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Does the “Sanctity of Human Life” Doctrine Sanctify Humanness, or Life?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 1999

TOM KOCH
Affiliation:
Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada Currently at the University of Hawaii (Manoa), Department of Geography, Honolulu

Abstract

No single principle is more critical to our ethical stance than the one asserting the sanctity of human life. In debates ranging from the care of anencephalic infants to the maintenance of fragile seniors, the question is, Where are the boundaries of sanctified human life? The generally accepted assumption is that a once firm set of principles and definitions is now eroding in the face of “new realities”—a generation's stunning scientific advance in medicine and medical technology. “There is no doubt,” Joam Graf Haber writes, for example, in a recent issue of Cambridge Quarterly, “that the miracles of medical technology have brought up ethical issues not contemplated by us until the very recent past.”

Type
PERSPECTIVES
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press

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