Vatican City, May 25, 2019 / 06:25 am (CNA).- Pope Francis said Saturday that abortion is never the answer to difficult prenatal diagnoses, calling selective abortion of the disabled the “expression of an inhuman eugenics mentality.”
“Fear and hostility towards disability often lead to the choice of abortion, configuring it as a practice of ‘prevention,’” Pope Francis said May 25.
“But the Church’s teaching on this point is clear: human life is sacred and inviolable and the use of prenatal diagnosis for selective purposes must be strongly discouraged because it is the expression of an inhuman eugenics mentality, which removes the possibility for families to accept, embrace and love their weakest children,” he said.
The pope addressed a Vatican conference on perinatal hospice highlighting medical care and ministries that support families who have received a prenatal diagnosis indicating that their baby will likely die before or just after birth.
“Yes to Life: Caring for the precious gift of life in its frailness,” a conference organized by the Vatican Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life May 23-25 brought together medical professionals, bioethicists, ministry providers, and families from 70 countries to discuss how best to provide medical, psychological, and emotional support for parents expecting a child with a life-limiting illness.
“Sometimes people ask me, what does perinatal hospice look like? And I answer, ‘It looks like love,’” author and mother Amy Kuebelbeck shared at the conference.
Kuelbeck was 25 weeks pregnant when she received the diagnosis that her unborn son had an incurable heart defect. She carried her pregnancy to term and had a little more than 2 hours with her son, Gabriel, before he died after birth.
“It was one of the most profound experiences of my life,” Kuelbeck said. She wrote a memoir of her experience of grief, loss, and love called “Waiting with Gabriel: A Story of Cherishing a Baby’s Brief Life.”
“I know that some people assume that continuing a pregnancy with a baby who will die is all for nothing. But it isn’t all for nothing. Parents can wait with their baby, protect their baby, and love their baby for as long as that baby is able to live. They can give that baby a peaceful life – and a peaceful goodbye. That’s not nothing. That is a gift,” Kuelbeck wrote in “Waiting with Gabriel.”
Dr. Byron Calhoun, a medical professor of obstetrics and gynecology, who first coined the term “perinatal hospice” spoke at the conference. His research has found that allowing parents of newborns with a terminal prenatal diagnosis the chance to be parents can result in less distress for the mother than pregnancy termination.
Many families facing these diagnoses have to decide if they will seek extraordinary or disproportionate medical care for their child after birth.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of ‘over-zealous’ treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted.”
Ministries like Alexandra’s House, a perinatal hospice in Kansas City, provide counsel and grief support to parents as they face these difficult medical decisions. They also connect families with a network of other parents who have had a terminal prenatal diagnosis. “Most of the families stay in contact indefinitely,” said MaryCarroll Sullivan, nurse and bioethics advisor for the ministry.
There are now more than 300 hospitals, hospices, and ministries providing perinatal palliative care around the world.
Sister Giustina Olha Holubets, a geneticist at the University of Lviv, helped to found “Imprint of Life” a perinatal palliative care center in Ukraine that offers grief accompaniment, individualized birth plans, the sacrament of baptism, and burial, as well as respectful photos, footprints, and memory books to help families cherish their brief moments with their child.
The motto of Imprint of Life is “I cannot give more days to your life, but I can give more life to your days.”
Pope Francis met with Sister Giustina and other perinatal hospice providers in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace on the last day of the conference.
The pope thanked them for creating “networks of love” to which couples can turn to receive accompaniment with the undeniable practical, human, and spiritual difficulties they face.
“Your testimony of love is a gift to the world,” he said.
“Taking care of these children helps parents to mourn and to think of this not only as a loss, but as a step in a journey together. That child will stay in their life forever, and they will have been able to love him,” Pope Francis said.
“Those few hours in which a mother can lull her child can leave a mark on the heart of that woman that she will never forget,” he said.
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Pope Leo and everyone else just need to relax. It was an accident. If you doubt that, you’re an anti-Semite.
If you doubt such sarcasm is antisemitic, you’re antisemitic.
WOW, 🤯 that was blunt!!! It’s possible to love the Jews but condemn the State of Israel! And many Jews do it!
Tony W. Arn’t you open to a dissenting opinion?
Because we know that shrapnel never causes collateral damage…
I can assure you that I am not an antisemite and having a missile strike a Catholic church full of innocent people is not acceptable. What kind of people have we become when we can shrug off this type of collateral damage as “an accident.”
Shrapnel does not a missile make.
How many churches were damaged by the allies during WW2? War is heck.
So Netanyahu called Pope Leo, eh?
Would it be too much trouble to let us know what Netanyahu said to him?
Yes, bineyman, it’s reported that a call was made but then tells us nothing of substance. A waste of precious ink.
I wonder why Leo XIV doesn’t ask Netanyahu to send his foreign minister to Castelgondolfo for a meeting with the leader of Hamas to end the ighting? Leo should invite the leader of Hamas.
“Fragments of a projectile”? Looks like a direct hit. The Church is completely destroyed. Well they’ve been itching to get rid of it since the war started. Never mind, There’s probably somebody sheltering there who might say something rude about Tel Aviv in the future. Prevention is better than cure, eh? Come to think of it, there’s probably people in Tierra del Fuego or Timbuctu who might also say rude things. Perhaps they need a few bombs too. Words are so hard to bear. Oh dear.
Yes, it was a direct hit from an explosive (i.e. shrapnel-filled) tank shell.
Israel is employing its usual diabolical sophistry (“the unaimed shrapnel did it!”) to excuse itself.
Diabolical?
If the problem that developed in Nigeria is because of a direct deliberate withholding of intelligence by Israelis, noticing it as it becomes apparent would not be from “hating Israel” or from being a “hate Israel firster”. If the US also has been withholding it doesn’t mean reacting against that is being hateful of the US.
I am skeptical of Israel’s explanation of the attack being an “accident”. They gave the same excuse, when they deliberately and intentionally attacked the USS Liberty and killed our sailors.
Why does the American media give so little coverage to these all
too frequent “mistakes” by the Israeli military forces”?
The Judophobia is strong in this comment section.
Pius XII did say we were all spiritual Semites, but he rejected Zionism, and Tel Aviv’s jurisdiction over Jerusalem, which remain the Church’s positions to this day. The Church began diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv a few decades ago (as did the Palestinians), but only as recognition of a political situation on the ground, not as a Jewish state per se. Catholics (unlike certain evangelical groups) ought to keep to the Church’s official, constant position on this issue; it’s based on faith, not politics. The Church has supported a two state solution (outside Jerusalem) ever since it became an option. The continuation of the war in Gaza for years after Gaza’s foray outside itself was defeated, has only one purpose – to make a two state solution impossible. But a just war does not entitle even an aggrieved party to annihilate another nation by ethnic cleansing.
But the main question the Christian West should be asking is: what about our sacred places? What about the Christians in Palestine? That should be the focus of our tears and anger.
I do not particularly care to embrace the political positions of any pontiff, as they are far outside the realm of his infallibility and are frequently outside the realm of good sense.
(Incidentally, you are thinking of Pius XI, not XII, as the pontiff of “spiritually we are all Semites”.)
In a word, “the Church’s” (really “the Vatican’s”) position on Zionism and the two-state solution and jurisdiction over Jerusalem is not authoritative for Catholics and enjoys all the sense of the Vatican’s position on the United Nations. A two-state solution was feasible eighty years ago and was rejected by the Arabs. The idea that it will work now is pure geopolitical folly. Israel has a better historical claim to Judea and Samaria than it does to the Mediterranean coast, and any Palestinian state would unquestionably be either a state sponsor of terror or ineffective in stopping it.
You parrot the common blood libel of “ethnic cleansing” (and it is blood libel), blissfully ignorant of the requirements of urban warfare and apparently of the large Arab Israeli population.
The war in Gaza is to destroy one of the most notorious terror organizations in the world. It is every bit as jest as the Allied crusade against Nazism or Japanese militarism.
It is furthermore fallacious to claim that the war in Gaza has or will make a two-state solution impossible. Hamas made it impossible by showing what a Palestinian state would do.
Thank you Spiritual Semite for stating the facts of the matter with brevity and clarity. Hamas, by their shocking actions over many years now have clearly demonstrated with hideous clarity that the ‘2 state solution’ is an absolute impossibility. A lot of contributors to this thread need to ask themselves why it is that to this day no Arab state has taken in a single refugee from Gaza.
Good post, Mr. Cervantes, an excellent summary.
There is no ethnic cleansing taking place, and it’s inappropriate to make that false accusation. The Palestinians have consistently rejected a two state solution, so their situation is largely their own doing.
It almost never fails.
Let’s not call it a phobia, but what it is: hatred.
It’s a disorder I believe. Scapegoats provide a rationalization for our failures. It’s easier to blame others for life’s disappointments and our own weaknesses.
I had a family member who ended up like that. Everything wrong with the world became the fault of Jews and immigrants. It’s sad.
I really hope the pope will also urge the release of Israeli civilian hostages.
I stand corrected. Saying a two-state solution is impossible because of the regime in the smaller part of Palestine, Gaza, is Luke saying that a German star was forever impossible because of the Nazi regime. Hamas was defeated is conventional warfare a few weeks into the conflict. That it is still able to conduct guerilla warfare is no teaspn the ethnically cleanse Gaza. If you affirm this, then you affirm that the English would have been right to ethnically cleanse the Irish, who continued for many generations to conduct rather deadly guerilla campaigns against the occupation and its local allies. These campaigns repeatedly killed far more than the 400 civilians and 300 soldiers Hamas did three years ago, and which you seem to consider a kind of Year Zero.
The Catholic Church’s position on Zionism and Zionism’s jurisdiction over Jerusalem isn’t politics, as you claim. Catholicism can’t identify the OT people with a Mitteleuropan political movement based on secular nationalism. Nor would it identify the OT state with contemporary Orthodox Judaism. The only claim Tel Aviv can have is its might is right notion, which the Vatican accommodates with its support for a two-state solution. This solution is politics, yes, and leaves untouched the Church’s position on Zionism and jurisdiction over Jerusalem.
Your second paragraph is risible bunk. The Church has no authority whatever to declaim on a geopolitical solution to the Zionist question. If anything, she can only affirm the special relationship of the Jewish nation to its land.
Your first paragraph repeats again the malicious lie that Israel is interested in “ethnically cleansing” Gaza, then compounds this with the military nonsense that counterinsurgency must under my view necessitate or justify such “cleansing.” This is preposterous. Military operations can and do, however, often necessitate urban warfare to uproot an entrenched enemy. You ought to familiarize yourself with military history.
“Catholicism can’t identify the OT people with a Mitteleuropan political movement based on secular nationalism. Nor would it identify the OT state with contemporary Orthodox Judaism. ”
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I don’t think Israelis are over-concerned about what some Catholics may believe about this. Attempting to assimilate & placate the prevailing class is what doomed many German Jews. It was a fool’s errand. Jews have always been the perfect scapegoat & Israel has been the only place they can feel relatively safe. Even there they still have to watch their backs.
The discussion with the other writer only concerned Catholic views on the issue. We are allowed to have views and discuss them? Thanks there.
The Vatican is a sovereign state which recognise other states if it chooses.The Church can and must try to intervene in secular affairs when higher principles are seriously violated by civil societies. It always has.
Netanyahoo’s Deight at Trump’s proposal to deport Gaza’s population only confirmed what his policies on the ground are doing. Do you agree that the removal of Gaza’s population to other countries would be immoral?
I can’t tell who your question is addressed to Mr Cervantes, but I personally believe Gaza should be completely evacuated. It’s unsafe for human habitation. To keep civilians there in harm’s way is immoral. But every civilian death scores Hamas propaganda points so they have no incentive to encourage the people to leave.
It’s unlikely any people would consent to being ethnically cleansed. The bravery of the Palestinians is incredible.
Jews have survived a very long history of attempts to exterminate and “ethnically cleanse ” them. They’ve know the reality of those words. Not the political invention.
Gaza needs to be evacuated ASAP and the hostages released. But Hamas has no incentive to do that because their sources of revenue would dry up.
The incredibly brave Palestinians of Gaza don’t need to be ethnically cleansed.
To call the Palestinians “brave” is, in the main, a despicable misuse of the word. The true bravery lies with the Israeli people and their righteous war.
The voluntary emigration of Palestinians from Gaza is certainly not immoral and would be excellent politics.
If you seriously believe their exit would be voluntary, there’s little point discussing the issue. But do you believe the removal of Gaza’s population to other countries would be moral? Last chance to give a straight answer.