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Teaching Bioethics Today: Waking from Dogmatic Curricular Slumbers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 November 2023
Abstract
The Dobbs decision has precipitated renewed medical, political, and professional interest in the issue of abortion. Because this decision handed responsibility for regulation of abortion back to the states, and because the states are enacting or have enacted policies that tend to be very permissive or very restrictive, the result has been legal and professional confusion for physicians and their patients. Medical education cannot resolve either the legal or ethical issues regarding abortion. However, medical education must prepare future physicians for caring for patients seeking abortion-related services. Physicians must be prepared to interact appropriately (sensitively and with integrity) with patients or colleagues whose views on abortion differ significantly from their own. This essay describes our educational effort to achieve that objective. The motto that governed this exercise was “No Easy Answers.”
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- © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
Notes
1. Kant, Anderson A., Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber. New York: Oxford University Press; 2020 Google Scholar. Readers trained in the history of philosophy will quickly recognize Kant’s awakening from his dogmatic slumbers because of his reading of Hume. “Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.” Kant I. Critique of Pure Reason. 2nd ed., preface; 1787.
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5. Howard Brody, MD, PhD, a former director of our Center and well-known grandfather in bioethics, deserves credit for introducing this motto. It clearly has the virtue of inducing intellectual humility, which is much needed in the debates regarding abortion.
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14. This session was exclusively designed to address the professional challenges physicians faced in caring for patients with whom they disagreed regarding the matter of abortion. The larger challenges will be generated by state policy regarding abortion and its potential effects on the professional integrity of physicians and other health professionals. That challenge cannot be met by individuals as individuals. That requires a coordinated response from representatives of the medical profession as a whole. In this regard, see Serchen J, Erickson S, Hilden D, for the Health and Policy Committee of the American College of Physicians. Reproductive health policy in the United States: An American College of Physicians brief. Annals of Internal Medicine 2023. doi:10.7326/M22-3316.