By Judie Brown
American Catholics continue to react to the controversial document from the Vatican dealing with blessings given to couples in irregular relationships, and homosexual couples in particular. One wonders why this is so, since Pope Francis has already derided such people as hypocrites. But in this age of twisted perspectives on love between two people, we agree with Jeffrey Mirus’ observation. He wrote, “Pope Francis dare not judge those who criticize his ecclesiastical governance to be hypocrites. The very fact that he so often does so is far too revealing, for hypocrisy is ever the accusation of the self-righteous. But the judgment of hypocrisy requires a perfect reading of souls. And that belongs to God alone.”
We will not dwell on Pope Francis’ opinions as the only example of cultural disarray, as there are so many worldly examples, including the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which is doing its own manipulation on the subject of abortion. The Guttmacher Institute was once an unofficial arm of Planned Parenthood, housed in its headquarters. Its founder, Alan Guttmacher—an obstetrician/gynecologist—was among the first in his profession to advocate for the use of contraception.
Today, the Guttmacher Institute continues the tradition of analyzing abortion data while skewing the results in order to maximize the abortion cartel’s tendency to deceive. According to researcher Randall O’Bannon, “Guttmacher does not seem to be counting abortions from states where full protections for the unborn are in place.”
But he also points out that the change in abortion practice and the emphasis on chemical abortions such as mifepristone and misoprostol could be a tactical maneuver based on the fact that the Supreme Court will hear arguments against chemical abortions in the coming months. If this is so, then we can attribute the once-benign phrase “better living through chemistry” to the current practice of better killing through chemistry.
These twists and turns in society’s fascination with eliminating the allegedly unwanted people in our midst are perhaps personified in the man who secretly drugged his pregnant wife in an effort to induce the abortion of their third child. His meager sentence for the crime was 180 days in jail and 10 years of probation. The guilty party, Mason Herring, is an attorney whose wife thankfully became suspicious, stopped drinking the potion, and gave birth to a little girl who is now one year old and who suffers from developmental complications. According to the National Review, Herring’s wife said “her husband worried that he’d ‘look like a jerk’ if he abandoned his wife with their newborn. Now he looks like a monster.”
This disfigured republic in which we live has grown increasingly cruel in its attitudes toward vulnerable human beings. Lawmakers refuse to acknowledge that pregnancy is a state wherein two human beings—the mother and her child—exist. Society does not describe the baby as a person but instead views pregnancy in terms of gestational age.
And while Pope Francis may have his own definition of hypocrisy, we see the most vile and deadly form of it right here in the American practice of medicine. In the classic Hippocratic Oath, doctors swore to do no harm, but today the American Medical Association states the code is a “living document.” And the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology’s remodeled oath states: “I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.”
In other words, as with most of what is occurring in our disfigured society today, science and common sense are burned on the altar of death. Such macabre human tenets are worse than hypocrisy; they are lies that disfigure truth and condemn the living to death.