UK's Slippery Slope of Relativism

Fire of Liberty

It seems that the UK is slowly but surely sliding down the slippery slope of eugenics with its most recent court ruling. According to this article in The Daily Mail, the UK government has ruled that the parents of an 18 month old baby named Charlotte (who has severe health issues that could cause her to stop breathing) have no right in deciding the fate of their child. Since Charlotte is deemed to be in "severe pain" by the Doctors at St. Mary's Hospital in Portsmouth, they have argued that it would be worse on the patient if they tried to resuscitate the child. I'd have to say its a sad day for the people of the UK and the World in general that doctors can take all decisions out of the parent's hands because they think their decision is better than the parents. While the doctors can easily decide to pull the plug because "science" says so, these parents have to sit by and see their child die before their eyes.

The big question I have is since when did a parent lose the right to choose what's best for their child. I can understand the parents losing these rights if they had died, put the child in a orphanage or abused the child and had her taken away but all these people did was have the child prematurely in a hospital and having a lot of medical problems. I guess this is a clear example of why the UK's National Health Service is more dangerous to the people than previously thought. You can clearly see that a government run entity like St. Mary's is being pushed to the limits like most government run hospitals and generally have long waiting lists for the precious beds/care that the hospital has. Therefore, the impersonal government run NHS looks at this case as something that eats up special time and space which could be better used for more healthy people thus Charlotte is deemed expendable because the "Doctors say so."

I guess socialized medicine is the first step towards Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Remember, this is the same nation that allowed someone to abort their child because they had a cleft-lip and would be deemed highly disabled, though it could be corrected by a simple surgery. I guess this is what happens when you have a culture enthralled with the concept of relativism. We are living in dangerous times where science is trumping what is morally right. While I'm no Catholic, I'm on board with Pope Benedict XVI in his concern and fight against this evil known as relativism. This case is just one more example of why I believe so.

As you've probably read, the article in The Daily Mail notes several times about Charlotte "suffering." Well let's look at another view on suffering:

[Cardinal Ratzinger:] Today what people have in view is eliminating suffering from the world. For the individual, that means avoiding pain and suffering in whatever way. Yet we must also see that it is in this very way that the world becomes very hard and very cold. Pain is part of being human. Anyone who really wanted to get rid of suffering would have to get rid of love before anything else, because there can be no love without suffering, because it always demands an element of self-sacrifice, because, given temperamental differences and the drama of situations, it will always bring with it renunciation and pain.

When we know that the way of love–this exodus, this going out of oneself-is the true way by which man becomes human, then we also understand that suffering is the process through which we mature. Anyone who has inwardly accepted suffering becomes more mature and more understanding of others, becomes more human. Anyone who has consistently avoided suffering does not understand other people; he becomes hard and selfish.

Love itself is a passion, something we endure. In love experience first a happiness, a general feeling of happiness.

Yet on the other hand, I am taken out of my comfortable tranquility and have to let myself be reshaped. If we say that suffering is the inner side of love, we then also understand it is so important to learn how to suffer–and why, conversely, the avoidance of suffering renders someone unfit to cope with life. He would be left with an existential emptiness, which could then only be combined with bitterness, with rejection and no longer with any inner acceptance or progress toward maturity.

This is from an excerpt of an excellent book by Benedict XVI (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) called God and the World: A Conversation with Peter Seewald. I'd have to say this man will make a great Pope and a champion for the people in a fight against evil.