An American lady aged 90-plus recently had a stroke which left her unable to swallow.

She had previously signed an “advance directive” specifying that no artificial hydration or nutrition be given her if she wasn’t going to recover.

But her nephew, her designated proxy, insisted that Catholic teaching be practised in her case, and that a feeding tube be installed anyway.

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Father Thomas Weinandy, spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, confirmed that Catholic health facilities have “an obligation to provide patients with food and water, including medically-assisted nutrition and hydration for those who cannot take food orally . . . you can’t just starve them to death. It’s hard to know whether someone will regain consciousness or not.”

A feeding tube was not, he said, required if it wouldn’t prolong life, or would be “excessively burdensome for the patient” or would “cause significant physical discomfort.”

In this case, doctors believed the patient had, at most, a few months to live, but would die sooner unless a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy ( PEG ) tube was surgically inserted.

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A rumpus ensued when the nephew made his decision – but as it happened, in the midst of it all, the patient died.

So did that solve the problem? Not entirely. This particular lady has gone to her judgement. But there are going to be thousands (millions?) more, just like her, about whom similar decisions will have to be reached.

We seem to have reached a turning-point in human history. Some questions can no longer be avoided.

What is a human being? Who decides what is “burdensome” and what isn’t? Burdensome to whom?

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The key point, for Catholics, is that you cannot do evil so that “good” may come of it.

Some people, including some doctors, don’t really distinguish between good and evil – when using those words they really mean more convenient or less convenient. For somebody.

This week is officially “Organ Donation Awareness Week” in Australia.

It was launched last Tuesday by Prime Minister, Mr Kevin Rudd, who said it is“crucial” that  families talk about this touchy issue.

A new program administered by the Federal Organ and Tissue Authority is to offer hospitals up to $11,400 a time for harvesting transplant organs from dying patients.

Mr Rudd lamented the fact that at present only 56 percent of Australian families give consent when approached for permission to remove a dying relative’s organs for transplant purposes.

His government is spending $150 million to try to boost that percentage.

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Why would families refuse to permit having their dying relatives harvested?

 *  do they doubt whether the doctors will wait until their loved one is really dead before starting to take things out?

 *  do they wonder whether “brain-death” is simply a convenient myth?

 *  do they wonder whether a person’s soul has necessarily left the body just because one organ — the brain — doesn’t look like working again?

Good questions.  The exact moment the soul departs cannot be known by scientific means.  Death is only certain when the body starts to decompose – which is why priests are permitted to give the Last Rites up to an hour after patients are certified medically dead.

By which time their organs are useless for transplanting.

Organs good enough to be worth transplanting must come from patients only pretend-dead — not dead-dead.

* * *

The government’s new pro-organ-harvesting website assures us that “most religions, including all major religions, support organ and tissue donation and transplantation as acts of generosity and merit . . . .”

Could that be a fib?

Even on life-support — while heart and lungs function, albeit artificially assisted – does not the body remain one organism, with one being, one soul?

Does that mean that it is removing his/her organs which actually kills the donor-patient?

Is that murder?

Prime Minister, Mr Kevin Rudd, said last Wednesday that he personally favours a 21-year old minimum legal drinking age, quoting links between Australia’s high P-plater road deaths and alcohol-swallowing.

But is it not probable that most teenage drunks will vote Labor (if still alive when next election happens)?

And likewise most people who sell alcohol?

It is hard, under Australia’s present form of “democracy”, to imagine any major party – especially Rudd’s so-called “Labor” — doing anything real to upset either of those two interest groups.

* * *

Federal Opposition leader, Mr Abbott, commented that 18-year olds drinking is OK with him, because he is not a “wowser”.

Deep stuff, eh?

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The scientific evidence about drinking ages and alcohol-related mayhem is, of course, well and truly in.

Professor Ian Hickie, at Sydney University’s Brain and Mind Research Institute, really does want legal alcohol drinking ages raised to 21 — on the basis of research showing that young people’s brains are particularly susceptible to alcohol damage.

Also the US experience, which provides further evidence –- in those states which have raised their drinking age to 21, accidents and violence involving youths having fallen . . . .

* * *

Both sides of Australian politics are carefully testing the water. Could it be that winning the next election is almost as important to both of them as is doing the right thing — i.e. preventing teenage deaths?

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Once again, the Church isn’t much help.

Two generations ago, when young Catholics celebrated their Confirmation, they were encouraged to sign an undertaking not to drink before turning 21. Many adhered to that promise.

Will that excellent practice ever be re-introduced?

Or would Church leaders need to “test the water” too – so as not to offend anybody – pretty much like a bunch of politicians?

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Two recent news items regarding so-called “emergency contraception”:

(1) Researchers now claim that a new morning-after pill has been shown to prevent pregnancy when used up to five days after sex — longer than any “protection” developed so far.

(2) Pentagon officials have decided to require all U.S. military bases around the world to provide abortifacient (“morning-after” or “plan-B” or “emergency contraception”) pills for the troops.

* * *

These kinds of pills will abort a newly-conceived embryo by preventing its implantation into the wall of the mother’s womb.

Their manufacturers prefer to call what they do “contraception” rather than “abortion”, knowing that some people are a bit funny about abortion — even thinking it is wrong – which could be bad for sales. They try to claim that pregnancy begins at implantation, not at fertilisation of the egg.

Everybody knows, of course, that from the moment the DNA from the sperm and the egg unite, they form a new and unique human being — nothing further being added by implantation.

Other problems with “morning-after” pills include the fact that they are useless in preventing sexually-transmitted diseases . . . .

One might have hoped the military would focus on discipline and proper behaviour — because lives depend on it — rather than promoting risky activities.

* * *

In the earliest days of contraceptive and similar pills, Pope Paul VI warned that contraception leads inevitably to practical atheism and irresponsible deeds.

You cannot defy the natural law and still have a relationship with the Creator of that law.

In Pope Paul’s words:

“If we do not want the mission of procreating human life to be conceded to the arbitrary decisions of men, we need to recognise that there are some limits to the power of man over his own body and over the natural operations of the body, which ought not to be transgressed.”

Having decided to ignore that warning, modern man (and woman) are now badly bogged down in a morass of unnatural, bizarre and sub-human technologies — such as in-vitro fertilization, cloning, genetic manipulation, and destroying human embryos in cold blood for certain kinds of stem cell research.

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Earlier this week, Republican candidate, Scott Brown, won a special election in Massachusetts, USA, supposedly a Democrat stronghold — which is going to change history.

Soon he will be voting, along with fellow Republican Senators, against President Obama’s proposed Health Care Plan.

If the Democrat candidate had won, Obama would have had the numbers to pass the new legislation without debate.

* * *

The Obama Health Plan is controversial:

(1) Feared by many as “socialistic”, it will, for the first time ever in the USA, provide universal health cover.

At present over 60 million Americans lack adequate health insurance. The old are covered by Medicare. The very poor are covered by Medicaid. Those working for big corporations are covered by their boss.

The rest, the working poor, have no cover. They cannot afford to get sick. It’s a brutal system, needing to be fixed.

(2)But there is a snag. The legislation in its present form cannot be supported by anyone who respects human life.

Amongst all the nice reforms are tucked away provisions that will give the abortion industry its greatest-ever boost.

Do politicians ever act on principle? Do they not invariably do whatever it takes, however perverse, to maintain themselves in perk-harvesting situations?

* * *

To create a better world, we must get politicians and government out of healthcare (also out of education and welfare).

Back in medieval Europe, health, education and welfare workers were all religious brothers, priests and nuns.

Unpaid: their life consisted of saying their prayers, tilling the soil to feed themselves — the rest being free for healing, teaching, helping . . . .

Celibate: they didn’t have to divide their time between God’s work and any family ties . . . .

TODAY THE CHURCH MUST SEEK AGAIN TO CREATE A NEW SOCIETY INSIDE — AND IN COMPETITION WITH — THE PRESENT DISINTEGRATING, ANTI-GOD, “MULTI-CULTURAL” SHAMBOLIC SHELL.

* * *

It is to this understanding of what God wants for human society that Mother Mary MacKillop, Australia’s first “saint”, committed her life. She refused always to accept even a cent of government money. She preferred to beg.

It will happen again — as soon as young people start seeing religious orders as an alternative lifestyle — different, unconventional, out-of-the-ordinary, unique, selfless — a full-time sharing of the divine life of God.

That’s not the message they’re getting at present.

2010 is the 50^th anniversary of the “contraceptive” Pill coming onto the market.

The advent of the Pill changed human history.

It ended the era, dating from the beginning of time, during which matters relating to sex were spoken of mainly in private — even bashfully. The new epoch of discussing it boldly at every opportunity had arrived.

Likewise it ended the age of considering the principle of contraception (interfering with the act of sex so as to deliberately make it sterile) to be unnatural. From the 1960s, it became increasingly a matter of little moral consequence one way or the other.

The main motivation for one’s actions, sexual and otherwise, switched from being something to be accounted for to God and to others, especially one’s family, to being a matter of doing what turns one on, and the others could get used to it.

* * *

Yet the new age of self-indulgence turned out less of a triumph for carefree liberty and licence than some had hoped.

It was noticed that women and girls taking the Pill were more at risk, not only of behaviour-related sexually transmitted disease, but also of breast cancer, cervix cancer, blood clots and — now they are telling us — of weak bones (osteoporosis) as well.

* * *

And after the Pill became available, Pope Paul VI reiterated the Church’s opposition to artificial contraception, warning that the Pill would lead to “marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards.”  

This was in his famous encyclical letter, Humanae Vitae, published on 25 July 1968.

Humanae Vitae  is a good read. It can be found at: www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html

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Pope Paul’s comments were initially pooh-poohed as scare-mongering. But, if anything, he under-stated the dangers. Hasn’t the whole concept of marriage as the institution keeping our families and our society stable, now been largely lost?

Even mentioning that marriage is better than de facto relationships or casual sex or same-sex coupling today risks accusations of “discrimination”, “hate-crime” etc.