Life After Death

by David Alton

1998: 50th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights: Article 3: "Everyone shall have the right to life and security of person".

1998: 30th anniversary of the implementation of the Abortion Act, and 5 million legal abortions.

1998: 25 years of legal abortion in the USA.

1998: As the British Parliament now considers the extension of the 1967 Abortion Act, the introduction of euthanasia, and a whole range of anti-life measures, David Alton looks beyond our culture of death.

Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" Vanity asks the question, "Is it popular?" But conscience asks the question, "Is it right?"

1998 is the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Article Three states that, "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person". 1998 also marked the thirtieth anniversary of the implementation of the Brititsh Abortion Act. Over the intervening thirty years there have been five million legal abortions. In addition, up to 100,000 human embryos are destroyed or experimented upon annually, and moves are currently underway to legalise euthanasia. There are also attempts in Parliament to extend the Abortion Act to Northern Ireland (against the wishes of the politicians in the Province); attempts to remove even the minimal requirement for two doctors to sign the green forms authorising an abortion, and a proposal to further erode the conscience clause of the Abortion Act by creating a public register of dissenting medics - a blacklist intended to force yet more doctors and nurses to become collaborators and participants in abortion.

The purpose of this book is to reflect on these past thirty years and to challenge our contemporary culture of death. I am not anti-abortion: I am positively pro-life. I want to see a consistent pro-life politics and a consistent pro-life ethic. I am pro-woman and pro-life. I do not come to this issue with a moral majority agenda but with a profound belief in the sanctity of human life. I am also convinced that the flaccid language of rights is worthless without a corresponding concern for responsiblities and obligations. All of these questions are explored in this book, but let me begin with another anniversary: the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the State of Israel. The Holocaust and the death of six million Jews was the backdrop against which the new State was formed and the 1948 United Nations Declaration on Human Rights was drafted. It is instructive to consider again how pre-war Europe slid into eugenics and Aryanism - obsessions which first took mentally- and physically-handicapped people, gypsies, homosexuals, Jews and countless others to their deaths. Instructive to consider how few raised their voices. Instructive to consider how Europe failed the Jews. In the book of Genesis the promise is given to Abraham and his people that: I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse, And all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

Jewish culture, community and family life, history and religion have enriched the world to a degree which is completely incommensurate with their numbers. The promise of Genesis that the world would be blessed by the descendants of Abraham is a promise which has been kept. These blessings have frequently been repaid in persecution and anti-semitism. The world hated the Jews because of that for which Judaism stands: the cry for freedom from Pharaoh's bondage, the sighing for justice by the waters of Babylon, the admonitions of the prophets, the belief in covenant and faithfuness and, above all, the endless and awesome desire to be right with God. The Hebrew Bible has at its centre a respect for the ideals of justice and the rule of law. This has been a part of the Jewish contribution to civilisation ever since. Few religions have afforded such prominence to respect for the law and its proper dispensation. The Ten Commandments, given by God Himself to the assembled Israelites on Mount Sinai manifest perfectly this love of law and an ordered society. Judaism emphasises the duties and responsibilities which are needed to balance the rights of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes and Locke. It also insists on justice. In the Book of Amos, and the other prophetic writings, this theme of justice is returned to again and again: "Let justice roll down like a river, and righteousness as a never-ending stream". And yet the Jewish people have themselves rarely been dealt with justly.

The Sanctity of Life

From Judaism springs our Judaeo-Christian belief in the sanctity of life, the dignity of the human person, the importance of individual and collective conscience, the requirement for personal and communal responsibility, our accountability before Man and God. This special genius, these momentous insights, have been the staple fare in civilized societies ever since they were first revealed through the Jewish people. Yet the jealousy and vilification which have affected generations of Jews - often at the hands of at least nominally Christian people - has been extraordinary, sinking to their ultimate in the destruction of the Holocaust, the Shoah. In the nightmare kingdoms of the concentration camps, the Jews faced extermination. But they also renewed their covenant with God. Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman said before he was killed: "The fire which destroys our bodies is the fire that will restore the Jewish people". Our own British Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, sees in the persistence of faith, even amidst the greatest adversity, the long-term ability to conquer evil: "The Jews of faith, who were able to sanctify death in the Holocaust, turned out to be the most determined to sanctify life after the Holocaust" (Faith in the The Future, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1995).

The Culture of Death

It has become unfashionable to speak clearly of good and evil. Everything has been given a relative value. Yet who can doubt that out of today's culture of death - spawned by thirty years of abortionism - must spring a new culture of life. No people have better cause to understand the consequences of the collapse of responsible citizenship, and what happens when society loses the concept of right and wrong, than the Jews. Times of monstrous inhumanity do not come about all at once: we slip into them gradually. People often ask, "Where was God at Auschwitz?". Yet in every situation we could ask the same sort of question as we consider the scale of contemporary ills. We are each given the gift of free will to choose for life or death, right or wrong. The more appropriate question is to ask: "Where was man during the horrors of Auschwitz? And where have we been over the past thirty years as five million British children were killed?". Through our indifference, we can all too easily drift into a culture which sanctions death, and overturns all belief in the sanctity of human life. The purpose of this book is to consider the effect which legalised abortion and eugenics can have on society and its attitudes, and how we can re-establish a respect for human life.

Nietzsche and Eugenics

State nihilism began in the 1920s when the German medical establishment, even before the Third Reich had condoned eugenics. Experiments on humans, abortion, and euthanasia were a natural extension of an ideology which cared nothing for the sanctity of life. Then came wholesale massacre of races and groups of people who were deemed to be inferior. Nazism was spawned by the philosophy of Nietzsche: the father of Nazism. He maintained that the one great freedom was freedom from God. To him, God was everything that heightened the feeling of power in man. Bad was every form of weakness, especially Christian self-sacrifice, which he saw as no better than suicide. Reaching back to Hegel, Nietzsche dreamed of a higher sort of man, the Aryan Superman. He claimed that Christianity, with its upholding of the weak - and erroneous belief in meekness, forgiveness or mercy - had constantly sought to undermine the creation of this perfect human. Condemning the Chur ch, he said: "How a German could ever have felt Christian is beyond me". The hatred of gentleness, the worship of perfection and power, and a world in which man himself became a god inevitably led to Dachau, Belsen and Auschwitz. To what else could such a monstrous ideology lead?

What is Truth?

One man in Poland who said 'no' was Maximilian Kolbe. His story reminds us that there is an alternative to collaboration or placid acquiescence. Signing his own death warrant, he fearlessly published an editorial denouncing the evil empire of Nazism, and warning his fellow countrymen that collaboration with the Lie led only to personal destruction: "No one in the world can change Truth. What we can and should do is to seek Truth and serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is within. Beyond armies of occupation and the hecatombs of the extermination camps, two irreconcilable enemies lie in the depths of every soul. And of what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are defeated in our innermost personal selves." The Gestapo arrested Fr Kolbe in February. On 28 May, he was herded into a cattle truck and transported, along with 300 others, to Auschwitz, near Krakow. Branded with the number 16670, he was stripped of all that makes a man human. Priests like Maximilian Kolbe were singled out for especially brutal treatment by the their sadistic keepers. They were forced to do some of the most gruelling work and were subjected to particularly demeaning humiliations. At the beginning of August 1941, a group of three prisoners escaped. The Nazis killed ten men for every one who escaped. Death was by long and slow starvation. The condemned men were simply buried alive in an airless underground concrete bunker. The Deputy Camp Commandant, Karl Fritzsch, accompanied by the Gestapo chief, Gerhardt Palitzsch, passed down the lines of prisoners. Fritzsch selected his victims. As the ninth man was chosen he cried out: "My wife, my children, I shall never see them again". It was at this moment that the unexpected and the unprecedented happened. A man stepped forward and stood before Fritzsch and calmly asked, in correct German, if he might take the place of the condemned man. "Who are you?" asked Fritzsch. "A Catholic priest," was the straightforward reply. The reprieved man, Franciszek Gajowniczek, was ordered to return to his place in the line. The condemned men were then sent to be stripped of their rags and to be buried alive.

Paying the Price

What happened next was recounted by Bruno Borgowiec, an assistant janitor and interpreter in the underground bunkers. He described the atmosphere in Cell 18 as resembling that of a church. Father Kolbe led the prisoners in prayers and hymns as they prepared for death. Gradually they died, one by one. After two weeks, only four remained alive and Father Kolbe was the only one who remained conscious. The authorities wanted to use the bunker for a new batch of victims and so the head of the camp hospital, Hans Bock - a common criminal - injected each of the men with carbolic acid. When Borgowiec returned to the cell he found Father Kolbe "still seated, propped up against the corner, his head slightly to one side, his eyes open and fixed on one point. As if in ecstasy, his face was serene and radiant". It was 14 August 1941, the vigil of the Feast (greatly celebrated throughout Poland) of the Virgin's Assumption into Heaven. In that underground cell, good overcame evil; the voluntary surrender of a life, on behalf of another, overcame death. It was the definitive answer to the megalomania of the Nazis; it was the victory of love over hate. It was the outlaw taking on the giant's might. Franciszek Gajowniczek, the Jewish prisoner whose life was purchased by Maximilian Kolbe, survived the camps. During the last days of the war his two young sons were tragically killed on the streets by Russian shells. He was present when another Pole, John Paul II, the former bishop of Krakow, canonised Maximilian Kolbe as a martyr-saint in October 1982. John Paul described Father Kolbe's life as offering a wonderful synthesis of the sufferings and hopes of our age, but it also offers a warning: "It is a cry directed to man, to society, to the whole human race, to systems which hold human life and human society in their hands ... This martyred saint cries aloud for a renewed respect for the rights of men and nations". It is also a cry to respect life. The story of Maximilian Kolbe is a story which gives some comfort to those who wonder aloud about the failure of the world to respond to the plight of the Jewish people. If this comfort instills a sense of complacency, then the sacrifice will have been in vain and the story worthless. Stories like this can also tempt us to shrug our shoulders and feel we could not act so courageously. But as some of the stories later in this book illustrate, you do not have to be a hero - or an extraordinary person - to take a stand. "I Did Nothing"

At the end of the Second World War, Pastor Martin Niemoller reflected on the failure of Christians to speak out and to act politically. "First they came for the Jews and I did nothing," are the words which ring down the pages of history. Then it was the trade unionists, gypsies, homosexuals, Catholic and Protestant dissenters. But people generally did nothing. The terrible truth is that most people did comply and very few repudiated Nazism.

Weakness not Strength

The Nazi idea of destroying a life which has lost its social usefulness, or which does not conform to a racial stereotype, springs from weakness, not from strength. The right to live is entirely divorced from questions of social utility. In God's sight there is no life which is not worth living - for God is the Creator of all life. Each life has a distinct and unique value. It is of infinite worth and is not to be squandered like surplus raw material. Nor is it to be belittled or reduced in status for reasons of racial origin, gender, or ability. Europe's crimes against the Jews remind us where an anti-life mentality leads. Judaism contributed richly to the world of pre-war Europe. The Talmudic academies, the courts of Jewish mystics, the masses of Yiddish-speaking people, the synagogues, the flourishing Jewish townships, the customs and characters - brought so vivdly to life in scenes from Fiddler on the Roof - all were wantonly destroyed in an orgy of hatred. This catastrophe relied on the fears and indifference of millions of responsible people. They failed the Jews. Where they failed, do we succeed?

Care for Life

Out of death must come new life. This book must consider that question too: how to go forward. Lo amut ki echyeh says the Psalm: "I will not die, but I will live". In the life and death of Maximilan Kolbe we see what should have been the Christian response to the Shoah. We see the triumph of authentic living over the dead hand of ideology and fanaticism. It is acutely relevant today. In coming to these issues, we can do worse than ask ourselves Martin Luther King's challenging questions: "Cowardice asks the question 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?'" Reduced to its essentials, that is the question posed by this book. And if abortion is not right, to what does it lead? What might be an individual's response? What are the alternatives?

Click here for Chapter One