The Sanctity Of Life by Averthanus L. D’Souza

GOA, Feb. 03, 2010, 12.00 Hrs (Averthanus L. D’Souza / CBCI News):

The ultimate tragedy of the Twentieth century seems to be the loss of the sense of the sanctity of life. We need not go to any great length to prove this assertion. The two world wars (1914-18 and in 1939-45) were the manifestation of humanity’s decline into brutality of the worst possible kind. Millions of human lives were destroyed with a ferocity unsurpassed either before or after. However, mankind does not seem to have learned the lessons from these wars. The rest of the twentieth century continued to see conflicts, albeit on a smaller scale, but every bit as brutal and ferocious, in many parts of the world. These were described as ethnic cleansing, genocide, inter-tribal wars or the clash of cultures. By whatever name these conflicts are described, they are the symptoms of a deep malaise within the social and cultural systems on which our present civilization is built. The degradation of our political systems and the corrosion in our economic institutions, and even the debasement of our entertainment industry and our sports enterprises have a common feature. There is no area of human enterprise which has not been infected by the cancerous invasion of the loss of a sense of the sacredness of human life.

Sociologists, Cultural Anthropologists, Social Psychologists and others have been straining their professional nerves to understand this upsurge in violence all over the globe. Some studies have provided useful insights into the phenomena and also into the causes. At the root of violence there seems to be an aggressive selfishness and unconcern for the rights of others. This is evident in all the institutions of public life – whether political, economic, cultural or social. The arena of politics, for example, has become like a battlefield in which laws of decency have been dispensed with. Each one for himself and the devil take the weakest. Our economic institutions show a similar disregard for the rights of others in pursuit of the personal advantage of the few (powerful) individuals. In the wake of the financial meltdown which is still ongoing, some analysts have described this crisis as having been caused by the deliberate spreading of the public risk to ensure the private profit of some. Banks and financial institutions have misused the investments and savings of their clients to invest in questionable projects which were at very high risk of failure. When the dominoes began to collapse, they had a global impact; but the shrewd banking operatives allowed their companies to flounder but ensured that their own personal fortunes remained intact. The Obama “bailouts” were converted into bonuses for those who had engineered the banking meltdown.

A similar phenomenon is starkly evident in the field of sports. Prominent cricketers and footballers are now being openly sold at public auctions. The prices paid for them are like the prices paid for cattle, depending on their age, their milk yield and their profitability in the future. Big businessmen are now “investing” in human beings just as they invest in commodities or in stocks and shares. The “commodification” of humans has reached its lowest level.

In the social field, women are being traded as commodities. Whether as models or promoters of dubious products or even as the public face of companies, women have been reduced to tradable commodities. And those responsible for this degradation, are, most often than not, women themselves. They evaluate themselves in terms of dollars. They are willing to sell themselves for the “right price.”

Social psychologists are lamenting the fact that “alienation” appears to have reached its nadir in an age which has completely lost its soul. Women want to discard their unique femininity in favour of becoming “equal” to men. This is a totally unrealizable dream precisely because it is unreal. Fame and fortune, like youth and beauty, fade away like the morning mist. When they face the reality of their situations, they begin to despair and seek refuge in alcohol and drugs; which, instead of alleviating their pain only further exacerbate their despair. They have lost, what one sage has called, the centre of their being.

Life has lost its vitality because life has been abandoned for the chimera of pleasure. The strongest evidence of this is in the insane pursuit of pleasure, mainly sexual, but also in the guise of fame and wealth. The citizens of this century have reduced their ambitions to false gods and man-made idols.

At the core of this problem is the fact that people have abandoned their respect for life in all its forms – but specially human life. One sees published articles often written by women in which these women justify the abominable practice of abortion on the grounds that they have a “right” over their own bodies. They have invented a right which they call “the reproductive right of women.” It does not occur to them that such a right is nowhere to be found in the U.N’s Declaration of Human Rights; neither does it occur to them that rights accrue only to human “persons” and not to any of their physiological functions. Reproduction is a physiological function just as are lactation and excretion. We do not hear of women, however, loudly claiming that they have lactation rights or excretory rights. By a strange distortion of reason and common sense they claim that the foetus inside their womb is part of their own body, and that, therefore, they have a right to destroy it at any stage of its development. They argue that a foetus is not human; but that it is only a mass of tissue. Sometimes they argue that they are being victimized to bear babies and treated as mere “containers.” Consequently, they argue, that they have the right to eject the foreign body at any stage of its development. This, they argue, does not constitute murder of a human being. If this crazy logic is extended, as is being done by some pseudo-scientists, they also justify the killing of adults who are completely helpless, people with Alzheimer’s disease and even those who, for whatever reason, are comatose. In a recent internet debate, a doctor (?) put forward the absurd argument that there are certain circumstances in which a person loses (sic) his/her personhood. He argued that in these circumstances it is justified to destroy human life, provided that authorization is obtained from the appropriate legal authorities. This would be construed, according to him, as “lawful” killing comparable to judicial execution, and the killing of combatants and innocent bystanders in war.

A nominee of President Barack Obama for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice argued before the American Supreme Court that pregnancy was like slavery. She argued that if a woman is not allowed to abort her baby it would be like her being “conscripted” by the government to carry an “unwanted” baby against her own “choice.”

It should be noted that what is being argued here is that the individual should be the final arbiter in deciding whether a baby should live or die, whether a foetus should be allowed to develop into a full human baby, whether a comatose person should be allowed to live until death comes, whether a person suffering from Alzheimer’s should be clinically dispatched because the doctor decides that s/he is a useless individual. When trained medical practitioners adopt an attitude which clearly violates the Hippocratic Oath which they have solemnly sworn to uphold; when mothers decide that their own (imaginary) “reproductive rights” take precedence over the inalienable rights of their babies, our society is surely but slowly fuelling the destruction of life on this planet. Violence committed by women against their own children and violence committed by doctors under fanciful clinical terminologies are at the heart of all the other violence which we see in society. We cannot decry the violence in wars without at the same time decrying the murder of innocent and helpless persons.