‘Compassion’ is being used as a weapon

The word, that is. And it’s loaded. Kathryn Jean Lopez points out its latest abuse in this book review of “Choice“.

Choice, ultimately, is written by the type of woman who spends a Saturday-night social outing bemoaning the right-wing fringers who want to take away women’s right to abort.

But if I left Choice there — if I were turned away by the book’s introduction, where I, pro-lifer, am caricatured as “too eager to set compassion aside in favor of judgment” — I would be doing the life-and-death issues a disservice. I’d be doing life a disservice, for we’re desperately in need of having conversations that are both compassionate and painstakingly frank about abortion and fertility and this brave new world we live in.

And, as Wesley J. Smith pointed out on a radio show I hosted earlier this week, a host of bioethical issues, especially euthanasia.

“Communication experts said the [AMA] study underscores other research on the value of empathy in the physician-patient relationship. They said the erosion of compassion that begins in medical school is the start of a career-long battle for physicians as pressure to become increasingly efficient squeezes out time for building relationships with patients.”

Perhaps that would explain why, according to the assisted suicide advocacy group Compassion and Choices (formerly the Hemlock Society), a medical student organization supports assisted suicide.

It’s language engineering.

Here is real compassion. Watch out for term-inology.