#506 Practical Tips, Real Life Stories, "Deciding" Who Dies? April 10, 2020
Practical Tips Damian Geminder of our member group Feminists for Life reports: “We wanted to share with you this beautiful slideshow featuring FFL's new article series focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. It is currently playing across our Feminists for Life and Women Deserve Better Facebook pages. We now have more than 200 articles on our Women Deserve Better help site for caregivers, especially mothers who care for others throughout their adult lives to help them. WomenDeserveBetter.com is especially useful for vulnerable populations during the pandemic to help all Work, Learn, Live, and Love better.”
Real Life Stories on the Death Penalty Our endorser Shane Claiborne reports: “Death Penalty Action launched our new LIVE interview program, Voices of Experience on the Death Penalty, featuring leading figures in the world of death penalty abolition. In our premier broadcast, Co-Director Abe Bonowitz was joined by Journey of Hope - From Violence to Healing Founder Bill Pelke as we heard from former prison warden Ron McAndrew.”
“Deciding” Who Dies? The dearth of medical resources has some fearing life-saving efforts will have to be focused on some but not all. Is triage similar to euthanasia? Richard Stith (CL board member) reports: “I found the linked joint declaration to add a lot of clarity. Basically, trying to bring about a death is different from simply accepting a death because of lack of resources, but that isn't the end of the story. Those resources need to be distributed justly, in a way that acknowledges the equal dignity of every person, even where there is no actual intent to kill anyone.” Connecting to other issues as we’re inclined to do, part of why medical resources are lacking is that time and money has been used up on overly expensive military machines and nuclear weapons instead. Government officials have long had an understanding of security that skews toward violence rather than being mindful of the needs of actual security. Additionally, if our society didn’t overdo the rhetoric of “choice” about killing unborn babies and assisted suicide, we wouldn’t be talking about tough choices, but intolerable ones. Those medical resources wouldn’t be lacking in a culture that values all human life.
Our Latest Blog Post Julia Smucker takes notice of how much the response to the Covid-19 pandemic is being compared to a war, and reflects on how the two are related and how they’re different in A Healing Metaphor: Pandemic as War. This metaphorical war is a good kind because it's nonviolent.
Top Julia Smucker. Cartoon by Safaa Odah, Gaza artist (pictured). From her Instagram
Pedro Gabriel The Seamless Garment is the Catholic position, January 31, 2020 Today is honored by Christians as Good Friday, so we offer the Biblical imagery of the “seamless garment,” a poetic term commonly applied to the consistent life ethic. In reality, nothing in the biblical imagery of the Seamless Garment evokes prioritization at all. The soldiers at the foot of the Cross were not fighting over one part of the garment that was more important than the others. They weren’t discussing whether the neck hole is more important than the sleeves. They weren’t arguing whether the first stitch was more important than the ones that followed. No. They were fighting because the garment was without seam and they could not divide it without tearing it apart. The key word here is “seamless,” just as the operative word in “consistent ethic of life” is “consistent.”
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