This week of extreme life and death challenges kept our brains and emotions working overtime. Dr. Clem described bioethics as healthcare ethics. These were the areas he focused on this week:
Embryo – when life begins
Reproductive ethics
Abortion
Euthanasia
Pornography
One thought came to me as Dr. Clem described why he believes the fertilization of the egg is the moment life begins. Why would we think that God’s spirit comes in later, or at a set point of our creation? Why would it be the point it attached to the wall of the womb, or when it starts looking like a fetus, or even when the heartbeat starts. Our lives actually begin in the mind of God before we were even created. So to erase any embryo can be seen as the taking of life created by God.
With that in mind, then creating all the extra embryos to improve the success rate of an IVF pregnancy can actually be destructive instead of co-creating with God. Now with the advances in technology, it gets even worse when parents decide they want a particular sex, to remove a baby because of its genes being defective or just unwanted.
Euthanasia is being promoted as a good thing, a way out of pain. No person can know this, yet it is being accepted more and more as being a right by those who believe it just ends. With the amount of suffering some survivors endure to get out of their circumstance, via beatings, illness, mental torture, euthanasia seems to slam against survivor efforts, why did they try so hard? Why go through all that suffering. However, due to the advances in medicine, I still believe that a patient should have the freedom to sign an advanced care directive, to avoid highly invasive medical procedures that only add a few days or months to their lives.
This week’s topics both appealed and disgusted me during this week. It took time to look for the positive and fascinating things about our bodies, and let God help with the difficult issues. We do need to be knowledgeable so as to be a help in critical moments in people’s lives past or present.
