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TechnoratiIt is now clear that a “death cult” has taken root within Islam. These fanatical enemies of freedom will as soon rain death and mayhem upon a schoolyard of innocent children (Muslim as well as non-Muslim) as they will attack a military vehicle.
Yet while we denounce these zealots who seek to destroy in the name of religion, we should also acknowledge that a “death cult” has arisen in our own society as well. Many in this group worship at the altar of secularism. They have devalued life, and their handiwork is memorialized in the ignominious Roe v. Wade decision as well as in those state statutes that allow for euthanasia and lethal experimentation on embryonic stem cells.
In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), Pope John Paul II noted as the twentieth century came to a close that a full-blown “Culture of Death” had established itself within Western civilization.
Clear marks of this “culture of death” are seen in a hideous September 12 decision by the New Jersey Supreme Court. It held that a physician has “no legal duty” to inform a pregnant woman consenting to an abortion that what is within her womb is a “complete, separate, unique and irreplaceable human being.” The case primarily focused on the “theory of lack of informed consent.”
The New Jersey justices affirmed a lower court ruling that a woman who consented to an abortion of her six- to eight-week-old unborn child but claimed she did not understand it was a child she was aborting was not entitled to the disclosure that she was carrying a child, nor was she entitled to damages for emotional distress or wrongful death. This is in spite of the medical fact that a baby’s heart begins to beat 24 days after conception and a baby has measurable brain waves at 42 days gestation.
“On the profound issue of when a life begins, this Court cannot drive public policy in one particular direction by the engine of common law when the opposing sides, which represent so many of our citizens, are arrayed along a deep societal and philosophical divide,” said the court in Rosa Acuna v. Sheldon C. Turkish.
The court had previously interpreted the state’s Wrongful Death Act as not including a “fetus within the definition of a ‘person’ covered by the Act.”
The plaintiff, Rosa Acuna, said when her physician, Sheldon Turkish, told her she was pregnant, she asked “if it was a baby in there.” Acuna claims Turkish responded, “Don’t be stupid. It’s only blood.” Turkish denies making that statement, but speculates he might have told her that a “seven-week pregnancy is not a living human being” but rather “just tissue at this time.”
Some weeks after her abortion, Acuna experienced unexpected complications. She was admitted to a local hospital where she was told she had had an “incomplete abortion” and that “the doctor had left parts of the baby inside” of her. At that point Acuna was horrified to realize her earlier decision to terminate her pregnancy meant not simply the removal of “blood” but the destruction of a real human being.
While expressing sympathy for the “deep pain” the plaintiff was enduring because of the abortion, the justices said informed consent extends only to doctors providing “their pregnant patients seeking an abortion only with material medical information, including gestational state and medical risks involved in the procedure.” Continue >>
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