Doing jobs that change us
Perhaps we should not be surprised to hear that midwives will soon be formally be given the lead role in performing early abortions. After all the doctrine of women’s choice is now embedded in this practice, and the foetus is regarded as not yet a person, more like an object that can be disposed of as inconvenient, so the midwife is merely helping a woman in this process which is morally neutral. This also ties in with the advance of the very secularist and utilitarian doctrine that some newborns do not have the right to life and should be disposed of if disabled in some way, as the Australian philosopher Peter Singer and articles in the Journal of Medical Ethics indicate now to be respectable options – although happily the government is not yet suggesting that such infanticide be legalised. If it were to be legalised, should midwives be asked to carry out such work? We associate them with caring, life giving, nurses who assist mothers bring their babies to birth safely and carefully: are we in fact going to contaminate that role and image if we ask them to terminate life, albeit early with a pill to induce a miscarriage.
Should society ask healers and medical carers to end life as a routing part of their job description? The same question applies to doctors and euthanasia. Their job is the heal and preserve life, as society move towards euthanasia as formal ‘right’, and chooses to use doctors for this task as a regular and frequent practice, that is bound to affect the image and status of our medical profession. Yes we know that doctors do sometimes overdose dying patients with morphine, formally to dull pain but also to end a painful terminal process. But that is a grey area, not a formal and normal part of the job of a doctor, and that grey area is important to preserve – in the interests of the profession and of society as a body of people committed to save life and heal people, and not kill. A utilitarian, coldly clinical view of the sick is bound to be increased with the formalisation of medical killings. And this is of course yet another instance of the de-Christianisation of our social norms from those of the keep Gospel imperative of loving and caring to the bitter end, and ending life which is in any way problematic, either very young or very old, or indeed possibly very disabled. Our humane social tradition is rooted in Christ and the Hebrew moral tradition ‘Thou shalt not kill’.
The government is now seeking to bring women into the direct killing role in the armed forces, a role which they have been spared because society has regarded women as life enhancers, mothers, child raisers and nurturers – that has also been the feminist view of women in distinction from ‘macho’ men who should protect them. Do we really want to associate women with killing in the name of a spurious doctrine of equality?