“The Europe of tomorrow is in your hands.
Saint John Paul II (1920–2005)
Be worthy of the task.
You are working to give Europe its true dignity back:
that of being a place where the person, every person,
is affirmed in its incomparable dignity.”
Speech to the participants in the study conference on “The Right to Life and Europe”, 1987
The EU has launched the “Conference for the Future of Europe”, an online consultation platform, open until spring 2022, where European citizens can register and state their proposals on values and rights. One of the aims of the platform is to find out the opinions, aspirations and objectives that citizens would like to achieve in order to shape the future of Europe. You can also share, support, comment on other peoples’ ideas, organize or participate in an event, and compare your responses with others’.
It is a participatory mode based on the democratic criterion. The European Parliament, the Council of Europe and the European Commission are committed to listening to the voice of Europeans in order to follow up, within their respective competences, the recommendations received. That is to say, by spring, the Conference should have reached conclusions and provided guidelines on the future of the European continent.
While the initiative itself is laudable, there are shadows and concerns. Indeed, as part of the EU’s upcoming French presidency, scheduled for the first half of 2022, the Secretary of State for European Affairs, Clément Beaune, is pushing for the “right to abortion” to be considered a value of Europe. This is a very serious position that denies the soul, the roots and the reasons for Europe, because it denies at the source the genuine culture of human rights that Europe claims to want to embody. Such a serious and profound contradiction would be the defeat of Europe, not its revival. The claim of the “right to abortion” is in fact a foreign element to European humanism and a principle of corruption of its cultural heritage.
One of us, two million of us
If we reflect deeply, we cannot fail to see that the EU was intended to defend life. The real Europe should therefore be the Europe of human dignity, not the Europe of the economy.
But where does the dramatic contradiction that obscures the truth of human rights come from? It comes from the prevalence of practical interests, of ideology, of a misunderstood idea of freedom over modern reason: today’s science demonstrates the full human identity of children even before birth – moreover, from the very conception.
In any case, from the point of view of practical behavior, the universally accepted precautionary principle must be applied. The “conspiracy against life”, i.e. the “culture of discarding”, encounters insuperable difficulties in opposing science and does not even accept doubt, therefore it prefers to impose the refusal to take into account the viewpoint of the conceived, covering the emptiness of reason with the alleged “right to abortion”.
How can you proclaim the rights of humans and then deny the most fundamental of rights to the poorest, most defenseless, most silent of human beings? How can anyone think that giving death by the organized force of states is an achievement and advancement of civilization?
The widespread crisis of our time, which touches various spheres of living together, originates in this refusal to look at the life that in the womb of a woman – and today also in a laboratory test tube – enters time and space.
“One of us!” This is the cry that almost two million European citizens have launched to demand that Europe at least does not finance destructive activities of human beings in the embryonic stage of existence. Almost two million European citizens: a great popular European success, with the highest number of signatories ever achieved in other initiatives. A cry that is unfortunately unheard, but one that the European Federation “One of Us” has not forgotten and, indeed, wants to make it even stronger, helping to open the future of Europe on horizons of equality, peace, justice and freedom.
General mobilization
This is why the Federation “One of Us” has entered the platform of the “Conference on the Future of Europe” with a document entitled A Europe that respects life from conception is a humane Europe. The aim is to give a voice to the almost two million citizens of Europe who have called for human life to be respected from the moment of conception, and thus to help give new strength to the project of European unity by consolidating the truth about human rights and the principle of equality, which are closely linked to that project.
It is very important that the document of the Federation “One of Us” receives as much support and sharing as possible. A general mobilization is desirable.
In fact, the platform also includes documents that go in the opposite direction and the cultural debate is intense: every week the results are made known and it would be very sad if the voice of those who have no voice were weak.
We must neither give up nor resign ourselves. Gutta cavat lapidem, and in any case we must bear in mind that real leaps in civilization take a very long time.
One clarification: at the end of each week, the success or failure of the various positions is reported based on the support received. It is therefore important to have a “continuous flow” of accessions.
How to do it
At this point a technical note is needed with respect to the document of the Federation “One of Us”. Below is what we glean from the instructions sent by Marion Dinand, Project Manager for the Foundation.
1. Create an account by clicking here. You can choose any name you want (EU does not verify). The platform will then send an email with an additional link to click on to confirm the creation of the account, and then generate a personal password.
2. Once you have created your account, click here.
3. Click “subscribe” to support the publication. The button is located on the right.
I have already done it, what are you waiting for?
-Marco Respinti, editor of iFamNews in Italian