[
Originally posted at The Next Hurrah]
DemFromCT's post When is a Doctor not a Doctor made me curious about the shill brought in by Jeb Bush to pronounce Terri Shiavo's previous diagnoses as inadequate or inaccurate. As DemFromCT mentioned, the doctor, William P. Cheshire, works for an outfit at Trinity International University called The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity (CBHD). CBHD sounded a little dodgy to me, so I looked it up, expecting to find an academic backwater. Instead, what I found was a bastion of antipathy toward science and retrograde notions about reproductive rights consistent with the beliefs of Phyllys Schlafly and Randall Terry. The press needs to jump all over this, because anyone affiliated with The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity puts religion over science and should not be given a serious hearing on issues of medical ethics.
I quickly perused some of CBHD's highlighted publications on reproductive ethics--none anything more than op-ed pieces, most likely meant to run in church magazines and local weekly papers starved for material. Some of what they write is just laughable, like the article that starts out with the claim that "[t]here are as many as 2.5 million infertile couples in America--that's about the same size as the population of Phoenix." I don't know much about medicine, but I know a bit about demography, and by any measure, even inaccurate measures, that's just plain wrong. Phoenix has 1.3 million residents, and the Phoenix metro area about 3.5 million. I have a hard time taking seriously anything that begins with such a glaring error that I confirmed in about 15 seconds.
But beyond failing to exhibit any regard for factual evidence even when it's not at odds with religious belief, the authors highlighted on CBHD's website show a hostility toward science and a reliance on a literal interpretation of the Bible in addressing what they believe are the pressing concerns of medical ethics. For instance, take a look as some of these gems from the piece that began with the dumb error about Phoenix, The Challenge of Infertility: A Biblical Framework for Responding Appropriately:
The growing number of reproductive technologies raises an equal number of ethical concerns. Only those technologies that pass ethical muster should be used. Some of the concerns to be considered include the sanctity of human life and the biblical ideal of the family...
[more below the jump...]
Just as procreation is part of the biblical ideal for the family, so too is monogamous marriage. The apostle Paul was being completely consistent with this ideal when he cited Genesis in his instructions on the family in the book of Ephesians: "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh" (Ephesians 5:31). God's ideal for the family is one man, one woman, in a one-flesh kind of union, for life. We all know from painful experience personally, in our families, or those around us how traumatic it is when this ideal is violated by adultery, divorce, or even death. This ideal is to be preserved and practiced for the well-being of the family, including when considering reproductive technologies.
A number of the reproductive technologies violate God's ideal for the family and are, therefore, rife with difficulties. For instance, surrogate motherhood, one of the more controversial of the reproductive technologies, is contrary to the "nuclear" structure of the family. When a third party is intrudes on the procreative relationship the divinely instituted structure of the family is altered...
Like other decisions, decisions concerning reproductive technology should be informed by a Christian worldview. What does the Bible say about infertility?...
[I]t is equally clear that the sovereign Lord is the one who opens and shuts the womb (1 Samuel 1:5-6). While children are clearly a blessing from God, the ability to bear them is subject to the mystery of his providence. In fact, the apostle James warns Christians not to be presumptuous about their lives. Rather than brazenly following our own desires, we are taught, "Instead . . . to say, 'If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that'" (James 4:15).
In other words, if you're not getting pregnant through normal intercourse, then just get over it, and quit taking matters into your own hands.
This is not the work of a serious medical ethicist. And one of the reasons is because it's less focused on infertility than on a narrow view of reproduction which holds that life begins at the moment that sperm fertilizes an egg, thus making a human being. (Of course, they're vehemently opposed to stem-cell research.) As a result, you have a piece about distinguishing between harvesting and thawing eggs (ethically OK if the eggs are damaged, because they're not human life) and harvesting embryos (if the thawing goes wrong, you've just killed a human being). You have a call for adoptions of human embryos. You have this book review from the perspective of somebody who sees oral contraceptives as essentially the same as abortion. And you have my favorite, this big "screw you" to couples who may wish to avail themselves of the technological aids to fertility and pregnancy:
It should be added that this impoverished view also entails moral relativism, a denial of objective values, a denial of real right and wrong in terms of what is in keeping with the will of God. Fostering an impoverished understanding of the human person, the involvement of money and anonymity together with the new technologies, separating sexual union in the flesh from procreation, create opportunities for abuse-though this abuse may not readily be seen as such from a secular point of view. With the practices of financial reward, anonymity and a technological separation of sexual union from procreation, the satisfaction of parental desire and the manipulative-cum-medical success become the measures of good and evil. All is right and good, so it is thought, if the medical manipulations are successful and the parents-to-be get the child they want. On this understanding, parental wills or desire, not the will of God, decide what is right and wrong; and so what is right and wrong will vary with human wills...
On a Christian understanding, it is not up to us to choose to have children in any manner we like. But if the concepts of the imago Dei and of life as gift from God are not accepted as moral yard-sticks, then there is nothing to hold back moral relativism, with all of its arbitrariness and tyrannies.
If there weren't "moral relativism," there wouldn't be much need for medical ethics. The only reason there's debate about "freedom to chose" "end of life" issues is because there's ambiguity about the choice or the actual end of life. Because there's ambiguity, because there are unsettled questions, we can exercise our liberties to search for our own answers, even to the big questions about the meaning and definition of life. When the Supreme Court, in Casey v Pennsylvania, upheld Roe v Wade, Justices Kennedy, O'Connor and Souter wrote that "[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State."
Because we, as Americans, have such varied and evolving ideas and principles about the attributes of personhood, and because our ideals and principles often lag behind our technology, we have a serious need for serious medical ethicists. However, we aren't served as people or as citizens of the United States by those who believe all our questions can be clearly and authoritatively answered by a literal reading of the Bible. Our need to wrestle with ambiguity won't go away by accepting the certitudes of the ideologues at the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity.