William E. May - Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human Life

CATHOLIC BIOETHICS

AND THE GIFT OF

HUMAN LIFE

THIRD EDITION

THIRD EDITION

CATHOLIC BIOETHICS

AND THE GIFT OF

HUMAN LIFE

William E. May

Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division
Our Sunday Visitor, Inc.
Huntington, Indiana 46750

Nihil Obstat
Msgr. Michael Heintz, Ph.D.
Censor Librorum

Imprimatur
Kevin C. Rhoades
Bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend
June 7, 2013

The Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur are official declarations that a book is free from doctrinal or moral error. It is not implied that those who have granted the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur agree with the contents, opinions, or statements expressed.

The publisher and author are grateful to all copyright holders without whose material this could not have been completed. If any copyrighted materials have been inadvertently used in this book without proper credit being given in one form or another, please notify Our Sunday Visitor in writing so that future printings of this work may be corrected accordingly.

Copyright 2000, 2008, 2013 by William E. May. Published 2013.

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All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts for critical reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing from the publisher. Write:

Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division
Our Sunday Visitor, Inc.
200 Noll Plaza
Huntington, IN 46750

ISBN: 978-1-61278-702-2
eISBN: 978-1-61278-308-6
LCCN: 00-130461

Cover design: Amanda Falk
Cover art: Thinkstock
Interior design: Sherri L. Hoffman

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Dedicated to the memory of
my father, Robert W. May (1893-1985), and
my mother, Katherine Agnes May (1898-1987),
and to the memory of
Thomas J. Davin, Jr. (1930-2007),
who helped me greatly in preparing
the 2008 Second Edition of this book.

Contents

CHAPTER ONE
Church Teaching and Major Issues in Bioethics

CHAPTER TWO
Making True Moral Judgments and Good Moral Choices

CHAPTER THREE
Generating Human Life: Marriage and the New Reproductive Technologies

CHAPTER FOUR
Contraception and Respect for Human Life

CHAPTER FIVE
Abortion and Human Life

CHAPTER SIX
Experimentation on Human Subjects

CHAPTER SEVEN
Euthanasia, Assisted Suicide, and Care of the Dying

CHAPTER EIGHT
Defining Death and Organ Transplantation

Acknowledgments

Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C., and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All rights reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for the United States of America copyright 1994, United States Catholic Conference, Inc. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Modifications from the Editio Typica copyright 1997, United States Catholic Conference, Inc. Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

Excerpts from Vatican Council II documents are from Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, new revised edition, edited by Austin Flannery, O.P., copyright 1992, Costello Publishing Company, Inc., Northport, N.Y., and are used by permission of the publisher, all rights reserved.

In addition to the sources cited in the endnotes and Bibliography and Resources, some texts of papal documents and other Vatican documents including Evangelium vitae, Veritatis splendor, Dignitas personae, and Responses to Certain Questions of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Concerning Artificial Nutrition and Hydration are copyrighted 2013 by Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Used with permission.

Introduction to the Third Edition

Our Sunday Visitor published the second edition of Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human Life at the beginning of September 2008. The text had been completed earlier in the year. On September 8, 2008, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) finished its instruction entitled Dignitas personae: On Certain Bioethical Questions, although the document was not officially released until December 8, 2008.

This document had been awaited for many years I myself had been appointed by then Cardinal Ratzinger as a member of one of the four groups of Catholic bioethicists meeting under the leadership of Bishop Elio Sgreccia to study new questions that had arisen since the publication of the Vatican Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation (Donum vitae [DV]). I had been informed erroneously, however, that the new document would not be published for some time. I thus decided to finish a substantive revision of my book, which had originally been published in 2000.

In this revised third edition I have added a section to I have cut some of the material providing in some depth the different views of D. Alan Shewmon and others over the validity of so-called brain death as one way of determining that a human person has died in order to devote attention to the contemporary debate and discussion among Catholic scholars loyal to the Magisterium who disagree profoundly among themselves. I have also updated the Bibliography and the list of helpful websites to include the most recent scientific and scholarly studies of the issues taken up.

In preparing this third edition of my book I have been helped greatly by my former student Mark Latkovic, now professor of moral theology at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit, and by E. Christian Brugger, my colleague as a senior research fellow of the Culture of Life Foundation, and William Cardinal Stafford Professor of Moral Theology at St. John Vianney Seminary in Denver.

CHAPTER ONE

Church Teaching and Major Issues in Bioethics

It is important and helpful to begin this book by summarizing the teaching of the Church on major issues in bioethics. I believe that the most important magisterial documents relevant to the topics to be considered in this book are: (1) Pope John Paul IIs 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae (The Gospel of Life); (2) the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faiths 1987 Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation (entitled Donum vitae in Latin); (3) the same Congregations 1974 Declaration on Procured Abortion; and (4) the same Congregations 1980 Declaration on Euthanasia.

Other magisterial documents, in particular the Catechism of the Catholic Church and many addresses of Popes Pius XII and John Paul II, are also quite relevant to matters taken up in this book. In addition, the 1994 Charter for Health Care Workers prepared by the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers, the 1994 Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services promulgated by the bishops of the United States, and pastoral letters of individual bishops and episcopal conferences bear on topics to be considered. Thus, in chapters to follow, reference will be made to these sources of Church teaching when it is relevant to do so. But five documents are of paramount importance: 1. John Paul IIs encyclical Evangelium vitae; 2. the Vatican Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation (Donum vitae); 3. the Declaration on Procured Abortion; 4. the Declaration on Euthanasia; and 5.