From Abortion to Euthanasia: Rethinking the Value of Life at the End of the Christian Age

Abstract

Many have observed that we are passing through a period as significant as the Reformation and the Renaissance. The very frame of reference by which we understand the meaning of reproduction, birth, suffering, and death is being recast. That we are in a period of significant change seems manifest. Almost overnight, an entire ideological framework with its metaphysical and historical presuppositions collapsed in Eastern Europe. With that collapse, or at least with the substantial reorientation and rearticulation of its claims, a set of assumptions regarding the place of the state, the role of medicine, and the meaning of individual life was recast as well. An analogous transformation has been occurring in Western Europe and North America with regard to Christianity, rendering it ever more a historical root of the culture than a living religious force. In the late 1960’s, probably associated with the rupture of pieties and traditions encouraged by Vatican II, the culture of Roman Catholics, and because of their influence even that of the Protestants, became ever more disconnected from the Christianity of the first millennium. Moreover, Christianity became increasingly less influential in personal life and public policy. In a world after communism and Christianity, in a world in which these are no longer dominant cultural forces, one faces the challenge of giving direction to medicine’s interventions in human reproduction, birth, suffering, and death. These changes are of particular significance for Poland with its historical connections to both communism and Catholicism.