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Vatican to Discuss Medical Issues Such as “Does a right to health at all costs exist?”

ROME, February 18, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The General Assembly of the Pontifical Academy for Life is meeting in Rome next week and will assess the growing problems in medical ethics with terms like ‘quality of life’ and ‘health’. Calling the emphasis in wealthy countries on health at all costs a “religion of health,” Vatican theologians said that some moral limits on the pursuit of health ought to be considered.

Rev. Maurizio Faggioni, a theologian and morality expert on the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life said, “The medicine of desires, egged on by the health care market, increases the request for pharmaceutical and medical-surgical services, soaks up public resources beyond all reasonableness.”

Bishop Elio Sgreccia, said at a Vatican press conference, the meeting of the Academy will address the question, “Does a right to health at all costs exist? Or is it rather a right to treatment?” He said, “What exactly is meant by ‘quality of life,’ is not yet clear to the public and perhaps not even to politicians themselves.”

He said that a very different meaning to these kinds of terms has progressively emerged in which the normal course of ethics is inverted, where “the quality of life becomes absolute and the sacredness of life becomes relative.” Bishop Sgreccia said, “It is affirmed that where an acceptable level of quality of life does not exist, life loses its value and does not merit being lived.” This inversion of priorities has created an ethical environment where euthanasia is considered a good or even a right.

The progress of this ethical confusion started with the push for legalized abortion. In the US, former President Clinton vetoed the ban on partial birth abortion twice, on the grounds that the bill did not include a clause which would allow the grisly form of infanticide for the ‘health’ of the mother.

The term ‘health’ is part of the abortion lobby’s arsenal of euphemisms to create social and legal permission for abortion on demand. A threat to a woman’s ‘health’ is interpreted as anything that makes her uncomfortable, be it the loss of a boyfriend, job advancement or social reputation.

“Medicine has become impossible to manage because it can’t fulfill the desires” of consumers for perfect health, said Sgreccia.

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