The challenge of bioethics

While it’s true that our current age of intense information technology can give us information overload, leading us to get saturated and blasé, it’s also true that the profusion of information can lead us to a greater sensitivity to the increasing complexity of our life. That’s the irony of our times.

That was the first impression I got as I started to attend a course on bioethics recently. It struck me as a novel way of having an interdisciplinary effort to blend the best findings of medicine and the sciences with the best conclusions and indications of philosophy, theology and pastoral care.

I consider this development as progress. Too often we can be accused of leaning too much on one side at the expense of the other sides that also need to be considered. Thus, we can be too scientific or empirical that focuses more on the material, while being deficient on the spiritual and moral that goes beyond the material and temporal aspects of our life. This is a common  phenomenon these days.

Or, we can go the other extreme—being too spiritual and moralistic while neglecting the material and biological foundations of our human concerns.

As a consequence, we are prone to be narrow-minded, simplistic, rigid, and to easily fall to rash judgments. With our complicated times, we have to try our best to avoid these predicaments.

We need to strike a healthy balance, because the resulting blend would actually bring us to a richer appreciation of reality. It would lead us to serve all of us better. In short, it would help us to live truth in charity better, a goal that we should all pursue in earnest.

And so, there I was with a few others in class, having to grapple with the mind-boggling names of hormones, their sources, mechanisms and effects, their usual manifestations, etc. I suddenly felt like a high schooler again having to cram for an exam the following day.

Besides, we need to assess the ethics and morality of the different cases brought about by our biological life and medical conditions.

This aspect was kind of bloody, since we discovered we had divergent views.

It became clear to me that bioethics is a relatively new science that would need more inputs, polishing and systematization. And to think that we were talking more about the reproductive system. I wonder how it is going to be when we start talking about the nervous system and the psycho-emotional aspect it has. I suspect that area would be bloodier.

One thing that I clearly saw during the classes was that while learning those biological and medical terms is certainly helpful, we should realize that  knowing the nature of things just simply cannot be achieved simply through the naturalistic ways. That is, by simply observing and experimenting.

We need to input the data of our faith, since the nature of things is based on a natural law that is created by God. We just cannot study and claim to know nature without referring ourselves to God. He is the author of nature, after all.

I believe the study of bioethics is very important and relevant. It gives us good ideas on how to go about giving advice and counseling to people who come to ask for help. I would say that that the inputs provided by bioethics can give us more charitable, prudent and effective pieces of advice.

And so I believe that with the complicated and confusing atmosphere we are getting into, and especially now that our government has sadly enacted into law a Reproductive Health Act, we have to be more conversant with the intricacies of bioethics.

Church leaders, I think, should tackle this challenge squarely, educating the main agents of formation adequately. The clergy, the religious persons, the catechists and other lay faithful actively working in the Church, should have some basic grounding on bioethics.

This is not going to be an easy task. We have to go over a formidable learning curve. But if we persist, if we continue to move on in spite of the difficulties, mistakes and failures that can come our way, time will come when bioethics can become a clear science that is appreciated by everyone.

In life, we need to dream even if at the moment such dream would seem impossible. Saints have proven that dreams, with God’s grace and our all-out effort, can come true. In fact, they have shown that their dreams oftentimes have fallen short of the reality that came later.

Let’s face the challenge of bioethics boldly!

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