When I tell people that I am in the University of Louisville BETH program, there is this instant flash of confusion that can exist in or out of the presence of polite terror. The confusion is that—being a relatively young field—people aren’t familiar with the concepts of BETH. Now: the terror is something completely different. The terror comes when people immediately regret asking what I’m studying. Around the third syllable of Bioethics, I notice that people tend to glaze over. It is akin to Joe asking George about his day.
“How are you today?” smiles George.
Preoccupied, Joe replies with a non-trite answer.
“Now that you ask, George, my new puppy has parvovirus, so I am afraid that he might be dead when I get home.”
Poor Joe and his puppy problems.
Horrified, George just keeps walking with his same 09:15 AM smile and makes a mental note to just smile at Joe from here on out.
As far as it goes with Bioethics and the Medical Humanities, it’s just about orienting yourself with the terminology. Bioethics is defined as the ethics of biological and medical research. That’s it. Cut and dry. If you poke around on the Internet, you will find competing versions of that what bioethics truly is. I like the aforementioned definition because it is succinct. The medical and biological fields are fraught with ethical dilemmas. Organ harvesting and donation; genetic counseling as a preventative measure in family planning; stem cell research and cloning; dealing with terminal illness and death and dying; public health outreach to minorities; religious and personal reservations that affect long-term care plans; and just about anything you can name that can be thought of as controversial can probably find a seat at the table of bioethics.
There is a great quote about the discipline from Orrin Hatch. Hatch is a Republican senator from Utah. Concerning stem cell research, he says:
“I understand that many have ethical and moral reservations about stem cell research, but for the same reason I describe myself as pro-life, I embrace embryonic stem cell research because I believe being pro-life is not only caring for the unborn but also caring for the living.”
Think about what Hatch is saying in this passage. He asserts himself as:
1) Knowledgeable about the controversy of stem cell research
2) Opposed to abortion
3) A proponent of using embryos for medical research
Knowing the little bit we know from the introduction given about who Hatch is, are any of these three points incompatible with the other? If so, why? Answering those questions is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to applying bioethics to healthcare controversies. And what we do as bioethicists and students training in the field is try to define why something is “right” or “wrong” with the knowledge that far less than 1% of such topics will ever have definite answers. Of course, that’s the fun of the discipline, too.
–Michael M.
uoflbioethics 