous. So have the social consequences. Our copulation explosion has been coupled with a population implosion. The imminent demographic disaster for the West — and the economic, political and cultural tensions it will occasion — rather like the water shortage here in Australia, has occasioned tut-tuts from leaders and journalists but little real action in response. We are in denial: but reality is fast forcing itself upon us.

The political scene is at last catching up with this. Political correctness once helped keep the code of silence on abortion, but it is falling out of favour. The admission of the publicly Christian to politics and the advent of family friendly political platforms has meant more leading politicians are now more willing to take an openly pro-life stand or at least to ask the hard questions about abortion than there have been for two or three decades. As the Democrats in the United States have discovered, anti-life, anti-family parties have a smaller next generation of supporters; pro-life, pro-family parties are likely to have a larger next generation of supporters even without converting any new people to their cause. Being pro-life is hereditary! And at last this means that governments can consider giving serious support to pregnant women, including good counselling before they take so grave a step as abortion, and real alternatives to abortion so they do not find themselves facing only one real option as so many of the mothers’ generation did.

It is women themselves who are increasingly acknowledging privately and speaking out publicly about the harm and heartache that is involved in abortion, the false mercy it has been for them. Likewise handicapped people question the assumption that abortion is a kindness to avoid people like them being born. The ‘dark ages’ view that we are better off dead than disabled is merely old-fashioned eugenic prejudice dressed up as mercy.

Most Australians clearly want something done to reduce the incidence of abortion. This is possibly an early sign of moral awakening about what abortion involves: for in recognizing the harms abortion occasions for the perpetrators, by-standers and promoters we may be coming to see the harm it does to its principal victims. We come to see it is not the merciful solution it first appears. Hardly anyone seems to think abortion is a good thing anymore, for women, for the unwanted children, for families, for society.

Euthanasia as mercy killing

Advocates of euthanasia often argue that it is the compassionate or merciful answer to cases of ‘intolerable’ suffering among the ‘hopelessly’ ill. They commonly draw on their own experience as witnesses to the harrowing death of a loved one. But are there are better ways of demonstrating compassion than by lethal injection?

To argue for euthanasia as mercy-killing rather than as an expression of personal autonomy is to allow that euthanasia cannot be restricted to the ‘hopelessly ill’ or even the sick or injured: suffering of other sorts may be just as serious, intractable and ‘intolerable’. The logic of suicide or homicide as compassion cannot be restricted to the terminally ill, properly so-called: instead it enlarges the category of the ‘terminally ill’ by adding new people to those at risk of dying sooner rather than later. Nor can it be restricted to those who ask for euthanasia, i.e. to ‘voluntary’ euthanasia of competent, free and informed adults. There may well be infants and children, senile or otherwise severely handicapped people or unconscious patients whose claim to such ‘mercy’ would seem to be at least as great as that of those who are in a position to make such a request. Put bluntly: euthanasia as mercy killing cannot be restricted to voluntary euthanasia. And sure enough, everywhere where it has been commonly practiced, such as in modern Holland, involuntary and non-voluntary euthanasia accompanies or follows soon after voluntary.

Of course if mercy for the suffering person really is the driving motor for euthanasia, we would expect its advocates to be addressing the suffering itself first and head-on. They would be fighting to ensure that disabled, frail elderly and ‘hopelessly’ ill people were given access to high quality healthcare, in hospital, in the community or at home. We would also ensure that they had access to the range of non-medical human, social and spiritual supports that people need in these situations. At the very least we would guarantee that they were kept as free of pain and other distressing symptoms as possible. But that has not been the case in places such as the Northern Territory where the euthanasia experiment was finally over-turned. Instead, all too often, those places most enthusiastic about euthanasia are least willing to provide real alternatives. Sounds very familiar to the abortion story.

With the best of contemporary pain and discomfort management techniques nearly all patients can be kept comfortable nearly all of the time. But sadly there are still Australians who go without such care. Real mercy demands better. With improved training in and access to palliative care, the opportunities for such care could be significantly increased and patients given the opportunity to live their last days well.
 
What I am suggesting, therefore, is that we should be looking for positive responses to illness, disability and dying – as we should be looking for positive responses to unexpected pregnancy – and be very loathe to embrace destructive ones, such as abandonment and homicide. We would be trying to kill the pain, not the person in pain. Yet the sad reality is that there is still much to be done to ensure that every Australian has access to such care. Euthanasia, far from being the merciful solution in these cases, seems to me more like an evasion.
 
The experience of health professionals is that when on-lookers talk of “putting granny out of her misery”, all too often what they really mean is “putting granny out of our misery”. Caring is not easy or cheap; it can be very hard. But a mature and authentic mercy does not seek cheap or quick fixes where there are none; it is not the strategy of curing misery by killing the miserable or cost-cutting by cutting the costly. Rather, as I suggested at the beginning of my talk, it entails standing by the sides of those who suffer and investing our time, our energy, our very selves in them, sharing in their suffering, offering the best care we can, and helping them to maintain hope, meaning, self-esteem, a sense of being loved and respected.

Giving this positive rather than lethal kind of care affirms that the lives, the persons, of such fellow Australians still matter, and matter very much. It conforms with our basic duties of care and respect for every human person however wounded or handicapped. And it maintains our bonds of community with them to the last. That is a kind of respecting and loving which no one should pretend is easy: it can be very hard. But it can also call forth from us all that is most noble in the human spirit.

Dignity is not recognised by telling the old, the infirm or the ‘hopelessly’ ill through our laws how ‘undignified’ we think their condition is, how we think they would be better off dead, or how willing we are to hurry their deaths along. Love and mercy are not expressed by adding killing to the series of rejections already heaped upon many of the sick and dying in our community. Surely in a land that prides itself on ‘mateship’ and ‘a fair go’ we can find more creative ways of demonstrating love and respect than by killing people.

But is the ‘sanctity of life’ principle merciful?

Because of the vulnerability of human beings, especially those at the beginning and the end of their lives, those who are immature, sick or frail elderly, it is especially important that health professionals have a clear sense of what is owing to others by way of action and restraint. Thus ‘primum non nocere’ (= ‘above all, do no harm’) was the classic first principle of healthcare ethics and the Hippocratic Oath included the promise that: “I will never use my art to injure or wrong my patient. I shall give no deadly drug to anybody [for suicide or euthanasia] even if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Nor shall I give a woman an abortifacient.” Such moral constraints helped health professionals to know how they should and should not express their compassion for those in their care.

But will a truly merciful person be an absolutist about such things? Most people regard killing simply for advantage or convenience or out of callousness or indifference as inconsistent with the recognition of human dignity and immoral. But dilemmas arise when the potential victim is very young or very old (as in abortion and some euthanasia), or is a burden to others (e.g. the pregnant woman, those caring for a senile person), or is severely handicapped or is in great pain or is asking to be killed or is very dependent, or is a great strain on resources, or is living in a state of persistent unconsciousness, or is otherwise at a very low ebb… Then we may well sympathize with those who feel driven to compromise the sanctity of life principle and we may even feel so tempted ourselves. The question for us is: what do I do with that sympathy and temptation?

The so-called ‘sanctity’ or ‘inviolability’ of life principle is not a merely Catholic or Judeo-Christian theological principle, but one deeply embedded in law, all the major world religions, and most ethical systems throughout the world, included in international human rights documents and our common and civil law, and strongly felt by people of all beliefs and none. Traditionally worded “you shall not kill” it is based upon the notion that human beings are entitled to great and equal respect: their lives are of such intrinsic importance that no choice intentionally to bring about an innocent person’s death can be right. Thus amongst the ways in which health professionals may not deal with people, killing them is one.

Abortion and euthanasia are examples of directly killing. This is never a trivial matter. Directly to kill, even at the request of the victim themselves or their relatives, is to act unethically by:

• directly attacking a fundamental good – the good of life itself and all other goods which life allows
• harming the victim, whose life, however rich or impoverished, is always a value
• harming the perpetrator and collaborators, who become killers
• harming the common good because the community is always diminished by the death of a member
• threatening respect for human life more generally by setting a dangerous precedent
• diminishing public confidence in the medical profession as always promoting and protecting the lives of patients
• contradicting a basic precept of common morality (against killing the innocent) and (on the view of believers)
• violating a divine command and so sinning against God, one’s self and one’s fellows.

Thus the sanctity of life principle concerns itself with justice and mercy towards a wider group of people than might first appear. It does not of course require that health professionals force life-extending treatment upon patients against their will or that they engage in a kind of ‘therapeutic obstinacy’. Sometimes there are good reasons for withholding or withdrawing some treatments and/or taking some risks with life when applying treatments or palliation. Therapeutically futile treatments should not be applied; highly burdensome treatments are optional at best; pain should be managed even if there are risks involved. Pain, discomfort, loss of lucidity, breathlessness, extreme agitation, alienation, repugnance and cost to the patient may mean the potential benefit is insufficient to warrant available treatments. But compassion will never require us to compromise our reverence for life or for a particular person by engaging in some lethal choice. Even when we cannot cure we can still care.

Mercy, as I argued earlier, is about empathizing with people in their suffering, staying by their side, and offering them a kind of active love that best reverences and serves their nature and calling as well as ours. Rather than giving people whatever they ask for, it is about wanting what is best for them. Through an active friendship it helps people recover hope, meaning, and a sense of being respected and loved. That is very different to saying to them, through our words or deeds: “we think you would be better off dead” or “we think, all things considered, that we would be better off it you were dead” or “on balance your life is worth zero or less than zero, so here is a merciful solution”. This “final solution”, far from realizing a life- and person- affirming mercy, indicates a loss of reverence for that person. Our willingness to care for the yet unborn who have never made a contribution and who will in the meantime require a great deal of our energy and time and care, or for the soon-to-be-dead who may never again make a contribution and who will also in the meantime require a great deal of our energy and time and care, is a litmus test of our character and of our civilisation.

The Good News alternative

In his great bioethical encyclical “Evangelium vitæ” Pope John Paul II challenged us to call a spade a spade. Abortion and euthanasia can be cloaked in the language of mercy but they are, in fact, a lethal kind of mercy. They kill the innocent.

Of course many who seek abortion or euthanasia may “do so out of anguish, desperation or conditioning”; they “may be motivated by pity rather than a selfish refusal to be burdened with the life of someone who is suffering” (EV 15, 66). This reduces or removes any personal sinfulness. Nonetheless, as John Paul II argued, this is ‘false mercy’, indeed ‘a disturbing perversion of mercy’.

True ‘compassion’ leads to sharing another’s pain; it does not kill the person whose suffering we cannot bear. Moreover, the act of euthanasia appears all the more perverse if it is carried out by those, like relatives, who are supposed to treat a family member with patience and love, or by those, such as doctors, who by virtue of their specific profession are supposed to care for the sick person even in the most painful terminal stages... The height of arbitrariness and injustice is reached when certain people, such as physicians or legislators, arrogate to themselves the power to decide who ought to live and who ought to die... Thus the life of the person who is weak is put into the hands of the one who is strong; in society the sense of justice is lost, and mutual trust, the basis of every authentic interpersonal relationship, is undermined at its root. (EV 66)

This is to be contrasted with ‘the way of love and true mercy’ which recognizes that the request for abortion or euthanasia, the temptation to violence in utter desperation, is “above all a request for companionship, sympathy and support in the time of trial. It is a plea for help to keep on hoping when all human hopes fail.” (EV 66)

John Paul the pastor showed he was all too aware of the pressures which draw or drive people to violent solutions such as abortion or euthanasia: domestic violence, pressure from others, dire personal difficulties, isolation and abandonment, fear and loneliness, the struggle to make ends meet, unbearable pain and suffering (EV 11, 18). Regarding abortion he recognized that

The decision to have an abortion is often tragic and painful for the mother, insofar as the decision to rid herself of the fruit of conception is not made for purely selfish reasons or out of convenience, but out of a desire to protect certain important values such as her own health or a decent standard of living for the other members of the family. Sometimes it is feared that the child to be born would live in such conditions that it would be better if the birth did not take place... The father of the child may be to blame, not only when he directly pressures the woman to have an abortion, but also when he indirectly encourages such a decision on her part by leaving her alone...Nor can one overlook the pressures which sometimes come from the wider family circle and from friends. Sometimes the woman is subjected to such strong pressure that she feels psychologically forced to have an abortion: certainly in this case moral responsibility lies particularly with those who have directly or indirectly obliged her to have an abortion (EV 58, 59).

He had only words of compassion for women who are victims of abortion:

I would now like to say a special word to women who have had an abortion. The Church is aware of the many factors which may have influenced your decision, and she does not doubt that in many cases it was a painful and even shattering decision. The wound in your heart may not yet have healed. Certainly what happened was and remains terribly wrong. But do not give in to discouragement and do not lose hope. Try rather to understand what happened and face it honestly. If you have not already done so, give yourselves over with humility and trust to repentance. The Father of mercies is ready to give you his forgiveness and his peace in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. You will come to understand that nothing is definitively lost and you will also be able to ask forgiveness from your child, who is now living in the Lord. (EV 99)

The good news is that something better is possible for human beings. Merciful support so that we might succeed, and supportful mercy when we have failed, are available through the Word of God, the sacraments and the Christian community. This helps rebuild a sort of “covenant” not just between ourselves and God but between the generations, so damaged by both abortion and euthanasia (cf. EV 94).

Will we continue to kill our next generation and maim our womenfolk in the name of mercy? Will we embrace a new path presently being considered by Parliament, of creating human beings by IVF or cloning earmarked from the beginning for destruction? Will we keep enlarging the class of non-persons or unprotected persons so that the sick and the elderly are also more and more at risk? Will we continue to engage in medical violence, to mess up our family life and to sterilize our community, and call all this ‘compassion’? Will we continue to deny the infertile any chance of adopting and the seriously sick the palliative care they deserve, and keep pretending this is ‘pity’? Or are we at last beginning to question the notion of abortion and euthanasia as mercy-killing, as something we have just got to wear in hard cases?

If so, we need to provide real alternatives to abortion and euthanasia, real mercy. It is not enough to say no to these things. Women who are pregnant in difficult circumstances need more choices, not fewer, and they need choices which do not demand that they decide between their own life-story and that of their child. When the Adelaide Women and Children’s Hospital introduced mandatory independent counselling before abortion, they saw a 25% reduction in abortion numbers (Adelaide’s Sunday Mail, 25 July 2004), prompting calls by the abortion industry to ban independent counselling and by others to ensure both independent information and options-giving and independent counselling be much more freely available.

Likewise the sick and elderly need real support in their pain and frailty. They need more choices, not fewer, and they need choices which do not demand that they decide between their own comfort and their principles, between a sense of self-worth and the unwillingness of others to honour their worth.

Sadly the Federal government has for years spent ten times as much on counselling for abortion provided by abortion providers and their allies as it has spent on counselling abortion alternatives provided by pro-life pregnancy counselling services. Likewise spending on palliative care education and provision has never matched demand. Now some of this is changing, though there is strong resistance from some with a deep financial, emotional or ideological interest in abortion being commonplace. If we are to help women who think pregnancy is death to their planned life-story to revise their plans in ways that seem impossibly hard but which we are convinced will ultimately make them and others happier, then we need to ensure than pregnancy and child-birth are not the end for women seeking an education or building a career or other reasonable goals.  If we are to help the elderly and sick who think death is the only way out to recover hope and meaning so that their life-story need not end with a veterinary solution, then we need to ensure that old age and illness are not times of abandonment and being made to feel oneself a burden to others.

The new debate over abortion and euthanasia reveals both points of convergence and deep chasms in our community and what some commentators have called ‘the culture wars’ about the most fundamental questions such as the meaning of life, the nature of the human person and community, the place of love, freedom and self-sacrifice in a life, the kind of civilisation we are building and bequeathing to our children and our elderly, and indeed whether there will be any children or elderly to whom we might bequeath our civilisation. As the Catholic Bishops of Australia recently said: “Every human being deserves our reverence and love, from the beginning to the end of the continuum of life. All human rights ultimately depend upon that recognition. But respect for human dignity also requires practical support for vulnerable people. We need to build a culture that respects the link between life and love, welcomes and esteems children and families, and supports women in every way.” So too at the other end of life. This debate goes not just to the heart of some life-and-death decisions about particular children and their mothers, particular patients and elderly people, but also to the very heart of our civilisation and culture. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy!