Solidarity with the most vulnerable: Alliance VITA’s motto
On 20th December 2025, International Day for Human Solidarity, Alliance VITA issued a statement concerning the motto chosen by the association to describe and determine its actions and to ensure that solidarity is truly for everyone, without excluding those who have a vital need.
Alliance VITA’s motto is founded on two firm beliefs which can be shared with everyone.
The first, is that human beings are interdependent. Which contradicts neither their need for freedom, nor their aspiration for autonomy. Surely interdependence is what justifies the foundation and development of human societies, around families, clans and tribes? Living together, in close proximity, linked together, in relations, is a question of survival, not merely of progression.
The grip of technology merely accentuates the fact. The more sophisticated the societies, the more specialised the human beings, the more we need one another. In order to drink a glass of water – a vital commodity if ever – one must now trust a series of specialists who guarantee the production and distribution of drinkable water for everyone.
All the more, sophisticated health systems, social protection schemes, trade etc. can only be sound if they are based on a relationship of trust. A society worthy of the name is therefore akin to a solidarity link where everyone has their own unique place, and plays their role. Where nobody can claim to be invulnerable.
Solidarity, a criterion of humanity
This is where the second firm belief comes in: the room given to the most fragile broadly determines the degree of humanity of a society. It comes from another observation: what is the link which determines the solidity of a chain? The obvious answer is: the weakest link. A chain naturally breaks at its weakest link.
Whence its precious nature for us all. The protection of the weakest link, the attention it receives, the care which it enjoys, are for the benefit of all. The failure of the weakest link is an alert signal, because it endangers the entire society. Research scientists have discovered that the most primitive human societies knew how to care for their most vulnerable members. As noted by Valérie Delattre, the archeo-anthropologist:
“The more one [looks back] in the depths of time, the more it is astounding to see how groups and communities managed to deal with those who were vulnerable, fragile or very severely handicapped”.
Nowadays, even more than in the past, the legitimacy of laws is based on their role for the protection of the weak against the omnipotence of the strong, according to the famous Lacordaire formula:
“Between the strong and the weak, between the master and the servant, freedom oppresses and law emancipates”.
Alliance VITA defends the eminent dignity of all human life, as recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; challenging any devaluation of human life, which might be alleged due to its fragility (immaturity or old-age, failing health, dependence and handicap…). Vulnerability is in fact a value of humanity, an element of mankind which calls for solidarity.
Consideration for the most fragile
It is on the basis of this substantiated observation that Alliance VITA has elaborated its motto: solidarity with the most fragile. It remains to be seen and considered how these most fragile, which – sometimes – laws, even if democratically adopted, no longer manage to recognise or consider as citizens, people or human beings in their own right. They are those whose life is neglected, ignored, threatened, despised.
Alliance VITA has therefore chosen to act in priority whenever the very principle of life is in jeopardy. Alliance Vita considers that the minimum living conditions (worthy of humanity) must be included in the requirements for solidarity. Many of the members of the association are committed in their own name or within other structures, in support of the handicapped, victims of child abuse, disoriented youngsters, the homeless or those experiencing miserable living conditions, as well as migrants living in poverty, the isolated, and those in “social death” conditions etc.
Respect for life and living conditions go hand in hand. Moreover, it is well known that an excessively individualistic and consumerist society leads to exclusions at its periphery. All acts of solidarity are necessary in order to heal a society which is sometimes so hard against the weak that it goes so far as to carry a particularly contradictory injunction in the case of the handicapped. Consider for example the case of those suffering from Down’s syndrome: Take all your place, but it would have been better if you had not been born…
From exclusion to self-exclusion
Alliance VITA has therefore focused on these stakes at the beginning and end of life: Around conception and birth on the one hand, and around disease and the end-of-life on the other hand, because the “right to life”, the first requirement of the Universal Human Rights Declaration, is being challenged at each of these stages, not only by the existing laws or those being debated, but also by current mentalities and behaviours. The stakes are cultural, social, economic and political.
With the undeniable technological and medical advances come tensions on life which one could have supposed to be bygone since the rejection of eugenics, in particular the selection of humans before birth, the exploitation of the female body, the denial of the value of the terminal existence, together with the risk of self-exclusion of the most fragile, under the pressure of discrediting social norms. Whence the efforts by Alliance VITA to maintain and restore the “will to live” for those in danger of losing it.
At the initial or ultimate stages of existence, Alliance VITA does not limit itself to defending the principle of respect for life in the name of solidarity through a plea aimed at the public or politicians; the association is working on promoting the conditions for accepting new life and supporting the most fragile, for the benefit of any person intimately concerned by these stages: youngsters, couples, pregnant women, the handicapped or dependents, seriously ill patients or at their end of life, the aged, those in despair, carers, next of kin helpers… The entire ecosystem essential to solidarity must be heard, encouraged and supported.
That is the idea behind the establishment of the three help lines run by the association. It is also the idea behind the practical guides published by the association which provide considerable information on the needs and devices for solidarity and encourage everyone to take part. This practical experience – thousands of people testifying each year to trained and supervised listeners – associated with the constant dialogue with deciders reinforces the legitimacy of Alliance VITA to speak out and reaffirm the urgency and importance of ensuring solidarity with the most fragile.
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