Plans to close a Christian maternity unit in Lithuania caused widespread protest, but campaigners said Church leaders are reluctant to voice opposition.
The Christian Maternity Home in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second-largest city, has operated a “pro-life” and family-friendly policy since the 1990s with broad public support.
In February, the government announced its decision to “reorganise” the Kaunas Christian Maternity Home and merge its staff with a large hospital as part of an “optimisation of costs”. This was met with incredulity alongside its response to Lithuania’s declining birth rate, already among the lowest in the European Union at 1.18 births per woman.
“During my first pregnancy, I was looking for an opportunity of calm, physiological birth in a friendly environment, and learned that Kaunas Christian Maternity Home is just such a place for many families, so the news of the plans to close it was incomprehensible,” said Jarūnė Rimavičė, a mother of one from the Trakai region.
She wrote a social media post inviting families to support the hospital. The group began an online petition which had attracted more than 11,000 signatures by this week. According to Rimavičė, the initiative has support from women’s and human rights organisations, family and motherhood groups, and Catholic organisations and communities.
“This is a rare situation when different groups agree on one thing – this place is important for Lithuanian families, their right to choose and the preservation of culture where childbirth is treated with respect and not in a ‘conveyor-belt’ style,” she told The Tablet.
The facility dates from 1926, when it was founded as a private women’s hospital in the recently-independent Lithuania. From 1940, and throughout the Soviet era, it functioned as a state-owned maternity hospital. In 1994, a few years after the restoration of Lithuanian independence, it became the country’s first consistently “pro-life” maternity hospital.
“At that time, it felt truly extraordinary for a state-owned place to choose a truly Christian way by deciding that abortions would not be performed here anymore, and an atmosphere favourable for childbirth would be fostered,” said Darius Chmieliauskas, editor-in-chief of the Catholic monthly Artuma and a father of five, expressing amazement at the amount of support for the cause.
“Not only Christian families, but also many of those who have nothing to do with the Church are now fighting for this hospital. It is a truly impressive sign of the fight for life in Lithuania,” he said.
However, the supporters of the Christian Maternity Home said they need more explicit institutional support to secure its future.
“What we miss most is the clear support of the main decision-makers – the Ministry of Health and the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences,” said Rimavičė.
“The silence of the Church leaders also raises questions, considering that Kaunas Christian Maternity Home is the only institution in Lithuania that consistently fosters the values of protecting life from conception and freedom of conscience for doctors. We also hope for more active involvement of the government, as this is a systemic issue of the quality of maternity care throughout the country.”
Valdonė Miliuvienė, a Catholic mother of three and a student of obstetrics, was among those who addressed the leadership of the Archdiocese of Kaunas on behalf of the group and sent numerous letters to bishops and representatives of Christian institutions, emphasising that the Christian Maternity Home “is the only institution of this kind in Lithuania where termination of life and no other actions against life that has begun in the mother’s womb are performed”.
“When communicating personally, we received a response that the Church’s position on this issue was neutral, it was decided not to interfere, and it was mentioned that resistance to the process should come from below, we understand – from the laity”, she told The Tablet.
“Currently, two months since the announcement of the dismantling of the Maternity Home, with new testimonies of families appearing almost daily, statements in the local media, various meetings taking place in the parliament, the Presidential Palace, other state institutions, and conferences, no position of the bishops has yet been publicly announced.”
Miliuvienė said the Christian Maternity Home has collaborated with Caritas, the Kaunas Archdiocese Family Centre and the Crisis Pregnancy Centre over many years, and enjoyed the support of the diocese’s clergy. Its archbishop emeritus Cardinal Sigitas Tamkevičius consecrated the maternity home’s chapel on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary in 2014.
“Thus, looking back historically, representatives of the Church not only expressed it in words, but, as you can see, supported, defended and protected life from the moment of conception with their actions, and were co-authors of fostering the culture of life,” Miliuvienė said.
Chmieliauskas observed that the Christian Maternity Home is the only institution of its kind in Lithuania to be honoured with a papal blessing.
“In 1997, [Artuma’s] previous editor-in chief Vanda Ibianska managed to obtain a private audience with Pope John Paul II and brought him the latest issue of the Artuma magazine, which contained her report from a night spent on the birthing ward of the Christian Maternity Home,” he said.
“She got this text translated into Polish for John Paul II, who was so impressed that he even sent a handwritten greeting-blessing to the maternity ward in 1999. Who else in Lithuania has such a direct intervention from the now-saint, the Great John Paul II? And all that history is being erased.”