CV NEWS FEED // Being pro-life means more than simply defending the unborn—it also means defending life at all stages, including caring for those at the end of their lives, according to an op-ed from author Patrick Brown.
Brown, who is also a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., wrote for Angelus News that focusing on this often-overlooked aspect of the pro-life movement is more important now than ever.
“With birth rates declining and life expectancy rising, our nation is the oldest it’s ever been,” he wrote. “Decades and dollars have sustained the advocacy around protecting the unborn child, a mission even more critical in these tumultuous years after the Dobbs decision.”
He continued:
Yet save for a few high-profile cases—Terri Schiavo in the mid-2000s, or headlines about abuses in Canada’s euthanasia program—there has been less concerted effort around building up respect for the elderly facing their final years.
Brown noted that Americans are generally able to live longer with the advanced medicine and technology available today, but pointed out that senior citizens are rapidly outnumbering younger generations due to declining birth rates.
“The future of aging in America—with fewer younger workers providing for a growing number of seniors—will put increasing strain on our care infrastructure, and the programs and resources available to those needing to care for a loved one as they slow down,” he continued.
While families often become the caretakers and support system for elderly adults, many aren’t able to devote sufficient time to their aging relatives due to other demands and responsibilities. Other families have poor or broken relationships that make it impossible to become the primary caregivers for an elderly person.
“These trends will put increasing pressure on a social system that has not adjusted to the new realities of smaller families and longer lives,” Brown wrote.
He added that issues with affordable health care and long-term care insurance make it more difficult for senior citizens to access proper care. Trying to solve these problems can often lead to higher taxes as well as financial and political difficulties.
Allowing Medicaid to pay for long-term care, for example, will dramatically increase its expenditures and worsen our nation’s fiscal picture, especially if we seek to raise wages for home health aides,” he wrote.
He continued:
As the whole economy has recently experienced, a world with declining birth rates means fewer workers and increased labor shortages — especially in labor-intensive jobs like child and elder care. It may be the case that the need for home health care aides and nursing home staff spurs America to revisit its immigration policy before too long.
When end-of-life care becomes impossible due to staff shortages or financial difficulties, Brown argued, physician-assisted suicide appears to falsely present itself as a practical and even “compassionate” solution.
He wrote that “There are no easy answers” to the problem of end-of-life care, but added that alternatives like physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia “threaten to make us all a little less human.”
“A world in which an increasingly large share of our population requires some long-term assistance requires us to evaluate tradeoffs and commitments,” he wrote, continuing:
But just as in our fight to protect the unborn, protecting the elderly in their frailty and old age means that any policy solution—and the cultural change of mentality that must accompany it—has to remember the importance of human relationships before anything else.
