A few weeks ago, Avvenire published a dispatch from its U.S. correspondent Elena Molinari reporting alarming news: American states were preparing to face the COVID-19 emergency with troubling guidelines. States like Maryland and Pennsylvania were moving to exclude people with certain disabilities from ventilator access in life-threatening situations. Doctors were being asked, in effect, to make a eugenic choice. Yet the Hippocratic oath is clear. It makes no distinction between patients. Anyone who becomes a doctor swears to help everyone. This principle has held for millennia. But in practice, pressure mounts toward the choice that is economically advantageous for society: save those with productive potential, allow others to die—those who would require care, at a cost to the collective.
How is it possible that the country with one of the world's most powerful militaries must ask its doctors to make such an inhuman choice? How can there be no money for ventilators to strengthen intensive care, yet resources always appear for weapons and for building a wall with Mexico?
These decisions call to mind statistics released last year by CBS on the dramatic drop in births of people with Down syndrome across parts of Europe—Denmark, France, Iceland—where abortion following a prenatal diagnosis has become so widespread it approaches 100%. A bare statistic revealing the effect of a prejudice fed, perhaps, by the isolation that leaves too many couples facing such momentous decisions alone.
These stories raise urgent questions for someone like me, often responsible for speaking to schoolchildren about inclusion and equal rights. Is it worth continuing to fight for inclusion and equality if the world's richest nation invites its doctors to withhold care from the disabled—implicitly suggesting they can be dispensed with? Absolutely. It is precisely in the face of such news that we must fight harder. These reports send young people a terrible message: that some lives are first-class, entitled to survive at all costs, while others are second-class, expendable when necessary on the altar of production, profit, and the luck of being healthy.
Society pushes people in countless ways to embrace these hollow models—when it criminalizes a boat of refugees fleeing war, hunger, slavery; when it declares "all foreigners are criminals"; when easy prejudice wins and people blindly follow their leader instead of thinking for themselves.
It seems obvious, even trite, and yet it bears repeating: young people, study. Read. Discover. Let curiosity guide you, not prejudice. History teaches unmistakably the danger of theories that divide society into "us" and "them," right or wrong, good or bad based on which social group you belong to—the group that gets to live, and the group left to die.
You don't choose to have a disability or health problem. It happens. And you have to reckon with it. Too often, the person and their family are left alone, abandoned by a society that offers little and offers it carelessly. Loneliness and blame descend like a suffocating weight. So I make this appeal once more to young people—that generation we so often criticize for being too selfish, too glued to phones, yet who taught us all a lesson with their global mobilization for climate action. Keep fighting for human rights: from the environment to access to care for everyone. Without exception.