When morality and pragmatism clash

Victims of misrule and justice are more than just a quota, writes Mary Kenny

Surely one of the great moral dilemmas of our age is the pitiful plight of the tens of thousands of refugees fleeing, and ready to flee, from Africa and the Middle East for a decent life – or even a chance of survival – in Europe?

One of Pope Francis’s first gestures, on becoming Pontiff, was to visit Lampedusa, the hoped-for point of arrival for so many people seeking to get to Europe in unseaworthy vessels, and which has, again and again, over the past two years, provided rescue.

Yet this year alone, the UN has calculated that 60,000 refugees have attempted to cross the Mediterranean – a twenty-fold increase on 2014. At least 1,800 people have lost their lives trying.

And now the EU Commission is proposing that each EU country should take its quota of migrants fleeing from terrible conditions in Libya, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Iran and elsewhere.

In common justice, surely each EU country should step forward and accept a proportion – according to its means – of these victims fleeing misrule and injustice?

But not for the first time in human experience, morality and pragmatism are in conflict. Can each host nation house, feed, give shelter and provide jobs for the unstoppable flow of migrants?

Parallels have been drawn, notably by the historian T.P. Coogan, with the “coffin ships” in which the Irish fled to North America after the Famine. A fair point. But America at that time was avid for immigrants to build the railroads and open up the frontiers.

Pope Francis has given wonderful Christian leadership in this tragedy. But how well can we follow his example?

 

Every baby deserves a chance of life

It really is good news that babies born at 22 weeks pregnancy are increasingly more likely to survive (according a study in the New England Journal of Medicine). Nobody would wish that a baby be born hardly more than halfway through the normal-length pregnancy of 40 weeks, yet every advance in saving early-birth babies is a win.

The early-birth baby must be medically helped with ventilation, as the lungs will still be very immature. What is distressing is that in Britain and other legislatures, medical guidelines currently say that 22-week babies should neither be resuscitated nor be provided with intensive care, as the 22-week marker falls within the legal limit of abortion. In America, 78% of such early-birth babies were not treated.

But Dr Edward Bell, the lead author of the study and a professor of paediatrics, said that 22 weeks is a now “a new marker” of viability. “These babies deserve a chance.”

Gradually, the message will get through that we are talking about human life.

 

Social relationships are important too

I totally agree that “Mothers and Fathers Matter” – those of us who lost a parent young often feel that intensely. Yet families can be odd and asymmetrical too.

I have cousins on my mother’s side who are almost like siblings to me. I have cousins on my father’s side who I have never met. There was no family rift, but the generations were out of synchronisation, my father died when I was very young, a widowed uncle was married twice, begetting a big brood each time, and there was a whole constellation of relations we didn’t see.

These kin all seem nice folk, but in childhood, I had no social relationship with them, whereas my maternal cousins were a constant in my life.

Mums and dads do matter, but blood is not invariably thicker than water, as the many celibate Christian communities down the ages can attest: the social relationship of the community can be an essential part of human connections too.