December 19, 2008

Summer Johnson: Who Cares if the Vatican Weighs in on Bioethics?

Great OpEd at the Bioethics Blog by Summer Johnson about the recent admonition from the Roman Catholic Church: "Who Cares if the Vatican Weights in on Bioethics?":
No one. At least that's my view. Certainly not American Catholics who use birth control, IVF, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, and a wide range of other reproductive technologies previously and even more so now get a Holy finger wagging from Rome.

Moreover, I don't know any American Catholics who oppose the commonplace forms of human enhancement we use today and even the borderline ones such as taking brain-boosting drugs or drugs to help us sleep at night.

And this concept that the conservative movement more generally keeps leveraging--human dignity--the centerpiece of Catholic bioethics? Perhaps it could be useful, if anyone knew what it meant.
Entire article.

2 comments:

JoMo said...

I'm confused. American Catholics using birth control? You can be Catholic whilst going against Catholic doctrine?

Besides that I don't think Johnson gives the Vatican enough credit. A terribly large proportion of Africa really does care, hence stories like this. Just because the more liberally minded Catholic intelligentsia of America don't listen it doesn't mean the rest of the world ignores what the Vatican says.

dharmicmel said...

that any part of the words listens to, or gives a damn, about what the Catholic church has to say about anything is irrelevant; that they are promoters of human dignity is meaningless, in view of their assaults on human dignity throughtout history and the debacle of pedophiles sheparding the masses