This week on Mornings with Carmen, we talked about The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity’s summer conference and a doctor in Canada who has helped more than 400 people die by assisted suicide.
Conference Recap
The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity’s annual conference was 2 weeks ago. Every year we try to pick a conference theme that we believe is relevant to what is going on today. So, this year’s theme was The Future of Health: Faith, Ethics, and Our MedTech World.
Our Virtue Ethics Plenary this year was by Professor Keith Plummer of Carin University on “Discipled by Our Devices: Spiritual Formation in Our Technological Age” in which he discussed a right view of technology based on the cultural mandate in Genesis and how the Fall has resulted in a disordered view of technology.
One of the key themes in Plummer’s lecture and in several of the other lectures at the conference is the question: What does it means to be human? And how does our technology shape us?
This question is especially important for things like artificial intelligence. And that’s not just the sci-fi version of AI, but the algorithms that we interact with every day through social media or when we go to the grocery store or go down an internet rabbit hole or streaming television.
We are embodied beings made in the image of God. This means the virtual world is not going to do it for us when it comes to things like compassion or care. Whether it is in medicine or our personal relationships, machine-mitigated care cannot take the place of a hug or a meal or sitting with someone who is suffering or at the end of their life. Think of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10 or the fact that Jesus came to earth in a body and was with those who suffered.
If listeners want to hear Dr. Plummer’s virtue ethics lecture, it is available for free here.
Canadian doctor has helped more than 400 patients die
A National Post profile of Dr. Ellen Wiebe who provides medical assistance in dying, which is a physician ending a person’s life by giving them a lethal cocktail of drugs. In the U.S., physician aid in dying laws mean the physician provides a person with a prescription but is not allowed to administer it. In Canada (and the Netherlands, Belgium) the physician actually does the act of killing the patient by administering the drugs.
In the U.S. there are 10 states, plus Washington DC where assisted dying is legal. This is where a physician provides life-ending drugs, but the patient decides if or when to take them.
CBHD has some good resources on aid-in-dying and euthanasia on our website. And I recommend J. Todd Billings Book The End of the Christian Life.