Killing Them Softly

Killing Them Softly

“My sister, Andrea Clark, is soon going to be REMOVED FROM LIFE SUPPORT At St. Luke’s Hospital in Houston, despite the fact that she is FULLY INSURED, despite the fact that her FAMILY UNANIMOUSLY AGREES SHE SHOULD BE KEPT ALIVE, despite the fact that she is NOT BRAIN DEAD, despite the fact that she WANTS TO CONTINUE TO RECEIVE MEDICAL CARE...she can still communicate--not even two weeks ago, she made the sentence, “I miss you,” when I was visiting her. She definitely can make her desires known and we intend to fight for her right to live and we need all the help we can get.”

A few weeks ago, I was giving two days of talks at a parish in the eastern part of the country, showing parishioners how to explain the Catholic Faith to people who don’t understand it. During the course of one of the question-and-answer sessions, I was asked what the religious future of America looks like. I am afraid the answer I gave did not please everyone in the audience.

I began by pointing out that Christian European flavors of religion would disappear. None of the men and women in the mainline Protestant churches are having enough children to sustain their faiths. They are contracepting and aborting themselves out of existence. The few children they have are apostasizing at a rapid rate.

This year, 2006, is projected to be a momentous year in America’s religious history. It is the year America stops being a majority-Protestant country. During the course of this year, all the Protestant faiths, taken together, will make up less than 50% of the American population.

The Catholic audience looked at each other with raised eyebrows and nodded.

American Catholic Christianity will fair only marginally better. Catholic Americans of European descent contracept and abort at the same rate as their Protestant brethren. They, too, are on their way out. Catholicism in America will remain stable at roughly one-quarter of the population, but it will be almost entirely Hispanic. Only immigrants are having children in sufficient numbers to maintain their presence over the long haul, and the Hispanic population is far and away the largest immigrant population.

The largely Anglo-Saxon Catholic audience shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

But contraception and abortion are only the beginning, I pointed out. “I fully expect to be euthanized,” I said, “and I expect most of the people in the room will be euthanized as well.”

The audience gasped.

I shrugged as I looked out over the audience. What I was saying wasn’t even a prediction, really, just a description of a reality no one wants to discuss.

Look at the facts. The baby boom generation is even now beginning to create an enormous burden on the economic system. The business of America is business. That burden will not be sustained.

It won’t matter if you have full coverage. You are cheaper dead - much cheaper dead - than you are alive. The stockholders of the major insurance companies, that is, your fellow citizens, want their profit margins.

After having squeezed you like a grape for most of your life, insurance companies will fully support the removal of your life support, your medical treatment, whatever it is that costs them money, regardless of your level of insurance. Once they are spending more than they made on you, you are a liability. Insurance companies must stay in business. They must get rid of their liabilities.

The rationale for killing inconvenient people has been accorded the full status of the law for nigh onto forty years. Inconvenient babies are redefined as non-human and killed. What makes you and me so special? It won’t matter that you are conscious, that you have fully paid premiums or that you don’t want to die. You aren’t going to be asked. This isn’t really even any of your business.

I have siblings who work in the medicine. They have been fighting the silent spread of euthanasia for years. Terri Schiavo was unusual only in the noise generated, not in the result obtained.

The “news” paragraph that begins this column is not news to anyone who has been following the medical profession for a few years.

St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston has an ethics committee. That ethics committee is headed by an abortionist.

America, you aborted your children.
Now your children will abort you.