Our View On The Schiavo Case

G. K. Chesterton wrote a powerful book called Eugenics and Other Evils, which was a mighty indictment of the so-called "racial hygiene" movement that was within Nazi Germany and also infecting his England. Plans to segregate and sterilize the "unfit" and "inferior" were not just the rage among the monsters of Naziism. England's Parliament had proposals for laws to do similar things to the mentally ill and retarded, as well as the poor and sick.

Thankfully, Chesterton, Belloc and those with them who would form the Distributist League helped stop such movements in their tracks.

Alas, with the passage of time and the decay of morals, we are abandoning the warnings history left to us and are destroying our unborn, sick and elderly. The current starvation of Terri Schiavo in Florida is just but the latest example of such rank evil.

But there are others more elequent and forceful than myself who can speak to this better than I ever could. So I leave it to Fr. Lawrence Smith, who was a past contributor to Gilbert Magazine - the publication of the American Chesterton Society - to speak for us on the Review regarding the death of Mrs. Schiavo and the layers of evil surrounding it.

His essay, from the online Traditional Catholic newsletter Christ or Chaos, is called "Do No Harm!"

In a Distributist America, "death by starvation" would not happen to Mrs. Schiavo. In a Distributist Holland or Belgium, so-called "physician-assisted suicide" would not happen to their elderly or despairing.

Let us strive, in every nation of the world, to eliminate laws and statutes promoting this "new eugenics" of abortion and euthanasia. Now matter how long it takes or how fierce the struggle.

Chesterton and Belloc would expect no less.