Life Affirming Care is Crucially Important
Solidarity President and Co-Founder, Chris Faddis, spoke with radio show host Matt Swaim on the SonRise Morning Show to discuss the importance of life affirming care and having access to it. Listen to the interview below, or read the transcript below that.
Interview Audio (Interview starts at 2:39:14)
Interview Transcript
Matt Swaim (02:39:17):
The Sonrise Morning Show continues. I’m Matt Swaim, joined in by Chris Faddis, co-founder and president of Solidarity HealthShare. You can find them link@sonrisemorningshow.com. Chris, good morning.
Chris Faddis (02:39:30):
Good morning, Matt. Great to be with you and happy New Year.
Matt Swaim (02:39:32):
New Year to you. You wrote an op-Ed recently for the Daily Caller about pro-life, life-affirming healthcare for future generations. And I know that with the beginning of January in the mix we also talk about protecting unborn life from the evil of abortion. But how are you hoping to extend that conversation to really help the healthcare system as a whole support life?
Chris Faddis (02:40:00):
Yeah, Matt, I think it gets back to this is a principle that we have in our organization is that everything we do has to serve the human person. It has to serve the end user, the person we set out to serve, which for us is typically our member and their family members. And I think if we really take a look at that and apply the gospel of life to healthcare, if we treat every person in each healthcare situation, if we make every decision of how we design care, how we build clinics, how hospitals operate, everything in a life affirming manner that really just looks at the dignity of the human person and gives them what they need to be whole and happy and be who God created them to be, that truly will solve everything. And obviously that’s very idealistic, but that’s the goal. That’s the ultimate goal of I believe pro-life, healthcare, Catholic healthcare should always be to serve the human person.
(02:40:58):
And I think when you look at what life affirming care is to juxtapose that to life, denying care is. Life affirming care looks at the body, the way God created it, the soul, the way God created it and helps to restore that to order as best as possible. Sometimes you need to do a surgery but restoring the body to order. If you look at life-affirming fertility care solutions like NaPro technology, the entire process is about getting that woman’s organs to operate as they were designed to, not to manipulate them and to override them or to do all these crazy things that happen with contraceptives and with sterilization and with in vitro fertilization. So life affirming care really respects that and looks at restoring the body to order so that it can do what it was meant to do. And that ultimately, when you think about it from a spiritual sense, that’s also what we’re supposed to do spiritually, is be a whole person, have our life integrated in such a way that we’re applying the gospel principles to everyday life.
Matt Swaim (02:42:03):
Yeah, there are so many angles to this and you’ve written specifically about chemical abortion pills and the way that that has just been shoved through in so many places, that’s a separate argument. I don’t think many people in our audience, I don’t want to presume too much, are likely to order abortion drugs, but there are a lot of people who naively will think to themselves, this is an easy out and then without medical supervision, which is insane to me, will take these drugs that will have a dramatic effect killing their unborn child, having them have to deal with the consequences of that alone in their own homes. I mean that’s insane to me. It’s absolutely insane.
Chris Faddis (02:42:44):
And if you think about it, it’s just like sin Matt, that it’s so much easier for us to commit a sin when we’re away from our family or away from those who love us and who will hold us accountable. And I think that this abortion pill has provided a way for people to basically be able to be in hiding. And the gospel of course tells us that all things will come to light, but the reality is that that’s what it is. It’s an easy out, nobody needs to know. And I think one of the things that we’re learning more and more, even with some of these, like the vote you just had in Ohio that we just had in Ohio and some other things, the data that’s coming out from the exit polling and all of that is showing that while many people are Pro-Life and they believe they may have voted differently, and one of the big questions is, is it because they somehow were impacted by abortion, whether they did it or somebody they know and love closely. And I think the abortion pill sort of could be what it is that young women in the church might be ashamed, whatever that is. So the abortion bill really does provide this sort of in secret so to speak, even though it’s not, because ultimately the mental health effects of abortion certainly would be a sign of your life being incongruent and those things and that causes these really difficult periods of depression and drug abuse and all these things that come from abortion.
Matt Swaim (02:44:12):
Well, I would offer a couple other reasons. I stay as far away from political analysis as possible. I happen to live in the DC area and I just walk around with my fingers in my ears all day. But I think that there’s a couple other things in the mix here. One of them is that I think that when it comes to some of these pieces of legislation coming through, the language gets so confusing, the rhetoric and the messaging gets so confusing that people kind of don’t know what they’re saying yes or no on the ballot. I think another part of it though is that we have allowed the talking heads and the pundits and the lobbying groups to isolate this question of abortion from the rest of the care of the entire human person so that people think it’s this thing over there that’s just not connected to anything else. And so we don’t connect it to the rest of this understanding of what a human being is and what health is or any of this entire totality of what, especially the church gives us as far as what it means to be a human being.
Chris Faddis (02:45:14):
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, I think your point is incredibly important because the fact is that people, we have such a disintegration of these things in this realization and it’s been so politicized, abortion, especially that people don’t think of it as a healthcare issue. But then of course on the other side, now the statement of the left is abortion is healthcare. So we’re seeing it the opposite way, but we’ve had it so disassociated for so long. And the reality is, and we’ve said this for a long time in the health share, is we see frontline what’s going on in healthcare for a long time that this fight for life has actually been in healthcare, in doctors’ offices, in clinics and hospitals for much longer than people realize. And it wasn’t just at the Planned Parenthood door. And the reality is that when we’ve allowed ourselves to contracept and do those things, then we allow ourselves to abort and to terminate pregnancies.
(02:46:14):
We keep disassociating ourselves with so much that’s ordered to life. And you see the same thing in the gender question. You see the same thing in the end of life question. And so there has been this sort of fragmentation, compartmentalization isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when we fragment life and we sort of put these things out there, I think you’re completely right that people don’t see it as integral. And also, Matt, the confusion of the bills and all of that, one of the things that’s coming to bear is the realization that people don’t believe that these awful things are happening. Like late term abortion. They don’t believe that doctors are doing abortion without parental consent. And that is the other issue is that we’ve done such a good job of lying to the public not we, but others have such a good job of lying to the public that it’s been effective.
Matt Swaim (02:47:05):
Yeah, it’s a disorienting thing and it just is a reminder that we want to not just change a couple laws but overhaul the culture’s entire way of thinking about this kind of stuff. And so I know that at Solidarity HealthShare, you’re trying to not just provide a different program, but overhaul an entire approach to caring for human beings and their overall health and what it means to be an integrated person. So if our listeners want to connect with you at Solidarity HealthShare, Chris Faddis, how do they do so?
Chris Faddis (02:47:35):
Yeah, visit us@healthcareforlife.com, the healthcare for life.com or call us at (844) 313-4999
Matt Swaim (02:47:45):
And you can find all that info@sonrisemorningshow.com. We’re back right after this.
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Solidarity HealthShare is a non-profit healthcare sharing ministry rooted in the teachings of the Catholic Church. Established in 2016, we operate on the Catholic principles of solidarity and subsidiarity, in accordance with the Church’s commitment to promoting life-affirming, ethical healthcare.
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