Health and Medicine in the Anglican Tradition

Conscience, Community, and Compromise
DAVID H. SMITH

Like the other books in this series, Health and Medicine in the Anglican Tradition is designed for health professionals, clergy, and others seriously struggling with issues of religion and medicine. It seeks to indicate how Anglicans face the question of suffering and death and determine the ethics of generation, the ways of sexual being, and the responsibilities for justice in the delivery of health care services.

At the heart of Anglicanism and the way in which it perceives the world is the doctrine of the incarnation: the belief that God has identified God's self with humankind in the person and mission of Jesus. This affirmation, says the author, involves three subordinate themes of immediate relevance to our topic--namely, those of suffering, human nature, and community.

This becomes clear in the first health- related issue taken up, the problem of sharing: the sharing of power, of knowledge, and of resources. Next we turn to the Anglican perspective on death and the principles that should inform medical decisions about death relating to newborns, incompetent persons, and competent persons who decide for their own death. Finally the book treats medically related problems associated with sexuality. The first concerns the relationship between nature or biological gender and marriage (the marriage of a transsexual or of homosexual lovers); the others have to do with the procreation of new life (genetic counseling, curtailing reproduction, use of new technologies for reproduction, nascent life, and abortion).

DAVID H. SMITH is director of the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions and professor of religious studies at Indiana University. He is the author of The Achievement of John Bennett, and editor of No Rush to Judgment, Respect and Care in Medical Ethics, and (with James T. Johnson) Love and Society: Essays in the Ethics of Paul Ramsey.



Contents

Foreword by Martin E. Marty			ix
Preface			1
1.	Anglicanism		5
	What Anglicans Are		5
	Morals		14
2.	Sharing		21
	Sharing Power		25
	Sharing Knowledge		27
	Sharing Resources		32
3.	Mortality		35
	Myself		35
	Others		40
4.	Decisions about Death		45
	General Considerations		45
	Newborns		48
	Older Persons Who Can't Decide for Themselves		54
	Choosing My Death		63
5.	Sexuality and New Life		69
	Biology and Marriage		70
	Counseling		75
	Curtailing Reproduction		79
	New Technologies for Reproduction		82
	Nascent Life		84
	Abortion		88

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