Tuesday, February 26, 2008

FROM FIDESNEWS:

EUROPE/ITALY - There's a war on Christianity. Have we realized yet?

Rome (Agenzia Fides) - Following the consumption of 200 milligrams of mifepistrone (RU486, which kills the embryo in the womb), and two days later, of 800 milligrams of misoprostol, the pharmaceutical drug that induces contractions and causes an explosion of the embryo, an American girl feels a little sick. She suffers tremors, abdominal pains, nausea, vomiting, and fainting spells. She thinks that it must be simply side-effects, but the situation worsens. She stops in a local clinic, where she is prescribed additional pharmaceutical drugs. She returns home. A day later, her situation continues to worsen and she is taken to the emergency room. Heartbeat and blood pressure begin to rise. More antibiotics and an exploratory surgical intervention. What are found are two and a half liters of dark peritoneal liquid and no sign of extrauterinal pregnancy. She is taken to the Intensive Care Unit. Sixteen hours later, the girl dies. The autopsy confirmed the presence of Clostridium Sordellii in the lining of the uterus, a death-causing bacteria. This is one of sixteen registered cases in the world of deaths caused by RU486 consumption. News of this death was published in the November 2007 issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology, from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
However, 16 verified deaths is not enough (especially when there are powerful economic interests lobbying for the distribution of this drug), to stop RU486 from becoming the most convenient means of birth control, together with the harmful practice of sterilization of women (an estimated 160 million women in the world are sterilized).

With this in mind, we read the position taken by the Italian Order of Doctors this past February 23, asking that the practice of chemical abortion through the use of RU486 be "for once and for all" accepted and that the "clandestine restrictions" be lifted, for the use of the morning-after pill, defined as an emergency contraceptive, available in supermarkets in America and sold in France, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Albania, Algeria, Belgium, Canada (Quebec), Chile, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, and Portugal without medical prescription and which is promoted by many Latin American governments as a method of contraception.

The Order of Italian Doctors fails to mention the second opinion given by the National Bioethics Committee on the right for a doctor to choose not to prescribe the morning-after pill, on the premise of objection of conscience (in Italy, the medical prescriptions are obligatory). Their opinion is supported by Law 194, on the interruption of pregnancy, defining it as "the best law possible, even from a moral standpoint." The Committee also expresses itself to be in favor of the pre-implantation process that according to the President of the Consultant Committee of Bioethics in France, is becoming a eugenic practice, an instrument for eliminating sick or deformed children.

If one takes a glance at the Deontological Code produced by Italian doctors, in Article 3, it says, "The doctor's duty is to protect life...". As is well-known, it can happen that the rules are made to be broken, as it can also occur, as is the case in Italy, that respectable and ambitious doctors profess their partiality for euthanasia or devotedly prophesy the arrival of a bisexual humanity in the future, or that international organizations pervert documents, as they have been for years, on the natural order of the world - no longer speaking of man and woman, but rather "genus," thus annihilating the identity.

None of this occurs as a coincidence. There is a quote from the most recent encyclical from Benedict XVI, taken from Emmanuel Kant: "If Christianity should one day cease to be worthy of love ... then the prevailing mode in human thought would be rejection and opposition to it; and the Antichrist ... would begin his—albeit short—regime (presumably based on fear and self-interest); but then, because Christianity, though destined to be the world religion, would not in fact be favored by destiny to become so, then, in a moral respect, this could lead to the (perverted) end of all things."

The abandonment of Christianity and the war on its principles, the first of all being the right to life and the dignity of the human person, could lead to (according to Kant and taken up by Benedict XVI) an unnatural "perverse" end to mankind, a sort of auto-destruction in both a material and moral sense. The relativism in which our society is immersed has that hideous strength that contaminates the public and private life.

(DQ) (Agenzia Fides 25/2/2008 righe 61, parole 752)