IB World Religions 3.6.3. Medical Ethics and the Sanctity of Life: Euthanasia, Embryo Research, Genetic Engineering, Abortion Notes

3.6.3. Medical Ethics and the Sanctity of Life: Euthanasia, Embryo Research, Genetic Engineering, Abortion

The sanctity of life

1. Christian argument about medicine starts from the sanctity of life, the claim that life is God's gift and not a possession its owner may dispose of.
2. The anchor is Genesis 1:27, humanity made in the image of God. Theologians call this the imago Dei and take it to give every life a worth independent of health or usefulness.
3. Exodus 20:13 forbids killing, and Psalm 139:13 has God knitting a person together in the womb, which opponents of abortion read as protection reaching back before birth.
4. Catholic argument adds natural law, the tradition from Thomas Aquinas that reads duties off the purposes built into human nature, with preserving life among its primary precepts. Protestants argue more often from scripture directly, though Joseph Fletcher's situation ethics made agape, self-giving love, the only rule.
5. Sanctity of life is not a duty to prolong existence at all costs. Catholic teaching separates ordinary means of treatment, which are obligatory, from extraordinary means, which a patient may refuse.
6. The doctrine of double effect permits morphine in doses that shorten life, provided the intended effect is relief of pain and the shortening is foreseen but not intended.

Euthanasia and assisted dying

1. Euthanasia means causing a person's death for that person's own benefit. It is voluntary, non-voluntary or involuntary according to whether the patient asks, cannot ask, or is killed against their will.
2. Active euthanasia kills by an act such as a lethal injection, passive euthanasia withholds treatment, and assisted suicide differs again because the patient performs the final act.
3. The Catholic position appears in the Declaration on Euthanasia (1980) and in Evangelium Vitae (1995), where John Paul II calls euthanasia a grave violation of the law of God.
4. In Britain the Church of England House of Bishops, the Methodist Church and the Baptist Union oppose legalisation, arguing that ill and disabled people would feel pressure to ask for death.
5. Christian opinion divides all the same. George Carey, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, backed a change in the law in 2014, Desmond Tutu wrote similarly, and British Quakers leave the question to conscience.
6. Opponents point instead to palliative care, a field with a religious root, since Cicely Saunders founded St Christopher's Hospice in 1967. Supporters argue from autonomy, and campaigners such as Dignity in Dying cite laws already working in the Netherlands, Belgium and the American state of Oregon.

Abortion and ensoulment

1. Argument about abortion turns on when a developing human gains the protection sanctity of life confers, and the tradition has answered that differently over time.
2. Augustine and Aquinas worked with delayed animation, the Aristotelian view that the rational soul arrives weeks after conception, so early abortion was condemned as a lesser offence.
3. The modern Catholic position dates from Pius IX, who removed that distinction from canon law in 1869. The Catechism now protects life absolutely from conception, and canon law attaches automatic excommunication to abortion, a penalty Pope Francis confirmed in 2016 that any priest may absolve.
4. The Church of England resolution of 1983 calls abortion a great moral evil while allowing that under strictly limited conditions it may be the lesser of two evils.
5. Others go further. The Methodist Church accepts abortion in a wider range of cases, Orthodox churches condemn it but apply oikonomia, pastoral flexibility, when the mother's life is at risk, and some American Christians campaign for access.
6. Secular argument works from bodily autonomy and from accounts of personhood resting on sentience or viability. Britain's Abortion Act 1967 permits abortion on stated grounds, Ireland lifted its ban by referendum in 2018, and Dobbs v Jackson (2022) returned the question to the American states.

Embryo research and IVF

1. In vitro fertilisation produces more embryos than are transferred, so clinics hold frozen embryos that may be donated, used in research or allowed to perish.
2. Britain's framework came from the Warnock Report (1984) and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990, which created the HFEA and fixed the 14-day rule for research on embryos.
3. Fourteen days marks the primitive streak, before which an embryo can still divide into twins. Critics on religious and secular sides alike argue that a practical line cannot carry so much moral weight.
4. Donum Vitae (1987) holds that the embryo must be treated as a person from conception, and objects to IVF itself because the technique separates procreation from the marital act.
5. Dignitas Personae (2008) carried that into stem cell research and cloning, while approving work on adult and reprogrammed cells because no embryo is destroyed.
6. The Church of England is more permissive, accepting IVF for married couples and regulated research inside the limit, though evangelical Anglicans have pressed for stronger protection. When Britain approved mitochondrial donation in 2015 the churches divided among themselves, and secular bioethicists divided too.

Genetic engineering and enhancement

1. Somatic gene therapy alters the cells of a living patient and stops there. Germline modification changes eggs, sperm or early embryos, so the alteration passes to every descendant.
2. A second division separates therapy, which restores normal functioning, from enhancement, which improves on it. Christian ethicists accept the first far more readily than the second.
3. Dignitas Personae accepts somatic therapy, rejects germline intervention because those affected cannot consent, and rejects enhancement as the return of eugenics.
4. Protestant bodies engage as closely. The Church of Scotland worked on the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1996, and Anglican reports accept therapeutic genetics while warning against treating children as products.
5. The playing God objection is contested by Christian writers themselves, since many theologians describe people as co-creators working inside creation. CRISPR sharpened the argument, and when He Jiankui announced gene edited twins in China in 2018 the condemnation came from scientific academies and churches alike.
6. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis lets embryos be selected, and campaigners such as Heidi Crowter have argued in the English courts that screening for Down syndrome tells disabled people their lives count less.

Autonomy and the secular case

1. Medical ethics is conducted in a shared secular vocabulary, and the four principles of Beauchamp and Childress supply it: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice.
2. Christian ethicists use those principles but rank them differently, placing autonomy under a good the patient neither made nor owns. In Pretty v United Kingdom (2002) the European Court of Human Rights held that the right to life in Article 2 contains no right to choose death.
3. The vocabularies often meet. Christian and secular disability campaigners both oppose assisted dying laws, one appealing to the image of God and the other to equal citizenship.
4. Christians also work inside secular institutions, serving on the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and giving evidence to parliamentary committees, while Catholic hospitals decline particular procedures inside national health systems.
5. Conscience clauses are the practical settlement, letting medical staff refuse to take part in abortion. That is how a plural society houses convictions it does not share.
6. It matters which body speaks. A papal encyclical binds Catholics as a Synod report or a Methodist Conference resolution does not bind Anglicans, so no single Christian line should be expected.