Day of Sanctity and Protection of Human Life – January 19, 2025

History of Day of Sanctity and Protection of Human Life

The phrase “sanctity of life” refers to the idea of human life being sacred, holy, and precious. It is inherent as man is incapable of creating life and therefore, people have no right to take their own lives or those of others. Though the phrase was initially used in the 19th century in Protestant discourse, it has been used since World War II, in Catholic moral theology, and following the case of Roe vs. Wade, in Evangelical Christian moral rhetoric.

The sanctity of life, usually often contrasted and conflated with the “quality of life” to some extent, is the foundation on which all Catholic teachings about the sixth commandment in the Ten Commandments are built. In Western schools of thought, the sanctity of life is usually only applied to the human species, in significant contrast to many schools of Eastern philosophy, which usually hold that all animal life is sacred. For instance, practitioners of Jainism (an ancient religion from India) would carry brushes with which to sweep insects from their path, to avoid inadvertently treading upon them.

The right to life comes up in debates about capital punishment, abortion, euthanasia or mercy killing, suicide (assisted or otherwise), and just and unjust wars. These may be legal in most countries, but in the Philippines, they are illegal and immoral.

Interestingly though, in the 1970s, the right to life directed the public’s attention to the morality (or immorality) of whether a person in a coma and who has no hope of recovery (or a mentally incompetent patient) has the “right to die.” This was shown in the case of Karen Quinlan, an American who lay comatose for years — during the first year, she breathed through a respirator. The court ruled that “no one could be held criminally liable for removing life-support systems.”