March 2011
The late champion of Life explains the imperative of conscientious objection in a spine-stiffening letter
TO PHARMACISTS AND OTHER PROFESSIONAL CARERS
ON THE
CULTURE OF LIFE AND THE CULTURE OF DEATH
In the Year of the Lord, 2001.
Dear Pharmacists,
The good Lord be with you. As a priest my problems naturally concern some of the most fundamental questions. I wonder if you would be so good as to ponder an important one with me in your own professional capacity.
1. The challenge facing us is between the culture of life and the culture of death. Do we promote life itself, and do we do so consistently? Or do we have an option for death chosen deliberately?
2. Of course carers of all kinds stand for life: doctors, nurses and pharmacists are of course in the van of this responsibility. Yet many carers today tinker with death in the realms of abortion, euthanasia, infertility, cloning, contraception. From there comes gradual moral disintegration.
3. From where are the seeds of death? I wish to argue that the seeds come from the attempt to re-design women! Of course this seems ridiculous but I urge you to ponder more deeply.
4. Rarely indeed will a chemist attempt to re-invent a woman with three hands, or four feet, or five eyes. This belongs to the realm of absurdity. But people want to change their own fertility even although this is part and parcel of themselves, or what they are.
5. And so some young women would like to seek sexual satisfaction without the result of pregnancy. They want to re-design themselves so that their fertility will be relegated to an optional extra.
6. Shall we choose God or ourselves? If we go with God we thank Him for what we are, our existence, life, being, gifts, capacities. We respond accordingly in love and gratitude.
7. On the other hand the use of contraceptives implies the philosophy of atheism. It implies that men are masters of themselves instead of servants of their Creator. People then reject God and live by themselves, alone, so to speak.
8. The seeds of death and contraception have gone hand in hand, notably since 1960. From them came the massively increased disasters of abortion, divorce, family breakdown, wife and child abuse, venereal disease and out of wedlock births. In vitro fertilisation, cloning, genetic manipulation, and embryo experimentation are all descendants of the contraceptive technology. And that technology was in fact looking to re-design women. This philosophy and this technology have not been the only factors in the unravelling of health and morals but they have had major roles.
9. As a simple summary, carers must realise that pregnancy is not a disease! There is not vaccine for it! Carers therefore as professional and responsible people should never have had anything to do with contraceptive pills. Their work is to cure the sick, or at least alleviate their condition. They have a place for improving health and preventing illness, but none of this involves changing people's human nature.
10. Obviously they must have no truck with morning after pills.* If contraceptive pills are anti-life then of course abortifacients are still more obviously so.
11. What must be done? Clearly carers must practise conscientious objection, whatever may be the difficulties. God will not abandon us.
Most sincerely,
Rev. James Morrow
* Father later addressed another letter to pharmacists specifically on the so-called Morning-After Pill.