COVID-19 and What's Really Important
Emergencies usually shine a very bright light on real priorities. What do you grab on the way out of a burning building? What did people pack in their pickup trucks while racing to get out of Fort McMurray in those wildfires a few years ago?
Our COVID-19 emergency meant that hospitals had to set up their open emergency plans. These are usually called triage, from a French battlefield term of 200 years ago. Crudely put, it is a system for judging who gets treated first or maybe even at all. In a certain form it is immediate rationing - whether of drugs, ventilators, surgeries or even the time and care of doctors and nurses. If you are old enough, you might remember the MASH re-runs on TV where, when the helicopters bring in the wounded to the Korean War medical tents, split-second decisions are made about who gets what and when.
After seeing the overwhelming of hospitals in Wuhan and Italy or Spain and New York, our local hospitals set up their own triage plans for triage - the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) priorities for ventilators, etc. I have seen two of these plans and they can be chilling. This is not to decry appropriate utility or effective use of scarce resources, but it does need calling out when the use of medical resources is based on quality of life issues. Do you get the resources if you are frail, elderly, disabled or have been deemed by some authority to have a lower quality of life?
A central question of our pro-life battle has always been what is the worth of a human life. Though the New York Governor can say that all life is worth protecting or our Prime Minister say that no cost will be spared to save lives, we need to scrutinize actual plans to see if the reality is equal to the rhetoric.
Have the deaths in our care homes shocked us into really examining the living conditions in all too many of them? As much as commentators speak of this being a watershed moment in our society, are they more worried about technical fixes and zoom meetings than of a chronically underfunded and rarely examined healthcare system for the elderly, which is predicated on cut rate care and cheap, under-appreciated help? If we wish to fight against the pushing of mercy-killing on the elderly, then our politicians must allocate the financial resources and set up the watch dogs needed to ensure real oversight, and not have to call in the military to establish basic care for our elderly.
Instead of top down decision making from out of touch politicians who only go into a care home for a photo op during election campaigns, we need to involve the voices of those who - to use the by now well worn phrase - are on the front lines caring day in and day out for their patients and vulnerable charges.
Where are the voices of the elderly in this desperately needed debate? We cannot allow their silence to signify assent to the less than proper care and protection that we have seen on our screens and front pages. This has a name in bioethics – the Disability Rights Critique.
Years ago at a bioethics conference on prenatal testing and abortion hosted by the renowned Hastings Center for Bioethics, bioethicists and scientists held forth on all the marvellous “advances” in ever earlier detection of genetic diseases and even the sex of the preborn child with the complete assumption that any detection of a disease, multiple pregnancies, or “wrong” sex would, of course, result in abortion, thereby resolving the problem. Then, Disabled Rights activists showed up and the whole conference stalled. From their wheelchairs, with their speaking assistants and word tablets, the activists took direct aim at the basic presumption that being disabled was a death sentence before birth. One asked the assembly, “Look at me. No, really look. Are you saying that if you had just found out about me before I was born you would kill me? You know that your answer is yes. Look me in the eye and tell me why.”
This led to many embarrassed silences and a rise in the Disability Rights Critique, that says that the life of each however “abled” person must be considered equal.
Yes, I know that we are aborting girls because they are girls, and Down Syndrome children because they are who they are, but as soon as they speak up, shame also rears its head. We need to call that out in this crisis too. We are spending billions to halt this pandemic and putting our economies and lives in the equivalent of a “medically induced coma” to do so.
But we are also still aborting children while we are putting off cancer care and surgeries. We are still pouring millions into aborting the children of the Third World in the name of “assistance”. We are still expanding mercy-killing to children, the mentally ill and demented elderly.
We need to speak up and confront these contradictions and to insist on the voices of those affected be heard and for those who cannot speak, to speak. Neil Young sang years ago, “Rust never sleeps.” Neither does evil. But “grace shall more abound.”
Thank you for your continued assistance in this battle. Your prayers, donations and support allow us at Priests For Life Canada to reach the clergy of our country and even though our churches are closed, we are using all the technical means at our disposal to keep educating, forming and activating our clergy!