When ideology corrupts science and medicine
Guest
Columnist
Father Tad Pacholczyk
Some physicians and researchers fail to see the important role of ethics
and religion in the world of medical science. Others are clearly ready
to sideline religion altogether when it comes to discussing the moral
values that should guide the conduct of science and scientists.
Recently I came across some published remarks by Professor Richard Sloan
of Columbia University dealing with the relationship between medicine
and religion. He notes that even though abortion is a “perfectly
legal procedure,” some physicians withhold information about the
practice from their patients, claiming their decision is justified by
their religious beliefs. He goes on to express his displeasure that some
states have enacted conscience clauses “to permit such religiously
motivated malpractice.” He even states that in some parts of the
country, patients may have “no alternative to physicians who think
that their primary obligation is to honor their religious convictions
rather than act in the best interests of their patients.”
His remarks expose a real tension between those who believe modern health
care should be guided by the values of an ethically informed conscience,
and those who believe that it should be driven by various ideologies.
One ideology widely encountered in the field of medicine today promotes
the direct taking of human life through abortion, euthanasia, and embryo
research, and neglects long-standing codes of medical ethics that insist
that the first duty of the physician and the researcher is to “do
no harm.”
When a physician directly takes the life of another human being, he is,
in fact, committing medical malpractice, and acting directly against his
central healing mission as a doctor. Abortion, by its very nature, can
never be compatible with promoting human dignity. It never respects the
human person. It is invariably at odds with the best interests of patients.
As a component of a broader anti-life ideology, it represents a corrosive
force in hospital clinics, research laboratories and other institutions
of higher learning. When ideology begins to shun sound ethical thinking
rooted in religion, we need to be very concerned.
I remember a story my father once told about the corrosive power of ideology,
something he had witnessed first-hand living under communism, and working
as a physics professor at the University of Warsaw. To enter the university
and study physics, all applicants were required to pass three oral exams,
one in physics, one in mathematics and the third in something called “Politics
and Marxism.” All the exams were held in a single room with different
tables for each subject.
One day, as my father and another faculty member were interviewing candidates,
a young man approached their table. It became immediately clear that he
was very intelligent and gifted, and would make an excellent student.
They discovered that he had been unable to gain admission to the university
for the past two years, because — even though he did brilliantly
on the physics and mathematics exams — he couldn’t seem to
pass the Politics and Marxism exam.
My father and his colleague had seen this before. The communist party
members who conducted those interviews would target applicants who might
be religious in their outlook, asking them pointed and discriminatory
questions they could not answer in good conscience, and then fail them
on the exam. Fortunately for the young man, there was a policy that any
faculty member was free to move among tables and ask questions during
any other department’s entrance examination. So when the hopeful
student approached the Politics and Marxism table, my father and his friend
went over and sat down, one on each side of the communist party member
running the interview.
The first question was: “Please explain how the Church is backwards
and oppresses people.” The fellow remained silent, since he was
a Catholic. My father and his colleague stepped in after a moment, and
said, “Well, it’s clear that he didn’t grasp the question.
Allow me to repeat the question for him: ‘What does Marxism teach
about how the Catholic Church is backwards and oppresses people?’”
The fellow was then able to jump in and provide a correct answer, by affirming
that the ideology of Marxism did teach thus-and-so. The questions and
their refinement by my father and his colleague continued, and the communist
party official became visibly agitated. The fellow ended up passing the
Politics and Marxism exam, along with the physics and mathematics exams,
and was admitted to the university. Although the story had a happy ending,
the brilliant young man had lost two years of a successful career because
of the closed-minded, anti-religious ideologies prevalent in the academic
environment of the university under communism.
In academic settings today, we still encounter powerful anti-religious
ideologies, as Professor Sloan’s comments remind us, and they can
result in even more damaging consequences than merely delaying admission
to a university. As anti-life ideologies, for example, become tolerated
and even promoted as part of medicine, not only do many humans end up
being destroyed along the way by abortion, euthanasia, in vitro fertilization
or embryo research, but clinicians and researchers who decline to participate
in those practices “feel the heat” and worry their careers
may be at risk.
To force health care and research to embrace such anti-life ideologies
is to warp, and eventually corrupt, modern medicine altogether. Instances
of such corruption have happened only too often in the past as professors,
researchers, and physicians have chosen to minimize the demands of an
ethical conscience and to adopt seriously misguided ideologies. Codes
of medical ethics like the Hippocratic Oath, the Nuremberg Code, and the
Declaration of Helsinki came into existence after various misguided ideologies
gained a foothold, and the medical establishment suffered a core meltdown,
allowing doctors and researchers to participate in crimes against humanity.
History sadly reminds us how quickly our human conscience, when deprived
of its divine and religious dimensions, becomes untethered in a tumultuous
sea of ideological temptations, and can end up on the glide path toward
crime and atrocity.
Those who strive to protect the ethical integrity of medicine through
conscience-protection laws, and those medical professionals who ardently
pursue an upright personal conscience by resisting, among other things,
maiming or killing actions directed against early human life, provide
an essential witness and a critical counterbalance to powerful and destructive
ideologies that are operative in academia and health care today.
Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk earned his doctorate in neuroscience from
Yale and did post-doctoral work at Harvard. He is a priest of the diocese
of Fall River, Mass., and serves as the director of education at the National
Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia. See www.ncbcenter.org