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Culture of Life Foundation's first annual:

“William E. May Award for Promoting Ethics and the Human Person”

Presented to

Dr. William E. May

In conjunction with our annual conference:

The Culture of Life vs. The Culture of Death: from Humanae Vitae to Cloning and Assisted Suicide

September 20, 2008

The Renaissance Hotel 

999 9th Street, Washington, DC  20001

CONFERENCE PANELISTS AND MODERATORS:
 
Panel 1: The Secularization of Present Day Culture: A convergence in Ethics, Feminism and Medicine

Moderator: Jennifer Miller, is the Executive Director of Bioethics International, a New York City based nonprofit dedicated to empowering responsible decision-making in healthcare, life science and biotechnology through education, training and advisory services.  

As a leading expert in disaster preparedness ethics, just resource allocation and person-centered bioethics, Jennifer has lectured for Fordham University, the University of Ottawa, St. Francis College, for health systems including St. Vincent’s Medical Center, St. Vincent’s Health System, Jameson Health System, and Hamot Hospital, for medical societies, dioceses, NGOs and organizations nationwide.  She has served as a panelist for the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s world congress in Washington, DC, and co-sponsored conferences with the Appignani Center for Bioethics at the United Nations. Jennifer has interviewed with Vatican Radio and in articles published by the Catholic News Agency, Zenit and the IMFC eReview. Jennifer has trained over 2,500 clinicians on how to make ethical decisions, directly improving the quality of healthcare for 1 million patients in the last year.  In 2007, she was appointed a special consultant to the United Nations as the representative for the Mexican NGO Mujer para la Mujer.

Additionally, she advises the American Medical Association, The Biotechnology Industry Organization, the National Disaster Life Support Foundation, the Institute for Marriage and Family Canada, Environmental Protection Agency scientists, consulting firms, pharmaceutical companies, hospital ethics committees, the private sector and the media.  She is the editor of Ethics Illustrated and a contributing author for BioVoice, Blogging Biotech and Bio on the Road, published by the Biotechnology Industry Organization.  Jennifer received a B.S. in Physics from Fordham University and is working towards her Doctorate in Bioethics at Regina Apostolorum University in Italy.


 
Helen Alvare, J.D. is an Associate Professor of Law at the George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Virginia. There she teaches and publishes in the areas of property law, family law, and Catholic social thought. From 2000 to Spring 2008, Professor Alvare taught at the Catholic University Columbus School of Law.  Professor Alvare also lectures widely in the United StatesEurope on matters concerning marriage, family and respect for human life. She is a consultant to ABC News and to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Marriage and Pro-Life Committees.  In 2008, Pope Benedict XVI named Professor Alvare a Consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Laity.

From 1987-2000, Professor Alvare was an attorney with the USCCB's General Counsel Office and director of information and planning for the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities. In these positions, she testified before the U.S. Congress and before the political platform committees of the Democratic and Republican parties. She also lobbied the U.S. Congress and drafted amicus briefs for the United States Supreme Court, as well as appearing regularly on national television and radio programs.   Prior to 1987, Professor Alvare spent three years as a litigation associate at the Philadelphia law firm of Stradley, Ronon, Stevens and Young.  She received her juris doctorate from Cornell University in 1984 and her masters degree in Systematic Theology from the Catholic University of America in 1989.


Joe Capizzi, Ph.D. is Associate Professor and Area Director of Moral Theology at the Catholic University of America. In 2002, he was appointed to The Cardinal’s Chair at The Intercultural Forum for Studies in Faith and Reason, The John Paul II Cultural Center, in Washington, D.C. He also served the Intercultural Forum as Acting Director from 2002-2003. He serves also on the Executive Council of the Law, Philosophy, and Culture Initiative at The Catholic University of America, and is a member of the board of The Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.

He teaches in the areas of social and political theology, with special interest in issues in peace and war, citizenship, and political authority. He has written, lectured, and published widely on just war theory, bioethics, the history of moral theology, and political liberalism. He is currently co-authoring a book on just war theory to be published by Oxford University Press.

He received his B.A. from the University of Virginia, his Masters in Theological Studies from Emory University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Notre Dame. He lives with his family in Bethesda, Maryland.

Abstract: “Secularization in Medical Ethics - Richard McCormick’s Lament”

Late in his career the moral theologian Richard A. McCormick, S.J noted the “profound threat” of secularization to Catholic integrity in healthcare. McCormick was the most prominent Catholic bioethicist of the past thirty years and a role model for many moral theologians interested in biomedical issues. Theology dominated bioethics at its inception in the 1960s and 1970s. This was due in part to the prominence of Christian theologians and Jewish scholars involved in bioethics, including McCormick, Callahan, Paul Ramsey, Joseph Fletcher, Leon Kass, Seymour Siegel, and David Feldman, and also to the dominance of theological language and methods. Those theologians represent a diverse group, especially considering their moral positions. The secularization of bioethics, then, came as a surprise and disappointment to many, including McCormick. And yet, I shall argue, the secularization of bioethics McCormick lamented was advanced by theological commitments he and other theologians made. 


Reverend Joseph Tham, B.Sc., M.D., B.Phil., STB, M.Be., Ph.D. was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to Canada at the age of fifteen.  At the University of Toronto, he first majored in Mathematical Sciences and then graduated from Medical School.  After several years of work as a family physician, he entered the seminary of the Legionaries of Christ and was ordained a priest in 2004.  As a part of this preparation, he has obtained his degrees in philosophy and theology at Rome’s Regina Apostolorum Pontifical university, where he also completed his post-graduate studies in bioethics.  Recently, he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation with high honors on “The Secularization of Bioethics—A Critical History” under the direction of Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, the current Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics.  He presently teaches bioethics in Regina Apostolorum.  He is the author of The Missing Cornerstone (Hamden 2004) and The Secularization of Bioethics (Rome 2007).

Abstract: “Religious Corrective to Secular Bioethics”

This presentation raises the perennial question of the role of religion in ethics, and in particular its contribution to bioethics.  The current secular approach to bioethical issues has been deemed insufficient, because it has been rooted in the Enlightenment bias, and ultimately unable to address the deeper questions of life and death, justice, and the ends of medicine.  Religion has traditionally sought to provide these answers, but its role has been side-tracked due to historical reasons.  Recently, there is increasing interest to re-examine its possible function.  Accordingly, this discussion would engage in a critique of secular bioethics, and attempt to address some objections raised against religious bioethics.  An analysis will follow in terms of “what”, “who” and “how” religious bioethics—namely, the specific contents, the role of believing communities and the distinctive methodologies—can make supplement or correct this deficiency of contemporary bioethics.


Panel 2: From Contraception to the Commodification of Humanity

Moderator: Rev. Thomas Berg, Ph.D. is adjunct professor of moral philosophy at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical College in Rome, Italy.  He is a Catholic priest and member of the Legionaries of Christ, a Roman Catholic religious congregation. He teaches at the congregation’s house of studies in Thornwood, NY where he is also founder and executive director of The Westchester Institute for Ethics & the Human Person dedicated to interdisciplinary research on the Western moral tradition.  He received his M.A. in Liberal Studies from Wesleyan University in 1997, and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Regina Apostolorum in 1999. His areas of specialization include natural law theory, personhood theory, and biomedical issues dealing with the beginning of life. For the past five years, he has dedicated most of his philosophical research to the question of the moral status of the human embryo, and has written and spoken frequently on the topic. Working with members of the President’s Council on Bioethics, he has organized an interdisciplinary group of scientists, philosophers and moral theologians to engage an on-going study of the moral and scientific feasibility of Altered Nuclear Transfer and other non-embryo-destructive sources of human pluripotent stem cells. He has published or been quoted in Crisis Magazine, the National Catholic Register, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and has appeared on the PBS program Nova Science Now.  He has co-edited a volume of essays by Catholic moral theologians entitled Human Embryo Adoption: Biotechnology, Marriage, and the Right to Life. He also sits on the boards of The Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia, and The University of Sacramento in Sacramento, California. He is also a member of the ethics committee of New York’s Empire State Stem Cell Board.


William L. Saunders, Jr., J.D. is the Senior Fellow and Director of the Family Research Council's Center for Human Life and Bioethics. Mr. Saunders earned degrees from the UniversityNorth Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Harvard Law School. He is a columnist for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, and for Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity.  He has appeared often in the media, including BBC World News, CNN, Fox News, Vatican Radio and National Public Radio. His articles on issues such as bioethics, the family, and Christian social responsibility have appeared in a variety of journals, such as First Things, Human Events, Human Life Review, The Legal Times, Communio and Touchstone. His articles and book chapters have been published by the university presses of Villanova, BYU, Fordham, Georgetown and the Catholic University of America, as well as by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Freedom House, Greenhaven Press, Rowan & Littlefield, Praeger, St. Augustine’s, and Intervarsity press. He has given lectures and participated in debates at many colleges, universities, and law schools, including Princeton, Harvard, Colorado, South Carolina, Wake Forest, Cleveland Marshall, Indiana, San Diego, Catholic University, and Belmont Abbey, and he delivered the annual J. Michael Miller Lecture at the University of St. Thomas (on international law) in February 2007, and the annual R. Wayne Kraft Memorial Lecture (on bioethics) at DeSales University in February 2004.  He has also lectured and/or been published in many foreign countries, including Italy, Hong Kong, Poland, Slovakia, Mexico, Germany, Austria, Qatar, Malaysia, Romania, and the United Kingdom. Mr. Saunders is a member of the boards of the International Right to Life Federation, the International Association of Catholic Bioethicists, the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, and the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity. He is a founding member of Do No Harm: the Coalition of Americans for Research Ethics.  He is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Law, Philosophy and Culture at the Catholic University of America. 

Abstract: The law, as we learned from Aristotle, is society's great teacher. While it undoubtedly reflects our attitudes, the law also shapes them. How has American law contributed to the moral problems we face today in the begetting of children? How might the law, applicable to the begetting and beginning of life, be reformed, realistically, to contribute to the building of a culture of life?


Christopher Tollefsen, Ph.D is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina. He was a 2004-05 Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He has authored over forty articles or book chapters on bioethics, meta-ethics, and jurisprudence, and he is the author of two recently published books, Biomedical Research and Beyond: Expanding the Ethics of Inquiry and Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, co-authored with Robert P. George, and editor of Artificial Nutrition and Hydration: The New Catholic Debate and John Paul II’s Contribution to Catholic Bioethics, both with Springer.   He is the editor of the Springer book series Catholic Studies in Bioethics, and is both James Madison Fellow, and a Fellow of Witherspoon Institute. He holds a Ph.D. from Emory University.

Abstract:

Bill May was one of the first, if not the first, moral theologians to identify some of the problems with IVF by contrast with sexual reproduction as centered around, broadly, the distinction between making and begetting a child. He has also been a proponent of embryo adoption, and an able defender of the practice of embryo transfer against critics such as Mary Geach. Even if embryo transfer is licit, however, embryo adoption, like more customary adoption practices, strikes some thinkers as resulting in a form of motherhood and parenthood that is less than, or fails to achieve the fullness of, biological parenthood within marriage. Here, I ask what can be said contrary to these claims.

 
Rev. José María Antón, L.C., S.T.D., from Segovia (Spain), is a member of the congregation of the Legionaries of Christ.  He was ordained a priest on December 22, 1996 in Rome and is currently Professor of Fundamental Moral Theology at the Regina Apostolorum PontificalUniversity, Rome, where he served as Vice Dean of the School of Bioethics from September 2001 to July of 2005.  He holds a certificate of post graduate studies in ancient and modern languages with high distinction from the Colegio de Ciencias Humanísticas, Salamanca, Spain, 1986.  He received a Bachelors of Philosophy from the Gregorian Pontifical University, Rome, in June of 1992 and his Doctorate in Moral Theology, Summa Cum Laude, from the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University, Rome.  He is author of La anticoncepción como acto contra la vida en el contexto de la ley natural según G. Grisez, Ateneo Pontificio Regina Apostolorum, Roma 2006; La fecondazione in vitro, contro natura? Alcune riflessioni etiche, IF Press, Morolo 2008; Salvati nella speranza. Commenti all’enciclica Spe salvi di Benedetto XVI, Cantagalli, Siena 2009 (in publication process); L’azione umana e la persona, IF Press, Morolo 2009 (in publication process), and La fecundación in vitro, contra la naturaleza? Algunas reflexiones éticas, Universidad Anáhuac del Norte, México, D.F., 2009 (in publication process).

Abstract: In-Vitro Fertilization violates the child’s dignity because the child is produced, fabricated. The relation is that of a producer to what is being produced, a relationship of ownership and property, instead of equality.

IVF is also unjust because the child becomes a means – is instrumentalized – for satisfying the parent’s desire to have offspring.

Thus, the logic of IVF is the same as the logic of abortion.  In the first case, the child is what I need for my happiness and I have the right to have him/her.  In the second, the child is what impedes my happiness and I have the right to eliminate him/her.  In both cases, the value of a concrete human life depends on the wishes of others.

Panel 3: Life, Death, Choice and Character

Moderator: Patrick Lee, Ph.D. is the John N. and Jamie D. McAleer Professor of Bioethics, and Director of the Institute of Bioethics, at Franciscan University of Steubenville, and Director of Bioethics Projects at the Witherspoon Institute. He is a graduate of University of Dallas and Niagara University, and received his Ph. D. in philosophy at Marquette University in 1980.  Lee’s books include Abortion and Unborn Human Life (Catholic University of America Press, 1996), and, with Robert P. George, Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2008). His articles and review essays have appeared in American Journal of Jurisprudence, Bioethics, Faith and Philosophy, Philosophy, and other scholarly journals, as well as popular journals and online magazines. 

E. Christian Brugger, Ph.D.  is an Associate Professor of Moral Theology at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver, CO. Dr. Brugger has master degrees in moral theology and philosophy from Seton Hall, Harvard and Oxford Universities and received his D.Phil. from Oxford in 2000.  His areas of scholarly interest are bioethics (in particular the human embryo), natural law, action theory, integration of psychology and philosophy, marriage family & sexual ethics and capital punishment.  He is the author of Capital Punishment and Roman Catholic Moral Tradition (Notre Dame Press, 2003), and has published widely on topics in moral theology and philosophy in journals such as the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy, The Heythrop Journal, The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, The Thomist, Communio, Josephenum Journal of Theology, National Review On-Line, First Things, and New Oxford Review.  Dr. Brugger lives in Lone Tree, CO, with his wife Melissa and four children.  

Since 2002 he has been a Senior Fellow of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.  In 2008 he became a Fellow of Ethics at the Culture of Life Foundation.
 
Abstract: Our biology and environment shape among other things our bodies, primitive affective dispositions and personalities.  Our free choices however shape our characters.  This presentation will consider some of the constitutuents of contraceptive choices from the perspective of cognitive psychology.  It examines how antecedent choices dispose a person to choices morally similar in kind in the future, and how this disposition in those who contracept shapes one's orientation--one's character--in relation to the good of human life.

Christopher Kaczor, Ph.D. holds a BA from Boston College (1992) and Ph.D. (1996) from the University of Notre Dame and is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University.  He is the former Director of the University Honors Program and Associate Professor in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America and has also taught at Loyola University-New Orleans and the University of Cologne in Germany where he was a Fulbright Scholar. 

He is the author of Proportionalism and the Natural Law Tradition, The Edge of Life:  Human Dignity and Contemporary Bioethics, Aquinas on Faith, Hope, and Love, Aquinas on the Cardinal Virtues, How to Stay Catholic in College, and Life Issues, Medical Choices:  Questions and Answers for Catholics.  Dr. Kaczor has written many articles for general audiences and has been interviewed on The Today Show, the Abrams Report, MSNBC, Life on the Rock, Living His Life Abundantly, and Voices of Virtue on EWTN, and in Los Angeles on CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX.

Abstract: “What Children Give to Parents”

One of the recurring themes in the work of Dr. May is his emphasis on the value of human life, including embryonic human life.  But in our culture, children—at all stages of development—are viewed often simply as burdens for their parents.  By contrast, Vatican II claims “Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents’ welfare.”  In my talk, I will suggest three things:  (1) the erotic drive between husband and wife is realized, rather than thwarted, by having children, (2) the friendship between husband and wife is strengthened by having children, and (3) children make it easier for parents to get to heaven.

 

Jennifer Kimball, Be.L. is the Executive Director of the Culture of Life Foundation, a non-profit policy think tank located in Washington DC which serves as a resource for the facts and science involved in issues surrounding Life, Family, Human Sexuality and Bioethics.  Previous to her work with the Culture of Life Foundation she was a Wilbur Fellow of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal located in Michigan.  Jennifer earned a Licentiate in Bioethics from the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum School of Bioethics in Rome with a B.A. from that same institution.  Her prior undergraduate studies were in International Administration and Government Policy at the Evergreen State College in Washington State.

Abstract: "From Infertility to Eugenics"

New technologies in human reproduction are becoming more and more removed from the principal aim to develop therapies needed to overcome human illnesses.  The distraction?  The ever-advancing ability to generate in a laboratory multiple human individuals for selection and research.  A new effort growing now in the medical community seeks not to provide therapy or cure a human individual’s pathology in the early stages of development but rather to make normative practices which discriminate against those individuals who carry genetic or other defects by denying them gestation- by denying them life after conception.


Panel 4: Natural Death, Euthanasia and the Psychology of Dying

Moderator: Reverend Peter F. Ryan, S.J., is a professor of Moral Theology at Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg , Md. , where he also does spiritual direction and formation advising.  A priest of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus, he was ordained in 1987 and received his S.T.D. from the Gregorian University in Rome in 1996. 

Fr. Ryan currently serves as the president of the Jesuit Philosophical Association, and is a member of the executive board of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. He has written articles on a variety of topics, including bioethics, academic freedom in the Catholic university, and the relationship between moral action and ultimate human fulfillment.  Fr. Ryan is presently working on a book on the theology of heaven and hell and its significance for the new evangelization.

 
John Keown, J.D., Ph.D. holds the Rose F. Kennedy Chair in Christian Ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University. Having graduated in law from Cambridge he took a doctorate at Oxford. After being called to the Bar he taught the law and ethics of medicine at Leicester University and then at Cambridge, where he held Fellowships at Queens’ College and Churchill College. His books “Abortion, Doctors and the Law” (1988), “Euthanasia Examined” (1995), and “Euthanasia, Ethics and Public Policy” (2002) have all been published by Cambridge University Press.  His latest volume is “Considering Physician-Assisted Suicide” (Carenotkilling.org, 2006).

Abstract: “Physician-assisted suicide: Why Not?”

This paper considers seven of the most prominent and influential arguments in favor of decriminalizing voluntary euthanasia and/or physician-assisted suicide: autonomy; beneficence; moral hypocrisy; public opinion; legal failure; and the experience of the Netherlands and Oregon respectively. It concludes that these arguments are unpersuasive, mask the dangerous implications of decriminalization, and distract from the real need: to improve the quality and availability of end-of-life care'.

Gladys M. Sweeney, M.Ed., Ph.D. is the founder and Academic Dean of the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia.  She obtained her Psychologist Degree from Universidad Católica de Chile, her M.Ed. and Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University.  She has held a faculty appointment at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, and a part-time appointment at the Department of Pediatrics.  She has also lectured at the North American College in Rome, and at the Pontifical University Regina Apostolorum in Rome.

Dr. Sweeney’s current research interest is the integration of the psychological sciences with the Catholic view of the human person and has published in this area.  She has co-edited Human Nature in its Fullness: A Roman Catholic Perspective, CUA Press, July 2006.

Abstract: "The End of Life and Psychotherapy"

Psychology often does not consider the transformative effects of suffering and  the value of life until natural death. It does not concern itself with the purpose and meaning of a ‘happy death’, as part of a ‘happy life’.  Although mainstream psychological theory continues to reject the notion that all life has intrinsic value and meaning, clinical experience has prompted some movement within the profession away from this position.  Psychotherapists have highlighted the need to support an integrated view of the human person and have inspired medical and psychological studies that provide evidence concerning the transcendent possibilities that are made manifest when maintaining life until natural death. This paper addresses this trend and its implications.

 

John M. Haas Ph.D., S.T.L. M.Div. is the President of The National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  The Center was established in 1972 to apply the teachings of the Catholic Church to ethical issues arising from developments in medicine, the life sciences and civil law.  It is the largest publisher of books and periodicals on Catholic bioethics in the country.  Dr. Haas received his Ph.D. in Moral Theology from The Catholic University of America and his S.T.L. in Moral Theology from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.  He also has a Master of Divinity degree and has studied at the University of Munich and the University of Chicago Divinity School.  Before assuming the Presidency of The National Catholic Bioethics Center, Dr. Haas was the John Cardinal Krol Professor of Moral Theology at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and Adjunct Professor at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies in Marriage and the Family, Washington, D.C. 

Abstract: