By
Susan Brinkmann
CS&T Correspondent
The woman who sat at the bedside of her dying mother was obviously tense
and uneasy. Her mother had been unresponsive and near death for some time
now, but for some reason, she wasn’t letting go. The daughter wondered,
should she say something? Could her mother even hear her?
The director of nursing came into the room. A certified harp therapist,
she had with her a small Irish harp. The daughter requested a few hymns,
and as the nurse played, the daughter begin to unwind noticeably, to relax
and hum to the music. Ever so slowly, she reached over and took her mother’s
hand, holding it tenderly in her own.
As she was getting up to leave, the nurse suggested, “Why don’t
you tell your mom it’s okay to go. Sometimes those things can help.”
As she left the room, she heard the daughter telling her mother that it
was okay to die. A half-hour later, the woman passed into eternity.
That true story is one of many that take place right here in Philadelphia,
in facilities run by the Archdiocese’s Catholic Health
Care Services, where the process of death is treated for what it is —
a natural event. The dying and their families need a spe
cial
kind of help at this time in their life — the right medical treatment
and pain medication, as well as counseling and pastoral services to help
them be at peace when the time comes to pass into the hands of God.
Those specially designed services are part of a comprehensive approach to
aid the dying, called the Guardian Angel program. Started 10 years ago in
the St. John Neumann Nursing Home in Philadelphia, which is operated by
Catholic Health Care Services of the Archdiocese, the program is the antithesis
of physician-assisted suicide. Instead of causing a sudden and unnatural
death, the Guardian Angel program facilitates the natural dying process
in a way that assists everyone involved.
“Death is part of life,” said Leslie Stickley, who has been
part of the program since its inception at the St. John Neumann facility.
“It’s a natural experience.”
Stickley, the director of nursing at St. Monica Manor in Philadelphia, was
the certified harp therapist who helped the woman in this article cope with
her mother’s death. She has been involved in plenty of similar situations
during her years in long-term care.
“I don’t think there’s anything better than a deathbed
situation where the people all get to say what they need to say —
whether the resident’s responsive to it or not. There may be something
you need to do yet, or something a family member needs to learn from you.
Just to let a daughter sit at Mom’s side and say, ‘It’s
okay to go,’ if it’s penetrating Mom’s consciousness,
it’s letting her go without guilt. Assisted-suicide short circuits
this whole process.”
Stickley’s words echo those of the famous psychiatrist who worked
with the dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. “Lots of my dying patients
say they grow in bounds and leaps, and finish all the unfinished business.
[But assisting a suicide is] cheating them of these lessons, like taking
a student out of school before final exams,” Ross wrote. “That’s
not love, it’s projecting your own unfinished business.”
The need to resolve unfinished business is what most patients are crying
out for when they ask for physician-assisted suicide, which is why the Church
has taken such a firm stance against legalizing euthanasia.
“The pleas of gravely ill people who sometimes ask for death are not
to be understood as implying a true desire for euthanasia; in fact, it is
almost always a case of an anguished plea for help and love,” said
the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the 1980 document,
Declaration on Euthanasia.
Science bears that out, as do the statistics from the only state that permits
physician assisted suicide — Oregon. Although proponents of assisted
suicide often cite unbearable pain as the reason why it should be made legal,
pain is a factor only in a small percentage of actual cases.
In the first four years of the Oregon law, 85 percent of those who requested
suicide did so because they were concerned about losing autonomy; 77 percent
said it was because they could no longer participate in activities that
make life enjoyable; 63 percent chose suicide rather than lose control of
bodily functions, and 34 percent did so because of a fear of being a burden
on their family.
Physicians agree that most of those reasons are signs of depression in patients.
“A major factor in requests for suicide is depression,” wrote
Hilary Evans, M.D., in Physicians News Digest. “Studies have shown
that depressed patients who request suicide frequently change their minds
after their depression is treated, even though their physical condition
is not improved. Yet physicians fail to recognize treatable depression in
about 50 percent of cases.”
Programs like the Guardian Angel program are designed to spot and address
depression.
“If you suddenly got a terminal diagnosis, no matter what your age,
most people would be depressed by this news,” said Michelle Bieszczad,
C.N.H.A., co-founder of the program and administrator at St. Francis Country
House.
“One of the things we do is make sure residents have access to psychological
or psychiatric services in regard to their depression,” she said.
“Obviousl, there would be appropriate situational depression associated
with a terminal diagnosis, both for the resident and the family. That’s
why this program is not just about care for the residents, but for the families
too.”
When a resident is dying, the Guardian Angel program mobilizes several disciplines
inside a facility, to surround him and his family with special care and
attention. Pain control and symptom management is a top priority, as well
as pastoral assistance for his spiritual needs. Social services assist the
dying and their families to work out any unresolved issues.
But there are plenty of other ways to assist the dying and their loved ones
during that difficult time in their life.
“If a resident is nearing the end of life, and family wants to spend
a lot of time with them, we have a specially-designed room called the Bethany
Room, where family members can convene,” Bieszczad said. “If
they want to hang out there all day, we can set them up there and provide
them with meals.”
Even caregivers who became close to the resident are encouraged to visit,
and schedules are adjusted to give them extra time to spend with a dying
patient.
An added touch is the comfort cart, which can be brought in to provide aroma
therapy or special music and sounds for the resident. For instance, if a
resident’s favorite place was the garden, his room may be filled with
the sound of birds singing and the fragrance of flowers and fresh-cut grass.
One dying woman who was born in Ireland was treated to a rendition of the
Irish folk songs she used to enjoy in the neighborhood pub, while her room
was decorated with posters of the Irish countryside. The whole family gathered
around, their toes tapping and their hearts lifting out of the grips of
death and into what became a celebration of a life they truly cherished.
“The ultimate goal of the program is to do everything possible to
provide residents with the most positive end-of-life experience they can
have,” Bieszczad said.
And the program doesn’t exist in a vacuum. “The Guardian Angel
program is not really a program — it’s a philosophy,”
Bieszczad said. “The services we provide at the end of life have become
part of the fabric and philosophy of how we deliver care.
“We serve people according to our mission and our values,”she
said. “We have a real respect for the sanctity of what’s going
on at the end of someone's life.”
Contact Susan Brinkmann at fiat723@aol.com or (215) 965-4615.
by
Susan Brinkmann
CS&T Correspondent
New evidence about the brain’s ability to process information in brain-injured
patients is raising questions about how those patients should be treated,
both medically and socially.
A new study by a Cambridge researcher, Adrian Owen, revealed conscious awareness
in a 23-year-old woman who had been in a persistent vegetative state since
an automobile accident in July 2005.
Even though the woman was considered to be severely brain- damaged and had
been totally unresponsive, doctors used a new imaging technique called functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at her brain activity. The technique,
which can detect increases in blood flow to areas of the brain during activity,
revealed that the woman was processing information in the same way as people
without brain damage.
When researchers spoke to the woman, language areas in her brain reacted
normally, indicating that she was processing what they were saying. When
they asked her to imagine playing tennis or walking through her house, again
her brain indicated the same activity as that found in healthy volunteers.
“If you put her scans together with the other 12 volunteers tested,
you cannot tell which is the patient’s,” Owen said in an interview
with the New York Times.
The study, which was conducted by doctors at the Medical Research Council
Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge and the University of Liege
in Belgium, was published in a paper appearing in the Sept. 8 issue of Science.
Researchers concluded: “Her decision to cooperate … by imagining
particular tasks when asked to do so represents a clear act of intention,
which confirmed beyond any doubt that she was consciously aware of her self
and her surroundings.”
Owen called the results startling. “They confirm that, despite the
diagnosis of a vegetative state, this patient retained the ability to understand
spoken commands and to respond to them through her brain activity, rather
than through speech and movement.”
It was not the first time Owen used the sophisticated imaging device to
look inside the mind of a person in a persistent vegetative state.
In 1997, he scanned the brain of a 26-year-old English woman named Kate
Bainbridge, who went into a persistent vegetative state (PVS) for six months
after contracting an acute viral infection.
Owen scanned her brain while showing her familiar photographs and found
that her brain reacted in the same way as any other brain would respond
to familiar images.
Although it would take two years for the patient to regain consciousness
fully, she distinctly remembered what it was like to be held in the unflinching
grip of a PVS.
“I felt trapped inside my body,” she told the BBC. “Not
being able to communicate was awful. … I had loads of questions, like,
‘Where am I?’, ‘Why am I here?’, ‘What has
happened?’ But I could not ask anyone — I had to work it all
out. I could not move my face, so I could not show people how scared I was.”
The Cambridge paper is not the first study published this year about new
discoveries in the way the brain functions after sustaining traumatic injury.
One of the most startling studies concerned the case of an Arkansas man,
Terry Wallis, who had been in a coma since a 1984 car accident, and who
woke up after 19 years. Researchers at the University of Liege in Belgium
found strong evidence that Wallis’ brain had begun to form new neural
connections that eventually enabled him to wake up.
Several reports also surfaced this year about patients in persistent vegetative
states who were temporarily roused after being given Ambien, a widely prescribed
sleeping pill. Researchers are trying to discern whether zolpidem (marketed
as Ambien) activates dormant cells in the brain or whether the patients
were misdiagnosed, which is highly likely in PVS cases. Some studies have
shown the rate of misdiagnosis to be as high as 58 percent.
According to the Liege researchers, that is because there have been too
many studies on patients who are in a coma, and not enough on other states
of consciousness. “Future research efforts should address the silent
epidemic of vegetative and minimally conscious states, so that these challenging
neurological states can emerge from the current dark ages of therapeutic
nihilism,” the scientists said.
Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D., a neuroscientist and director of education
at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, said diagnosing
brain injury is not nearly as standardized as most people think.
“This is something where a diagnosis is made partly on what the neurologist
has encountered in previous patients,” Father Pacholczyk said. “You
make your best assessment based on all the data you have, and that includes
your prior exposure to individuals who were in the same situation. Published
studies will certainly help, but at the end of the day, it’s a bedside
judgment for a particular patient.”
The diagnoses are very individualized, he said. For each patient, there
is a unique traumatic event that is responsible for casting them into the
PVS, which means there will be slightly different parts of the brain affected.
This is why recovery in one patient doesn’t mean recovery in all.
The public frequently misunderstands those mysterious conditions —
misunderstandings that are often fueled by a misinformed media. Father Pacholczyk
recalled an interview he had with CNN during the Terri Schiavo case, when
the reporter’s first question was: “‘Why is it that you
Catholics have to string out these brain-dead people forever?’”
“In the average person’s mind, being in a persistent vegetative
state, in a coma, being brain dead — it’s all the same thing
to them,” he said. “They don’t make any distinctions,
and yet the distinctions are the essence of the entire discussion.
“You have to be precise here,” Father Pacholczyk said. “A
brain-dead person is completely different from a person like Terri, who
was in a persistent vegetative state.”
The most important issue raised by the new questions about the capabilities
of the brain-injured is whether we are adequately treating their needs.
In March 2004, Pope John Paul II called for more practical and compassionate
assistance for those patients and their families, rather than hastening
death by withholding treatment.
“Although the care for these patients is not, in general, particularly
costly,” the Pope said, “society must allot sufficient resources
for the care of this sort of frailty by way of bringing about appropriate,
concrete initiatives, such as, for example, the creation of a network of
awakening centers with specialized treatment and rehabilitation programs,
financial support, and home assistance for families.”
Father Pacholczyk said the Pope’s words were “a beautiful manifestation
of the Christian concern for these individuals and respect for their personhood.”
He added: “What’s really important is that these are patients
with needs that we can address in a very concrete way. We have to love them
just as much as anybody else, because, at the end of the day, a patient
in a PVS is a person who has some brain damage. Just because you have brain
damage should not be an automatic death sentence as it was in the case of
Terri.”
History has demonstrated that euthanasia in such cases creates a dangerous
medical context for every society in which it has advanced, quickly expanding
to include other categories.
“It’s already rampant in the Netherlands, where elderly people
are afraid to go to the hospitals because they know hospitals are no longer
places where healthcare is provided,” Father said. “They are
also places where people are ‘dispatched’ — even those,
according to the statistics, who don’t request it.”
That way of thinking has already gained a foothold in our society, he said:
“There’s a lot of pressure and movement in the direction that
once you have injuries that compromise your ability to function normally,
then you are now in a new sub-category of people— those who can be
dispensed with,” he said. “That’s tragic.”
by
Susan Brinkmann
CS&T Correspondent
The
odds of a baby surviving a first-trimester abortion are one in 64 million.
Take those odds and multiply them by four, and you’ll have a good
idea of the odds Bridget Hylak defied before she ever saw the light of day.
“My mother tried at least four times to have an abortion when she
was about five or six weeks pregnant with me,” said the 41-year-old
mother of four from West Grove.
“My father didn’t want another child,” she said. “Those
were the days when the thinking was ‘It’s no big deal. It’s
not a baby yet.’”
Her mother went to the family doctor in downtown Chicago, where she was
injected with pitocin, a hormone used to induce labor. Nothing happened.
She went back three or four more times for injections. They never worked.
“This type of abortion fails in one out of 400 cases, so my odds of
being here are like one in two billion,” Hylak said. “But God,
who knew me before I was born, before even my parents were born, had His
hand on me.” Her parents finally gave up, and she was born on Feb.
9, 1965.
“I don’t discuss this to criticize my parents,” she said.
“I love them dearly. I have peace in me. My mother was confused and
trying to save her marriage. My dad And I are extremely close. His views
have changed. Both of them were misled back then, just like a lot of people
are, about when life begins. What they did was probably the result of a
lack of information, a lack of consideration. But I don’t feel it
was a malicious act.”
Hylak found out about it in grammar school, shortly after her parents divorced.
By then, she was growing into a deeply faithful Catholic, who at one point
considered entering the Benedictine order. Her faith in God was where she
drew the power to forgive her parents and go on to live the life God had
so miraculously given her.
She attended Stanford University, where she earned two bachelor degrees,
in Spanish and Portuguese, and broadcast journalism with a minor in Russian.
Always involved in the pro-life movement, Hylak learned by experience that
abortion is much more than just a contentious social issue — it is
a matter of life and death.
“But I’m completely pro-choice,” she says. “People
always look at me funny when I say that. But it’s only because the
language of the pro-life movement has been convoluted by the other side.
“I believe it’s a woman’s choice to decide if she wants
to be a mother or not. God gives her that right, and even the Church follows
the laws of natural family planning. But once she conceives a child, it’s
not just her body anymore. Two bodies are involved,” she said. “Whether
it’s one cell or 18 billion, once she’s pregnant, her choice
has been made.”
Hylak was 25 when she met Joseph Hooker, the man who would become her husband,
on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje.
Raised in Chichester, he was a professional Catholic singer, songwriter
and musician. Hooker’s production of “Singing the Rosary”
was presented to Pope John Paul II.
For the two, it was love at first sight. They married 18 months later, on
the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, Oct. 7, 1991. Father John McFadden
officiated at their wedding at Immaculate Heart of Mary parish in Chester.
Eleven months later, they welcomed their first child, Luke John.
“He was the healthiest, happiest baby for the first three years,”
Hylak said. “We were just starting out when he was born, and spent
most of our time traveling with a Catholic youth ministry. I used to be
onstage, giving my pro-life message, with Luke John in a playpen next to
me. They used to call him the pro-life baby. He was the perfect prop.”
Hylak was pregnant with her second child when Luke began to experience sudden,
high fevers that were not associated with a cold or ear infection. Doctors
told her to give him Motrin, but the fevers kept coming back.
On the day she delivered her daughter, Veronica Grace, Luke John came in
to see his new little sister. “I could tell right away he was sick.
He looked so lethargic,” she said. “When I hugged him, he was
burning up.”
A pediatrician at Brandywine Hospital believed something serious was wrong
and told them to take Luke John for a thorough evaluation immediately.
Her husband took Luke John the following day, and on July 1, 1995, they
received the terrible news. Doctors found a malignant tumor the size of
a grapefruit on Luke’s liver.
“We went from elation over our new baby to total devastation,”
Hylak said. The dichotomy of emotions inspired the couple to write “The
Miracle Song”: “One child is born into light, the other begins
his own fight, both miracles in their own right….”
They spent the next two years in and out of hospitals. Luke’s cancer
metasticized, and slowly consumed their beautiful little boy. “On
his fourth birthday, he had four operations in one day,” Hylak said.
“That’s when Luke grew up. He went into surgery a 4- year-old
and came out a senior citizen.
He was in so much pain, he wouldn’t talk to anyone,” she said.
“When he finally did speak, he said, ‘Mom, get my shoes. I want
to go home.’”
His parents decided not to put him through any more surgeries. They took
him to Lourdes, hoping for a miracle.
God granted their wish — but He had a different kind of miracle in
mind. While they were in Lourdes, Luke kept asking his parents for a little
brother that he wanted to name Benjamin.
They discovered later that at some point during their pilgrimage, Hylak
did, indeed, conceive a new baby. But Luke John would not live to see his
new little brother.
“His last weeks were painful, but as he was dying, he would rarely
take any pain medication,” she said. “He kept saying he wanted
to be like the children of Fatima and offer it up for the conversion of
souls.
“We are blessed that our church, Assumption B.V.M., is open all night,
and I used to go there and lay on the floor, crying, ‘Lord, how can
you allow this? You let me teach him the faith so I can watch him suffocate
to death while offering it up.’
“God loved me patiently through those emotions, which came and went.
I realized then that you can say anything to the Lord at times like that
— just don’t stop talking to him,” Hylak said. “I
also learned the huge difference between knowing the faith and really putting
it into practice. My son taught me that, as only children can.”
Luke died in her arms on Feb. 3, 1997.
“As I was holding him, and he was dying, I felt the new baby within
me kick for the first time,” she said.
It was a glimmer of glory in the darkest hour of her life. The birth of
Benjamin Lourdes on July 4, 1997, was a healing salve on the broken hearts
of the Hooker family.
“It turned the tide of sorrow for us,” Hylak said. “We
had a new baby. It was time to say, ‘Okay, let’s start again.’”
They did, giving life to yet another child — Blaise John — two
years later. Life is good on the sprawling, West Grove homestead the family
calls “Luke John’s Hope Ranch.”
Hylak, a certified translator, who juggles home schooling duties with her
husband, has a demanding schedule managing Come Alive Communications, Inc.
The company does translation work for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
and numerous U.S. dioceses nationwide, including the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
The company’s secular clients include the federal government, the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the states of New Jersey and Delaware.
Overshadowed by a near-blow with abortion, touched by the cold kiss of death,
Hylak’s perspective on life has never changed — now it’s
just a bigger picture.
“I can put up with what might seem overwhelming to other people, because
I can compare it to what I’ve already survived,” she said. “What
we really need to do about abortion is just acknowledge these babies —
acknowledge the fact that they had a right to be alive. Just like I did.
Just like Luke did,” she said. “Yes, a piece of me went with
him — but he was a very special gift. And now I’m the mother
of a saint.”
Caught in the cross-hairs: Abortion targets minorities
by
Susan Brinkmann
CS&T Correspondent
Arlene Campbell was a 22-year-old college student when she discovered she
was pregnant. The year was 1974, only a year after Roe v. Wade made abortion
“safe and legal.”
What happened to Arlene might have been legal, but that didn’t make
it safe.
“During the procedure, the doctor perforated my uterus,” said
Campbell, a Philadelphia native who is now 53 years old. “He knew
he did something wrong but he never acknowledged it. They just sent me home
with a pack of pain pills and a card with an emergency number on it.”
A few days later, she nearly died on an operating table while doctors performed
an emergency hysterectomy. Gangrene had set in, and it destroyed her reproductive
organs. When she woke up after the surgery, instead of being a woman capable
of childbearing, she found herself in menopause.
“They told me the abortion would be as simple as pulling a tooth,”
she said. “I asked if it was a baby, and they said no, it was just
a blob of tissue. They’re still telling women these lies even today.
Never would I have thought the decision I made that day would haunt me for
the rest of my life.”
It was years later that she picked up a brochure at a crisis pregnancy center.
It asked: “What is the leading cause of death in the African American
community?” It wasn't cancer or heart disease, she discovered, but
something she never expected — abortion.
The abortion rate for African American women is 30 per 1,000, compared to
only 10 per 1,000 for white women. Even though only 13 percent of the population
is African American, this group undergoes 35 percent of all abortions.
“I was shocked,” Campbell said. She started looking into the
subject. “One day, I opened the phone book and counted something like
34 abortion clinics, and only three crisis pregnancy centers, in the Philadelphia
area.”
Campbell had stumbled on what has become a national problem — a high
concentration of abortion providers among minority population centers in
urban areas where there are too few crisis pregnancy centers. The disparity
amounts to leaving minority women with only one choice in the event of an
unplanned pregnancy — abortion.
Unknown to most, crisis pregnancy centers are not about forcing women either
to keep their babies or choose adoption. They offer women a multitude of
services, including crisis counseling for families and individuals, referrals
for housing and other material assistance, parenting and childbirth classes,
support groups, and post-abortion counseling services. Without them, women
often feel as if they have no choice but to undergo an abortion.
A movement has already begun to correct this disparity in cities across
the nation. Care Net, a leading national crisis pregnancy center network,
began an initiative in 2003 to open more centers in urban areas.
“Our goal is to open 50 new centers by 2008, so we have a lot of work
to do,” said Lillie A. Epps, vice president for urban center development
for Care Net.
“We have had 13 centers open since the initiative started in 2003,
with six more to open by the spring of 2007,” she said. “We
also support existing centers by strengthening them and helping them to
provide additional services such as ultra-sound and STD testing.”
When Epps looked at the abortion rates across the nation, she found that
Philadelphia ranks at the top of the list of cities where the majority of
abortion providers are located among minority population centers.
In fact, about 50 percent of all abortions performed in Pennsylvania are
performed in Philadelphia County — which encompasses only the city
of Philadelphia. Of the 14,389 abortions performed in Philadelphia in 2001,
some 10,339 were performed on African American women.
Minority populations are in the cross-hairs of the abortion industry. “If
you put African American and Hispanic women together, they make up only
25 percent of the population of women of childbearing age, but they make
up 57 percent of all abortions done in this country,” Epps said. “This
is mind-boggling.”
Care Net's initiative will attempt to change those numbers by opening new
centers and developing partnerships with existing urban ministries or churches.
Efforts are already underway to open up new centers and strengthen existing
ones in major metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Hartford,
Houston, and Orlando.
“I want women to make choices in their lives they can live with, but
I also want them to know, first and foremost, that they have a choice,”
Epps said. “Our centers are here to educate and support women —
to help them make informed choices.”
Clinics also help turn around the lives of women who are caught in a vicious
cycle of abortion, she said: “In the inner-cities, it’s all
generational. You have grandmothers, mothers, daughters all having abortions,
and having all kinds of relationships.
“We want to turn these girls’ lives around, and let them know
they need to be responsible for their own sexual health. The way you do
that is by loving yourself, learning how to take care of yourself, respecting
yourself,” she said.
Of all the services provided by crisis pregnancy clinics, one of the most
crucial is post-abortion counseling. Epps tells of a teenager who came into
a Newport News, Va., clinic sobbing hysterically. She had just had a late
term abortion and was haunted by actually hearing her baby’s heart
stop beating.
“I sat down on the floor with this little girl, and held her in my
arms and cried with her,” Epps said. “She had no mother —
no one she could talk to. This happens every day in crisis pregnancy centers
across the country. We’re all about seeing wounded lives heal.”
Joan Boydell, the director of the Amnion Crisis Pregnancy Center in Bryn
Mawr, has been in the business for 17 years and has seen the same thing
over and over again.
“The initial reaction for many women after an abortion is relief and
a little depression, but most women just get on with their lives,”
she said. “This is something that comes back to haunt them later.”
When it does, crisis pregnancy centers are there to help. The Bryn Mawr
center has six professional counselors on staff to help women cope with
the affects of unplanned pregnancies, regardless of whether they chose to
keep the baby or not.
“We make it clear to every woman [that] even if she chooses abortion,
she is always welcome to come back, because we’re here to help her
process that decision,” Boydell said. “Should she experience
any regret or concern afterward, she’s welcome to come back.”
She also believes more centers are needed in urban areas. But Boydell added
that money is a big problem. While Planned Parenthood clinics have collected
billions of taxpayer dollars over the last 20 years, pregnancy centers get
next to nothing.
“We’re all privately funded and run by mostly volunteers,”
Boydell said. “There are some areas of funding that have been made
available to pregnancy centers, but it’s not across the board. It
needs to be applied for, and it’s difficult to get. We’ve applied
for a grant or two in the past, but up to this point, we have no state or
federal funding at all. And because most pregnancy centers are faith-based
organizations, that also limits where the funding can come from.”
Campell, meanwhile, remains determined to open centers that will help African
American women get out of the sights of the abortion industry.
“The truth is not getting out. That’s why it’s so important
for me to get the word out, and make sure women know what’s going
on. I will not keep quiet,” she said. “I will tell my story
to anyone who will listen.”
Contraception — ‘a spiritual cancer’
By
Brian Gail
Special to the CS&T
Cancer
has been compared to the Black Plague. It has claimed the lives of tens
of millions of Americans. Untold billions have been spent to slow its destructive
surge through our families and communities.
But it continues, all but unabated. Indeed, today, there is virtually no
American family left unscathed by the scourge of cancer.
But there is something even more destructive that has been loosed upon the
land. Call it the Blackest Plague. It is a spiritual cancer.
Soul-deadening, infant-killing contraception has already claimed the lives
of — not tens of millions — but hundreds of millions. It, too,
continues unabated. And, indeed, virtually no American family has been left
unscathed.
The Florida Bishop Victor Galeone first described contraception as a “spiritual
cancer which is eating away at the mystical body of Christ,” in a
pastoral letter to families in his diocese of St. Augustine.
“It is the taproot of all evil in the family, in the Church and in
society,” he said.
The Commission for the Study of Abortion Deaths, directed by the late Father
John A. Hardon, S.J., and chaired by Bogomir Kuhar, estimated that seven
infants are killed by hormonal contraceptives for every one infant killed
by a surgical abortion procedure.
There have been an estimated 44 million infants killed by surgical abortion
procedures since the U. S. Supreme Court declared abortion constitutional
in 1973. During the same period, more than 300 million infants have been
killed by abortifacient contraceptions, the Commission said.
The vast majority of young, church-going, Eucharist- receiving, Catholic
husbands and wives have no idea that they are potentially killing their
babies in that brief period between fertilization — when an infant
is actually conceived — and implantation of the fertilized egg, whenever
they use an oral contraceptive, an intrauterine device, a synthetic progestin
like Depo-Provera or Norplant, or some other hormonal contraceptive.
Indeed, there are perhaps 50 babies destroyed by otherwise faithful young
Catholic mothers every week in our Archdiocese — simply because nobody’s
told those women.
The effects of cancer are readily apparent. The effects of spiritual cancer
are less so.
A physical body, after all, is visible, but the tiny body of an infant who
exists ever so briefly in the womb of its mother is not. Neither, of course,
is a soul.
But the pain — both physical and spiritual — is no less real
to the infants, to their mothers and families, and to society in general.
One out of every two couples suffers the pain of divorce. Three of every
four couples who live together and contracept prior to marriage suffer the
pain of divorce.
How pervasive is the use of abortifacient contraceptives?
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “Contraceptive
use in [in the United States] is virtually universal among women of reproductive
age. Some 98 percent of all women who have had intercourse have used at
least one contraceptive method.”
Similar studies have long since established that Catholic couples contracept
at the same rate as non-Catholic couples.
Contraceptives are, of course, notoriously unreliable. The same government
agency also reports that an astounding 125 million Americans are suffering
from an incurable sexually-transmitted disease. Prior to the advent of the
first hormonal contraceptive, the pill, there were five known sexually transmitted
diseases. Today, there are an estimated 30, 26 of which infect only women.
Perhaps no single institution in America has suffered the devastating consequences
of this blackest of plagues as has the Catholic Church.
Two generations ago, there were more than 70,000 priests serving almost
35 million families. Today, there are about half as many priests serving
almost twice as many families. Two generations ago, there were almost 50,000
men studying to be priests. Today there are less than 5,000. There were
over 100,000 women religious teaching in Catholic schools back then. Today
there are less than 10,000.
Fewer children — an average of two per family today, compared with
five just two generations ago — means not only fewer students, fewer
vocations and, therefore, fewer schools. It also means a diminished Catholic
influence on the culture, and American society in general. This has proven
to be a matter of no small consequence.
Perhaps never before has America more urgently required an authentically
Catholic voice to help form its character, shape its discourse, and guide
its policy development — both foreign and domestic. And our deadly
silence, particularly on the life-and-death issue of abortifacient contraceptives,
has helped impoverish the American spirit and deaden its soul.
Pope Pius XII emphasized the indispensability of the one, holy, catholic
and apostolic Church in his iconic encyclical, Mystici Corporis. “It
is a great mystery,” he wrote, “that the salvation of the many
depends on the holiness the few.”
In opposing contraception and abortion, it is well to contemplate the words
of Blessed Theresa of Calcutta when she accepted the Nobel Prize in Oslo,
Norway, in 1979: “The fruit of abortion is nuclear war. If a child
is not safe in its own mother’s womb, what is to protect nation from
nation?”
Let us each resolve to live the “call to holiness” that is our
shared vocation. Let us pray and fast, as Our Lady has asked of us, in accordance
with our station in life. Let us adore and reparate the Eucharist for the
national sin of abortion in all its virulent forms.
Let us pray the rosary every day for peace in the womb, in the heart, and
in the world. Let us pray the Divine Mercy chaplet every day for our bishops
and priests.
And let us not stop there.
Those of us with apostolates, let us meet with our bishops and pastors.
Let us ask them to publish pastoral letters on the sanctity of marriage
and the sacred transmission of human life, as some of our bishops have already
done.
Let us ask them to proclaim the truth of God's holy plan for covenantal
marriage from the pulpit.
Let us ask them to invite the remarkable Christopher West into our dioceses
to share with our priests and young married couples the exquisitely sublime
truths of John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body,” which
his biographer, George Weigel, once said is a “ticking time bomb that
will go off sometime in the 21st century.”
And let us entrust our hearts, our families, our Church and our world to
the Immaculate Heart of Mary. She can release and direct the transfusion
of grace the world so desperately needs to turn back from the edge of the
precipice.
As the history of our beloved Church over two millennia has demonstrated,
she, and she alone, has always been the cure for spiritual cancer.
Brian J. Gail is a retired business executive and is a member of St. John Vianney Parish in Gladwyne.
Challenging some assumptions about the death penalty
Kirk
Bloodsworth
By
Andrew Rivas
Special to the CS&T
Losing
a close family member to murder is a tragedy of unimaginable proportions.
The effects on the family, and on the wider community, extends well beyond
the initial shock and trauma. The common assumption in this country is that
families that have suffered this kind of loss will support the death penalty.
That assumption, of course, is wrong. Many family members of victims have
argued forcefully against the death penalty for their loved one’s
killer.
We’ll see how four people whose lives were touched by murder unexpectedly
became public advocates against capital punishment.
Vicki Schieber
Schrieber’s daughter, Shannon, was 23 years old in 1998, when she
was murdered by a serial rapist in Philadelphia.
In 2002, Troy Graves pleaded guilty to assaulting, raping, and killing Shannon,
and to 13 other sexual assaults.
The Schriebers raised their children to oppose the killing of anyone, including
murderers, if the killers could be imprisoned for life without parole, and
so no longer pose a danger to society.
No one should infer from her opposition to the death penalty that Schrieber
did not want Shannon’s murderer caught, prosecuted, and put away for
the rest of his life: “We believe he is where he belongs today, as
he serves his prison sentence, and we rest assured that he will never again
perpetrate this sort of crime on any other young women. But killing this
man would not bring our daughter back,” Schrieber said. And it was
very clear to us that killing him would have been partly dependent on our
complicity in having it done.”
Today Schrieber serves on the board of directors of Murder Victims’
Families for Human Rights (MVFHR), a national non-profit organization of
people who have lost a family member to murder or to state execution.
David Kaczynski and Gary Wright
David Kaczynski is the brother of Ted Kaczynski, “the Unabomber,”
a mentally-ill man whose anti-technology bombings over 17 years left three
people dead and 23 injured. When newspapers printed the Unabomber’s
“manifesto,” David Kaczynski and his wife, Linda, recognized
similarities to Ted’s ideas. He faced an almost unimaginable dilemma
— he could turn in his brother knowing that he might be executed,
or he could do nothing, knowing more innocent people could be harmed. He
chose the path of life, and took steps to stop the violence.
Despite Ted Kaczynski’s history of mental illness, federal prosecutors
sought the death penalty. It was only through the work of highly-skilled
lawyers — an advantage often unavailable to those facing capital prosecutions
— that Ted was allowed to plead guilty and is now serving a life sentence
in a federal penitentiary in Colorado.
Gary Wright was one of the Unabomber’s victims. Wright, owner of a
Salt Lake City computer store, happened to pick up a piece of wood behind
his store in 1987. It turned out to be a bomb placed there by Ted Kaczynski.
It was a miracle that Wright wasn’t killed, but he had to endure three
years in-and-out of surgery, and the slow, pain-filled process of rebuilding
his body and contemplating what had happened to him.
Both David Kaczynski and Wright reflected on the death penalty in intensely
personal ways, and both became convinced that our society can live without
using the death penalty.
Five years later, David Kaczynski became the executive director of New Yorkers
Against the Death Penalty, a group headed by Albany Bishop Howard Hubbard.
Wright has become an unlikely soldier in the same battle.
Wright, a practicing Catholic, explained: “While he was being executed,
Jesus forgave the people who were killing him. I thought, if that’s
the example Christ gave us while he was suffering on the cross, then I had
to think very seriously about forgiveness in my own life.”
Kirk Bloodsworth
Kirk Bloodsworth, a retired Marine from Maryland, was wrongfully convicted
of sexual assault, rape and first-degree murder, and was sentenced to death
in 1985. The ruling was appealed a year later on the grounds that evidence
was withheld at trial, and Bloodsworth received a new trial. He was found
guilty again, and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
In June 1993, his case became the first capital conviction in the United
States to be overturned as a result of DNA testing.
By the time of his release, Bloodsworth had served almost nine years in
prison, including two years on death row, for a crime he did not commit.
“In that time,” he says, “my life had been taken from
me and destroyed. The Catholic Church provided me with essential support
in my time of need, and I converted to Catholicism in 1989, while I was
serving time behind bars. I am a deeply spiritual person, and continue to
embrace the Church. Its values help to guide me as I travel across the country
to tell my story.”
Although Bloodsworth was a retired marine with no criminal record, and was
nowhere near the scene of the crime, he was nevertheless convicted and sentenced
to death for the crime. If it could happen to someone like him, he reasoned,
it could happen to others.
And it does. Since 1973, more than 120 people have been exonerated from
death row after being cleared of their charges.
Today, Bloodsworth works for the Justice Project’s Campaign for Criminal
Justice Reform and the Criminal Justice Reform Education Fund.
What is striking about these stories is seeing how God embraces people as
they face some of the most terrible and hopeless situations life can present.
If those men and women can overcome human hatred and bring a Gospel of mercy
and love to the world, how can we claim a right to demand the death of a
killer to “honor the victim” or to “win justice”
for the victim’s family?
We cannot. To do so dishonors the lives of all involved, making us complicit
in perpetuating violence rather than ending it.
Andrew Rivas is executive director of the Texas Catholic Conference.
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