The Culture of Death
By John M. Swomley, Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics
St. Paul School of Theology
In their November 15, 2000 meeting, the U.S. Catholic Bishops denounced the Supreme Court decisions on abortion and announced a program of education and public policy advocacy to oppose what they call "a culture of death." They recommitted themselves to "building a culture of life." In their statement they referred only to legal abortion as a culture of death and laws against it as promoting a culture of life.
This requires a more comprehensive ethical analysis not only of "the culture of death" but of the meaning of a "culture of life." Is it true that the leaders of one church are the champions of a culture of life while others, including major Protestant and Jewish groups, are endorsing a culture of death?
Our analysis goes beyond the obvious conflict between preserving the life and health of the woman and giving priority to life in the womb.
In actuality the culture of death includes, since the 1980s, almost fifty million people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The World Watch Institute reported the "number of deaths from AIDS in 1999" at 2.6 million and "pushed the cumulative death toll to 16 million, nearly as many people as live in New Your City." The same report said that about 12.2 million African women are infected compared with 10.1 million men." It noted that because of unprotected sex "most of these women will unknowingly pass the virus to their babies, adding to the half-million children born infected each year in Africa."
This culture of death is, at least in part, the responsibility of the U.S. Congress, which yearly responds to the Catholic Bishops campaign against U.S. funding of overseas family planning services, including contraceptives.
Outside Africa, the scourge of AIDS hits hardest in Central America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. In Haiti, for example, six percent of adults are infected. Since the Bishops are primarily concerned about Vatican restrictions against contraceptives and abortion, their political agenda against the use of condoms condemns millions of people around the world.
In some areas where Vatican influence is virtually nonexistent, the "culture of death" has been changed. For example, in the Indian state of Tamil Nadus a mass-media campaign promoting safe sex cut the rate of casual sex among factory workers in half between 1996 and 1998, while condom use rose from 17 to 50 percent.[1]
It is not just adults who are affected by this culture of death. "In nine African nations U.N. AIDS found that one-fifth to one-third of the children are likely to be orphaned by AIDS over the next decade. By 2010 Africa could be home to 40 million AIDS orphans."[2]
As another result of the Vatican objection to worldwide family planning, the World Health Organization estimates that 585,000 women die each year during pregnancy and childbirth. "The death toll," according to World Watch, "underestimates the magnitude of the problem. For every maternal death as many as thirty women sustain crippling and life-long health problems related to pregnancy."[3] Many of these deaths and life-long health problems could have been prevented by access to family planning services and safe, legal abortions
A culture of death also includes wars produced by over-population in some areas of the world. In 1995 there were 1,800,000 refugees living outside the borders of Rwanda and close to one million Rwandans had been slaughtered in internal warfare. The British medical journal, The Lancet, said Rwanda had the world`s highest fertility rate and "the fact that any country could now be in intensely Catholic Rwanda`s predicament is an indication of the world`s and especially the Holy See`s reluctance to face the issues of population control."
A more personal illustration of the culture of death relates to suicides among gay and lesbian youth in the United States. According to a 1989 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report, suicide is the leading cause of death among gay and lesbian youth. Estimates indicate that they are five times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers. The stigma caused by sectarian religious condemnation of homosexuality cannot be measured, but about 30% of the more than 5,000 annual suicides committed by gay and lesbian youth are those trying to deal with issues of sexual orientation.
Pressures on gay and lesbian youth are strong. In families unable to reconcile their child`s sexual identity with their religious values, the loss of family support is such a heavy blow that many youth flee to large cities to find friends who accept them. Part of the culture of rejection that may lead to suicide is in the schools. Name-calling as well as physical assault and the failure of school officials to provide protection from harassment and violence are all part of a culture of rejection that may lead to death.
The Vatican must share in these problems not only because of its hard condemnation of homosexuality but because it banned a nun and priest engaged in pastoral work with homosexuals from such work and silenced any comments or protests from them.
The solution to the culture of death is not to be achieved by laws such as those proposed by the Bishops against abortion in the United States. The Catholic Bishops want to reverse the Supreme Court`s legal decisions and even get a Constitutional amendment that would prevent doctors and clinics from ever providing safe abortions. They and some of the laws they propose identify abortions with infanticide. That is because they assert that a live human being or person exists at conception, even though a majority miscarry. Yet even unwanted infants are abandoned at birth and left to die. The sectarian religious idea that all abortions are wrong simply means that the culture of death concentrates on the woman whose life or health is threatened by pregnancy.
A culture of life is not achieved by passing laws against unwanted diseases such as AIDS or unwanted pregnancies. Ethical measures that prevent disease or unwanted pregnancy begin with causation rather than results. When I was teaching biomedical ethics in a theological school, I asked students, "If there were no unwanted pregnancies, would there be a significant abortion problem?" They generally concluded that the real problem is unwanted pregnancies. However, the anti-abortion movement will not deal with unwanted pregnancies by advocating sex education in the schools or contraceptive birth control or economic measures to minimize abortions for working mothers or those with low income. They simply want to pass laws against abortion.
If the United States had declared yellow fever to be illegal and had ignored the mosquitoes that were causing it, the U.S. would have made the same mistake as the Catholic Bishops: neglecting the cause and concentrating on the result. In short, the anti-abortion emphasis concentrates on the result instead of the cause and does not face the total problems of the culture of death to which it actually contributes.
One of the major causes of unwanted pregnancy is the unavailability of contraceptives or failed contraceptives. Today almost half of the women seeking abortions do so because of a failed contraceptive.[4] The failure rate of barrier methods is in the ten to eighteen percent range; of birth control pills, one to four percent; of Norplant .04 percent; and of natural family planning, the only Vatican-approved method, twenty to thirty-five percent.
A culture of life, contrary to the culture of death resulting from the Bishops` policies, respects existing human persons, including women whose lives or health are threatened by pregnancy. It respects the lives of men, women and children by preventing AIDS and other diseases through contraceptives. It respects homosexuals and other minorities and protects them from stigmatization and harassment. And it provides adequate family incomes for every family.
Endnotes
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[1] World Watch Institute, Vital Signs, 2000.
[2] Ibid.
[3] World Watch Institute, Vital Signs, 1997.
[4] Swomley, John M., Abortion Factbook, Readings, Trends, and State and Local Data to 1988 (S.K. Henshaw and J. Van Vort, eds., 1992), 5.
