Category: Making Sense of Bioethics

On
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk

Undoing a chemical abortion

In 1978, Charles E. Rice, a former professor of law at Notre Dame Law School made this prediction in his book Beyond Abortion: The Theory and Practice:

“The abortion of the future will be by pill, suppository, or some other do-it-yourself method. At that point the killing of a baby will be wholly elective and private. We have, finally, caught up with the pagan Romans who endowed the father, the pater familias, with the right to kill his child at his discretion. We give that right to the mother. But it is all the same to the victim.”

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Fr. Tad Pacholczyk

Medical assistance with the battle of the bulge

Bariatric surgery, which often involves banding of the stomach, is a widely used procedure for treating severe obesity. Another approach that relies on an implantable “stomach pacemaker” also appears poised to assist those struggling with significant weight gain.

Many people have already benefitted from these kinds of surgical interventions, enabling them to shed a great deal of weight, improve their health, and get a new lease on life.

Weighing alternatives

At the same time, however, it’s important for us to examine such interventions from an ethical point of view. It’s not simply a matter of weight loss, achieved by any means whatsoever, but a rational decision made after carefully weighing the risks, benefits, and alternatives.

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Fr. Tad Pacholczyk

Esteeming our elders

Occasionally we hear disturbing stories in the media about young people who perpetrate abuse against the elderly.

In a widely reported 2009 story, for example, caretakers at the Quadrangle Assisted Living facility outside Philadelphia were charged in connection with the abuse of an elderly patient named Lois McCallister. Three employees, aged 19, 21, and 22 were caught on a surveillance camera as they taunted, mocked, and assaulted the partially naked 78-year-old woman.

She had begun complaining to visiting family members several months prior that someone was hurting her and hitting her. There were also initial signs of bruising on her hand and wrist.

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Fr. Tad Pacholczyk

Is artificial insemination wrong? Even among married couples?

Editor’s note: This column contains some information that might not be suitable for younger readers.

Artificial insemination introduces sperm into a woman’s body by use of a thin tube (cannula) or other instrument to bring about a pregnancy.

Artificial insemination can be either homologous (using sperm from a woman’s husband) or heterologous (using sperm from a man she is not married to). Both forms of artificial insemination raise significant moral concerns.

Treating people as objects

Bringing about a pregnancy by introducing a cannula through the reproductive tract of a woman and injecting sperm into her body raises concerns about reducing her to a kind of conduit for the purposes of obtaining a child.

These actions fail to respect the most personal and intimate aspects of a woman’s relational femininity and her sexuality. She ends up being treated or treating herself as an “object” for the pursuit of ulterior ends.

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Fr. Tad Pacholczyk

Clearing the air around marijuana use

A June 2014 article in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), written by researchers from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institutes of Health, points out that marijuana is not the harmless drug that many imagine.

Rather, it is associated with “substantial adverse effects, some of which have been determined with a high level of confidence.”

Negative outcomes

These negative outcomes include the risk of addiction, symptoms of chronic bronchitis, an elevated incidence of fatal and non-fatal motor vehicle accidents, and diminished lifetime achievement and school performance in cases of long-term use, especially beginning in adolescence.

 

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Fr. Tad Pacholczyk

Renegade researchers should trigger drawing long overdue ethical lines

Producing human embryos in the laboratory for research purposes makes most people uneasy.

Even those who tolerate the creation of embryos in test tubes so that infertile couples might have children will often have reservations about the creation of embryos to serve as experimental research material or to destroy them for their cellular parts.

Creation of embryos for research

Twenty years ago, when a deeply divided government panel recommended allowing such research experiments on human embryos for the first time, even Bill Clinton summarily rejected the idea.

Two years later, Representative Nancy Pelosi concurred in the Congressional Record: “We should not be involved in the creation of embryos for research. I completely agree with my colleagues on that score.”

The proposal to engender human embryos by cloning has similarly drawn strong opposition from Americans for many years.

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Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk

Editing our genes? We must be vigilant about use of new techniques

A number of serious diseases are known to occur because of defects or mutations in our DNA.

Curing such diseases could in principle be carried out by rewriting the DNA to fix the mutated base pairs. Yet until recently, scientists have remained largely stymied in their attempts to directly modify genes in a living animal.

New gene-editing technique

Findings described in the March 30, 2014, issue of Nature Biotechnology, however, reveal that a novel gene-editing technique, known as CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), can be used successfully in mice to reverse disease symptoms for a liver defect known as type I tyrosinemia. In humans, this potentially fatal ailment affects about one in 100,000 people.

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Fr. Tad Pacholczyk

A path of renewal for the sterilized couple

Among married men and women who undergo surgical sterilization through a vasectomy or a tubal ligation, it has been estimated that anywhere from 10 to 20 percent will come to regret the choice.

Sometimes there may be an immediate awareness of wrongdoing following the surgery, while in other cases, as Patrick Coffin, radio host and author of Sex au Naturel notes, sterilized couples may “. . . drift for years before acknowledging that something between them is no longer in sync. After the initial pregnancy fear subsides, and the vision of 1001 erotic nights turns out be something of a scam, spouse may (subtly) turn against spouse while doing their best to ignore the silent, disturbing ‘presence’ of the choice they made.”

Their decision to seek out a permanent form of contraception can also affect their marriage in other important ways. As Dr. John Billings has noted, there is “an effect that is even more tragic than the clinical, and it is that in many cases the use of contraceptive methods in marriage has been followed by an act of infidelity of one of the members.

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Fr. Tad Pacholczyk

Discrimination and human genital sexuality

Making Sense out of Bioethics column by Fr. Tad Pacholczyk

*Caution to parents: the following article uses frank and honest language to discuss the serious and complicated subject of human sexuality. Care should be used when determining if your children are old enough to read and discuss the contents of this article.*

Discrimination is often understood as acting out of prejudice against persons who differ from us and do not share our views, traits, values, or lifestyles.

The word “discrimination,” however, has an older meaning as well, namely, to draw a clear distinction between proper and improper, good and evil, to differentiate and recognize as different.

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