How Christian values defend the most vulnerable

What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics, by O. Carter Snead (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). Hardcover/paperback: 336 pages.

The field of bioethics is increasingly delineated and dominated by lawyers and legal experts, according to American legal scholar and bioethicist O. Carter Snead, in his book What It Means to Be Human.

Theological voices have faded from the conversation. Daniel Callahan has referred to this as the "secularisation of bioethics". Abandonment of the Christian tradition has cut the West off from that tradition's strong sense of the dignity of the body and the value of human interdependence.

Individuals are rooted in communities, upon which they are dependent at various points throughout their lives. We come into the world dependent on our parents for every element of our care, and we continue to depend on others as we are educated and grow in virtue. When we are sick; when we are injured; when we reach the end of our lives; again and again, we need the help of our families, friends and neighbours.

Today, though, it is all too common to prize self-sufficiency as a virtue — a virtue by nature inaccessible to the sick and to the disabled, to pregnant women and to the elderly, and to children of any age. This anthropology of individualism prompts us to hold up the isolated individual as the fundamental unit of society.

The replacement of morality in the public discourse with "rights talk" is further evidence of expressive individualism's dominance. This, too, comes at the expense of the most vulnerable in our midst.

Laws legalising abortion obscure the relationship of care between parent and child. Instead, they assert the rights of the woman against the child growing in her womb.

When a mother is expecting a child, there exist "a woman and her biological offspring literally joined in body, one inside the other, utterly dependent on the other, with lives integrated and intertwined to a degree like no other human relationship". The intimacy of this relationship is the perfect ground on which to cultivate the virtues of acknowledged dependence.

The tendency of abortion laws to characterise the relationship with the same impersonal tone as a dispute between business partners is a failure to remember the way in which our bodies shape, limit and give life to our reality.

The fact that anyone could argue for the destruction of unborn life in order to safeguard a woman's dignity should give us pause. Just as parents and children are not isolated wills in opposition to each other, neither do they exist in isolation from a wider network of family, friends, neighbours and fellow citizens who are called to extend the virtues of acknowledged dependence toward them.

Whether a patient seeks assistance in dying because of extreme pain or because he fears being a burden, the legalisation of euthanasia and assisted suicide only ends up compounding harm to the most vulnerable.

For example, 68 percent of surveyed patients who pursued assisted suicide in Oregon were on government health insurance, which covered assisted dying but capped potentially life-saving interventions.

The availability of assisted dying decreases the availability of end-of-life care, and increases the price of the care that is available. Prior to the legalisation of assisted suicide in Oregon, the state had made advances in developing hospice programs. Since legalisation, however, the use of hospice care in Oregon has fallen below the national average rate.

But what about those vulnerable persons who lack strong familial or social connections? This is where the state might step in to encourage citizens to see themselves in those who are suffering.

Despite its lenient laws regarding euthanasia, the Netherlands provides a beautiful example of how this might look. The Humanitas Retirement Village provides rent-free living accommodations for young people in an eldercare facility, with the stipulation that these young residents interact with their elderly neighbours and provide assistance with social media tasks.

This creativity in overcoming the isolation and age segregation of an individualist culture is just one way in which society might care for the aging.

In What It Means to Be Human, O. Carter Snead presents a view of the human person that values broken, fragile, ailing bodies just as much as it values those which are young, strong and beautiful.

As a society, we in the West should turn away from laws that view the mother and the child as conflicting parties; from the temptation to create children in petri dishes; and from the narrative that depicts dying as a burden. Instead, we should strive to support parents (especially those living in poverty), to provide friendship to those struggling with infertility, and to encourage family care-givers of the sick and elderly.

Abigail Wilkinson Miller is an American writer from northern New York state, where she lives with her husband and son. Previously, she studied moral theology at the University of Notre Dame, human rights at the Catholic University of America, and history and classics at Christendom College. The above book review is an excerpt from a much longer one published online in The European Conservative (November 17, 2022), and is reprinted with the publisher's permission.

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