Contraception, Abortion, and now Euthanasia: Demographics is Destiny.

 

Contraception, Abortion, and now Euthanasia: Demographics is Destiny.
by Brian Kopp, DPM


The historical and universal Christian prohibition on contraception, which dates back to the Apostles, was first shaken by the Anglican Church's 1930 Lambeth Conference, the first Christian body ever to condone contraception. Although the Anglicans limited contraception to what they termed exceptional cases, they cracked open a door that had previously been tightly shut. Within three decades, most Protestant denominations had abandoned the universal Christian prohibition against contraception and, by the early 1970s, much of Eastern Orthodoxy had dropped its prohibition on barrier methods.

The connection between the acceptance of contraception, beginning only in 1930, and the legalization of abortion, just four decades later, cannot be overstated. The apocryphal "right to privacy," upon which the horrid 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion-on-demand was based, was first invented by five justices on the US Supreme Court in the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut.The Court decided in Griswold married couples had a "privacy" right to purchase contraceptives. To this day, Constitutional scholars openly concede there was simply no foundation or precedent for such a ruling, but there was also no means to stop the Justices from imposing their opinions on the nation. The Griswold ruling struck down the only remaining "Comstock Laws," written by Protestant legislators in the 1800's to make it illegal to sell or distribute all forms of contraception.

Over time, birth control became accepted in our culture because Christian groups abandoned traditional Christian teaching regarding sexual morality.

In 1968, Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, the landmark encyclical letter reaffirming the Christian prohibition of contraception passed down from age to age. A large number of Catholics rejected Humanae Vitae, so that, in the early stages of the Pro-life Movement (begun as a Catholic movement), contraception was never really examined or debated. This is regrettable since contraception is a fundamental consideration in the fight against both abortion and euthanasia. Paul VI warned that legalized contraception would result in disregard for life and morality leading to widespread divorce, abortion and euthanasia. Of course, in retrospect, it is obvious that he was correct.

The Pro-life Movement, which began in the 1960s as a Catholic response to efforts to legalize abortion, would become a coalition of Catholic, Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians in the ensuing years. The issue of contraception was never debated within this broad pro-life coalition because of the many Catholics who considered it a non-issue and because the movement's Protestant members held that the issue had already been "settled." In the interest of political effectiveness, a movement was born that never examined the root cause of what it was fighting against.

The fabricated legal foundations for the "right" to birth control progressed naturally to the philosophical foundations of a "right" to abortion. The US Supreme Court, in its 1992

Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, said:              

In some critical respects, abortion is of the same character as the decision to use               

contraception... for two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.

This brutal honesty on the part of the US Supreme Court should have been cause for the pro-life community to reevaluate the role of secular and Christian acceptance of the contraceptive mentality in fomenting the legalization of abortion. Unfortunately, that didn't happen.  

Of course, there are organizations, such as American Life League and Human Life International, whose founders did recognize that the widespread embrace of contraception led to legal and social acceptance of abortion, but they are the exception. 

To orthodox Christians, who form the core of the Pro-life Movement, it is morally and philosophically inconsistent to support (or ignore) contraception and oppose abortion. Even the US Supreme Court admitted the connection. Surely the pro-life community can address contraception, which, for the most part, has never been credibly debated in spite of its role in the legalization of abortion and its precipitation of the cultural embrace of euthanasia.

As the momentum for legalized euthanasia builds, and de facto legalized stealth euthanasia becomes more and more commonplace, the question must be asked: Why euthanasia now?

The answer seems simple enough. The solvency of Social Security, Medicare, Welfare and Medicaid is based on younger workers paying into the system to support the outlay of benefits. In 1940, there were 159 workers paying into the Social Security Trust Fund for every Social Security beneficiary. In 2010 there were 2.9. This is due to increased life expectancy as well as decreased birth rates. The Baby Boomer generation, born from 1946-1965, filled the coffers and kept the welfare benefits flowing well into the 80s and 90s. But the Boomers did not reproduce at the rate of their parents. By 1970, the ratio of workers paying into the Social Security Trust Fund for every Social Security beneficiary had already dropped to 3.7. (Therefore this collapse in the ratio cannot be laid at the feet of Roe v. Wade.)

No society has both a shrinking population and a growing economy. As the federal government projects the costs of pensions and medical care promised to retirees will soon outstrip the ability of our population base to provide support, pressure is mounting to control costs by rationing care. Demographic changes have created the economic incentive to euthanize the Baby Boomer generation.

Frankly, killing the elderly is the final solution for a culture that has contracepted and aborted out of existence the generations that would otherwise have supported and cared for them. That is the ultimate end product of the cultural embrace of the contraceptive mentality.

Why euthanasia now? Demographics is destiny.

About the author: Brian J. Kopp, DPM, is a podiatrist in private practice in Johnstown, PA. He has written articles on a range of subjects, primarily the culture of life, medicine, and ethics, that have been published in the L'Osservatore Romano (English Edition), New Oxford Review, The Wanderer National Catholic Weekly, LifeSiteNews.com, World Net Daily, and Podiatry Today magazine. Dr. Kopp is assisting Catholic Hospice of Pittsburgh to expand their pro-life hospice care services and will serve as Faith Community Liaison for Catholic Hospice of Greensburg. Dr. Kopp is also a member of the PHA.