Culture of Life or Culture of Death?
By A. Lurlene Madsen
In March 2005 we were drawn in to the incredibly sad drama of a fractured family fighting over the life of one woman. Who could see the video clips of Terri Schiavo and not be moved with compassion? We watched as Terri’s parents and siblings fought valiantly for her life. We listened as Pope John Paul the II forcefully spoke out to save her life. We saw the governor of Florida fight to save her life. We saw Congress pass special, time-sensitive legislation and President Bush fly from his ranch back to D.C. to sign it into law — all in an effort to save Terri’s life.
Yet, to our shock and dismay, we saw the entire judicial path thumb their collective noses at the congressional directive to take a new look into the case and the new evidence. Their arrogance and defiance ordered the death of an innocent woman who could not fight for herself. Her crime? She had a severe brain injury and her otherwise healthy body was being fed & hydrated with a feeding tube.
She valiantly clung to life for 13 days as they starved and dehydrated her healthy body. Her death on Thursday morning, March 31, was caused by a court-ordered death sentence; a ”cruel and unusual punishment” forced onto an innocent woman.
Before we could digest Terri’s death the ailing Pope John Paul II took a final serious turn for the worst. Then the world that watched the Terri Schiavo tragedy watched as the ailing Pope declined and died. The Pope died with dignity in his papal apartment with a feeding tube. He died with joy at his home-going to be with Christ. He fought for the saving of Terri’s life and laid down his own life joyfully at God’s calling him home. Even as he lay on his death bed slipping in and out of consciousness he had his secretary help him write a note to his aides that said, “I am happy and you should be as well . . . Let us pray together with joy.” He passed away peacefully on April 2, 2005.
The difference between the two deaths is stunning. The first was fraught with rancor and deceit and selfish machinations as the fight for life and death continued until Terri’s last breath. The second was one of peace and dignity and the joy of going home to be with the Lord.
In his article, If Polls Correct, Many Americans Misguided, appearing in the Tyler Morning Telegraph, April 2, 2005, Call Thomas said this in reference to Terri Schiavo’s judicially forced death:
“This will not be the end of such cases, but the beginning, or more accurately, a continuation on the line of death that began in the womb in 1973 with Roe v. Wade and will now quickly advance toward the ‘retirement’ villages. The angel of death that moved through ancient Egypt at the first Passover was called ‘the destroyer.’ Our courts are his modern incarnation.
“No life is safe because every life now depends on the whims, desires, comfort level and pleasure of others. From an ‘endowed’ right to life, we have quickly moved to a court-imputed right to die. Increasingly we do not speak of life at all, but death. America truly is, as the suffering Pope John Paul II has described it, a ‘culture of death.’”
Those who camp in the “Culture of Death” have been vigorously and systematically working to create a pervading public attitude that agrees with their deadly anti-God view. They have achieved a significant degree of success in dragging the public consciousness backwards to the pagan culture before Christ. And they consider themselves “progressive”?
Centuries ago, before Christianity swept around the world, the pagans commonly set out unwanted babies to die in the elements. The elderly, the disabled, the unwanted, the unbeautiful, were left to die. In short, any one who was inconvneient or a burden or imperfect was put out in the wilderness to die. Human life had no value.
The spread of Christianity and its Gospel of Life changed all that. God values life. All human life is sacred to Him. We are human beings created in the image of God.
Then along came Adolph Hitler. In the early days of the Nazis it became common practice to “euthanize” the elderly, the infirm, the handicapped, the mentally retarded, and the generally undesirable. In fact, before he began gassing the Jewish people he had already mudered more than half a million people whose lives the Nazis’ considered were not worth living.
Who has the right to say whether or not a life is worth living? Joni Erickson-Tada said in a 2005 interview that at first she didn’t want to live as a quadriplegic. But she has gone on not only to live a very full life but has positively impacted hundreds of thousands of people by her life. Her point was that before facing tragedy one does not see how you can live that way. Once you are living it you find there is so much more to life and so much more to give than you were able to imagine. No life is without value.
Pope John Paul II spent his life spreading the Gospel of Christ. And he fully taught Christ’s message that all human life is valuable and sacred, no matter the condition. He always maintained that other people can draw from the reservoir of love in the suffering of another. Anyone who has ever spent real time ministering to the very sick or disabled can testify to the truth of that.
Consider God’s Word:
Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; …. Jeremiah 1:5
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behod, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. Gen 1:16,27,31
I join with the Schindler family and many others in praying that Terri Schiavo’s court-ordered death is not in vain. I stand with them and call for March 31st to be a Terri’s Day Observance. I pray we never forget Terri or give up in this battle for the Right to Life.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
U.S. Declaration of Independence, 1776
LIFE IS SACRED. ACT ON THAT TRUTH.
© 2005, 2007 by A.Lurlene Madsen
