01-01-2007 - Traces, n. 1 Euthanasia What Life? Excerpts from the Lecture of the Archbishop of Bologna at the National Scientific Convention “Deciding in Neonatology”, in the “New Pathologies” Aula Magna of the Sant’Orsola-Malpighi general hospital, December 7, 2006, promoted by the Department of Women’s, Children’s and Adolescent Health at the University Hospital of Bologna, in collaboration with Medicina e Persona and the Italian Association of Catholic Doctors by Carlo Caffarra Is it licit to put and end to the life of a new-born child on the basis of the discovery of a grave harm to the quality of life provoked by the failure of treatment that could have saved the child at the cost of grave handicap in the future? The justification of euthanasia of the newborn and of selective reanimation is the forecast of a gravely biologically handicapped human life, and therefore of grave suffering. Since we are dealing with human persons absolutely incapable of elaborating any concept of a good life on the basis of which to deduce a judgment on the usefulness/uselessness of one’s own life, another elaborates this judgment on the basis of the hypothesis that the newborn child–were he able to think–would agree…. To legitimate this justification (and therefore to legitimate selective reanimation) means objectively to inflict a grave wound to two fundamental pillars of the democratic profile we have wanted for our society: autonomy and equality… Autonomy means in the first place that no person’s life can be disposed of by another… Every man is a novelty. It was above all H. Arendt who reflected on the fact that the birth of a child is not simply “another” life history, but rather a “new” life-history. In order that this be so the subject must be defended at its natural beginning from every intervention that could predetermine its subsequent history. “An indisposable ‘destiny of nature’ that would precede, so to say, our own biographic past seems to be an essential element for the awareness of our freedom” (J. Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, Polity Press, 2003). The legalization of euthanasia of the newborn means objectively to confer on some people the right of life and death over others, on the basis of a moral judgment of theirs on the natural destiny of a birth…. Some people have the right to pronounce a death sentence on the basis if the own conception of life, whether judicious or not. A person is judged worth or not worth keeping alive on the basis of criteria established by others, on which the person himself cannot pronounce…. Every person has the same dignity in his being as any other, and no one has the right to decide if another should or should not live.… Where does this road we are traveling lead us? I think that it is no exaggeration to answer: to the destruction of the person as such. What struck me theoretically in this whole matter is what I tried to expose in my second point: the “fundamental dogmas” of modernity–autonomy and equality–are not able, they haven’t the theoretical and persuasive force to refuse what by now, abandoning all linguistic modesty, is called the killing of the newborn. Where does this speculative and practical weakness come from? I think it has at least two roots, which we can mention briefly. Man has, as it were, severed contact with himself, entrusting himself more and more exclusively to the game of opinions about himself: he more and more prefers anthropo-doxy to anthropo-logy, the Greeks would say. The only source of knowledge man has of himself, and the only criterion for evaluating the result, is direct personal contact with himself which happens always with direct cognitive contact with the world. When this source dries up, the original evidences about man like dignity of the person, the generative interpersonal bond instituted at birth, life not as a modification of the state of material, but as the being of a living individual. The other point is that historically the humanistic bases of our society have been generated largely by Christian faith. Is it possible to keep these bases while ignoring this faith or marginalizing it from public life and debate? Fortunately, especially in Italy, our basic juridical rules still reflect those roots and still live of them, at least up to a point. However that basis is gradually being eroded away in many minds…. Will merely procedural rules be enough to save us from disintegration? I want to tell you, and I conclude: let’s begin once more to look at reality with pure eyes, let’s root ourselves consciously in the Christian tradition.