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“Life Begins When They Steal Your Bicycle”: Cross-Cultural Practices of Personhood at the Beginnings and Ends of Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Lynn M. Morgan
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Extract

A friend once told me I was wasting my time writing about cross-cultural perspectives on the beginnings of life. “Your work is interesting for its curiosity value,” he said, “but fundamentally worthless. What happens in other cultures is totally irrelevant to what is happening here.” Those were discouraging words, but as I followed the American debates about the beginnings and ends of life, it seemed he was right. Anthropologists have written a great deal about birth and death rites in other societies and about non-western notions of personhood, but to date our findings have had little impact on American policy, ethics, or law. The recognized experts on contentious topics such as abortion and euthanasia tend to come from the fields of philosophy, bioethics, theology, law, and biology, but rarely from the social sciences. I was a bit surprised, therefore, to be invited to address the Thomas A. Pitts Memorial Lectureship on “Defining the Beginning and the End of Human Life.”

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , Spring 2006 , pp. 8 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2006

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