It may be unfashionable to say so in the secular world, but we shall say it anyhow: a culture of death has firmly taken root in South Africa.
That culture of death manifests itself most visibly in the ferocious brutality that often accompanies the perpetration of crimes.
From the side of the state, it also finds expression in the government’s approach to abortion. Next month sees the fifth anniversary of the legalisation of abortion on demand in South Africa.
What was once purported to be merely the availability of an option has become an aggressively pursued state policy. Statistics that record an increase in abortions are lauded as signs of the success of government policy, when these should rather serve as an indicator of a deficient society.
Official disregard for the sanctity of life is not limited to positive acts of destruction, such as abortion and elements of proposed euthanasia legislation. As reported in our front page article this week, it is government policy to withhold drugs which may prevent HIV-infection – even when the life is that of a gang-raped baby.
The news that the Northern Cape’s provincial health minister has reprimanded a hospital doctor for administering the anti-retroviral drug AZT to a brutalised nine-month-old demonstrates a callous disregard for that child’s right to life (and, as Bishop Kevin Dowling rightly points out, of the doctor’s ethical obligation to protect life).
The government claims that the side effects of anti-retroviral medications are “unproven,” an assertion most experts in the field dispute vigorously. More likely, the government is disinclined to allocate the requisite budget which would make anti-retroviral drugs widely available, thereby placing a price on human life.
In a society where the myth that raping a virgin cures Aids is so deeply rooted, this is all the more reprehensible. In effect, the government condemns the innocent victims of this prevarication to a probable death, and so becomes complicit in the suffering of the victim, and an active agent in the culture of death.
And on this, the government cannot put a price.
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