By Paul Farmer (of Harvard University and Partners in Health)
Proponents of liberation theology have maintained for decades that people of faith must make a preferential option for the poor. As discussed by Leonardo Boff of Brazil, a leading contributor to the movement, "the church's option is a preferential option for the poor, against their poverty." The poor, Boff adds, "are those who suffer injustice. Their poverty is produced by mechanisms of impoverishment and exploitation. Their poverty is therefore an evil and an injustice."
To those concerned with health, a preferential option for the poor offers both a challenge and an insight. It challenges doctors and other health providers to make an option for the poor by working on their behalf. The insight is, in a sense, an epidemiological one: most often, diseases themselves make a preferential option for the poor. That is, the poor are sicker than the non-poor. They are at heightened risk of dying prematurely, whether from increased exposure to pathogens (including pathogenic situations) or from decreased access to services or, as is most often the case, from both of these "risk factors."
[Read the rest, here.
HT: America.]
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