Ecumenical Bioethics
Bioethics: A Christian Primer
by Gilbert Meilaender
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.
(120 pages, $10.00, paper)
Body, Soul and Bioethics
by Gilbert Meilaender
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996.
(134 pages, $21.95, cloth)
reviewed by Allyne Smith
Gilbert Meilaender, professor of theological ethics at Valparaiso University, has produced two recent books for Christians in the increasingly important area of bioethics. Bioethics: A Christian Primer is, as its title suggests, an introductory work for the average reflective Christian. In addition to the specific issues discussed below, Meilaender considers genetic advances, prenatal screening, suicide and euthanasia, refusing treatment, organ donation, human experimentation, and sickness and health.
The writing is always remarkably clear and thought-provoking, and the chapter on organ donation, for example, has caused this reviewer to reconsider his own position. One criticism of Bioethics, however, is the scarcity of footnotes. The author actually may whet the reader’s appetite for more information, so suggestions for further reading would be a helpful addition.
Body, Soul and Bioethics is a different kind of book than his Christian primer: less general, with more attention to the current literature in the field, but no less accessible to the general reader. Here Meilaender begins with a chapter on methodology that introduces some of the writers and approaches that have shaped American bioethics over the last couple of decades—the four principles approach of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress, the revival of casuistry by Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, and the communitarianism of Ezekiel Emmanuel. He ends this survey with a criticism of the status quo that follows the analysis of another influential bioethicist, Leon Kass.
In the second chapter Meilaender criticizes secular notions of personhood that have shaped the development of bioethics, notions that tend to separate the body from the person. Preferring to speak of the person as both “embodied soul” and “ensouled body,” Meilaender offers the following as the alternative Christian view: “To have a life is to be a terra animate, a living body whose natural history has a trajectory. It is to be someone who has a history, not a someone with certain capacities or characteristics.” This conception developed, he suggests (following the Anglican ethicist Oliver O’Donovan), “when Christians had to make sense of the claim that in Jesus of Nazareth both divine and human natures were joined in one person.”1
The next chapter is a much needed look at how Christians should view the advances in reproductive technologies: every week seems to bring news of a new advance or new ethical dilemma in this field. Meilaender see the change of terminology from “procreation” to “reproduction” as symbolic of a tremendous shift in the perception of what is at stake.
In the parallel chapter in Bioethics, he examines the moral significance of the biological bond between parent and child, of assisted reproduction, of the use of third parties, and of surrogacy. He clearly rules out the use of third parties, whether through donation (of sperm or ova) or surrogacy, and also strongly suggests that we should be cautious even about assisted reproduction that does not involve third parties. Such techniques “instru-mentalized the body and use it in order to produce a child,” and so risk “a separation of person and body that demeans the body and makes of it a ‘thing’.”
They also present new problems. What are we to do with extra embryos? Recent headlines have brought us news of an incident in Britain involving the wholesale destruction of unwanted embryos. And as an example of fertility drugs resulting in many more embryos being conceived within the womb than can be successfully brought to term, he cites the case of a woman carrying nine children who was persuaded by a tabloid newspaper to attempt to carry all nine to term. (All of them died.) But can Christians rest any easier with the usual procedure in such a pregnancy—to eliminate most of the unborn children to increase the chance that one or two would survive? These dilemmas raise the fundamental question as to whether or not something should be done simply because it can be done and someone wants it done.
In the fourth chapter of Body, Soul and Bioethics, Meilaender examines the impoverishment of the public policy dimension of bioethics, citing as a prime example a report on human embryo research. The chapter’s last section provides a haunting comparison of the justification for embryo research with the ethical processes that underwrote Nazi medicine.
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