High schools address bioethics
Bioethical issues are real for this generation of high school students.
Some of them were conceived using in-vitro fertilization technology and others have had abortions before they leave high school, said Marin Catholic High School religion teacher Ryan Mayer.
Girls are using artificial contraceptives without realizing how they work, said Ryan Martin-Spencer, religious studies chair at Notre Dame High School in Belmont.
“Our technical expertise is surpassing our moral understanding,” said Marin Catholic senior Virginia Yoham, 17.
The San Francisco Bay Area is a world center for artificial reproduction, with numerous IVF clinics. In the United States, about 240,000 babies are born each year using IVF, with as many as 4 million newborns created via IVF since the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in 1978, experts estimate.
Proposition 71, approved by California voters in 2005, created the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. The institute is authorized to float $3 billion in state bonds to fund stem cell research, with a special mandate to fund embryonic stem cell science – a technology the Catholic Church opposes because it violates the principle of dignity of life from conception through natural death.
California teens may obtain an abortion without parental notification and pay for it with Medi-Cal funding.
Both Mayer and Notre Dame’s Martin-Spencer teach bioethics courses at their high schools, presenting Church teaching and the reason behind tough issues such as its absolute stands against abortion and artificial reproduction technology, including embryonic stem cell science and IVF.
Last year a student at the all-girls high school “very courageously revealed she was an IVF baby,” said Martin-Spencer. “That added a level of reality to the course.”
The class also examined the emergency contraceptive “Ella,” approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in August for prescription only and touted as a way to prevent pregnancy up to five days after sexual intercourse. “Do you realize it has the potential to terminate a pregnancy?” Martin-Spencer said he asked the girls. “They were honestly shocked. They had no idea based on the commercials they saw.”
At Woodside Priory School, Redemptorist Father Benjamin Owens last year revived a bioethics elective for juniors and seniors. Because of demand the course grew to three sections this year, he said. The class draws on material from the National Catholic Bioethics Center, which advises the U.S. bishops, for information about stem cell ethics and science, Father Owens said. “We try to present what the mind of the Church is on critical issues, realizing that the Church is in that value-focused dialogue and sometimes struggles with other viewpoints,” said the Portola Valley school theology teacher.
At some other schools in the Archdiocese, bioethics is covered as part of mandatory theology courses.
Archbishop Riordan High School freshmen “read and discuss a section in the Catholic Faith Handbook called ‘Respecting Sexuality’ that addresses issues like contraception, in vitro fertilization, and artificial insemination,” said Dean of Academics Colleen Eagleson, with the topics coming up again at the boys’ high school in junior religion in three units, “Culture of Life,” “Culture of Death,” and “Respect for Sexuality,” and again in senior year as part of a course on ethics and marriage and family.
Marin Catholic’s Mayer, who recently obtained his certificate in bioethics from the National Catholic Bioethics Center, includes bioethics modules in the senior religion course and teaches bioethics within the senior elective Christian Literature. Martin-Spencer teaches bioethics as a spring senior elective.
The Church teaches that IVF and embryonic stem cell science are wrong because they remove conception from the marital act and treat a baby as a product to be manipulated, violating the child’s integrity as a human being with an immortal soul from the moment of conception. Additionally, embryonic stem cell science and often IVF destroy embryos in research or medical procedures. The issue was addressed by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in “Donum Vitae” published in 1987, and “Dignitas Personae” issued in 2008.
Martin-Spencer’s course includes end-of-life issues such as physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia, the death penalty, IVF, human experimentation, abortion, contraception and genetic engineering. “We teach from the Catholic perspective and the students have a lot of questions about it,” Martin-Spencer said.
“The way we approach it is very sensitively because these are very personal issues, especially in Marin, because some students have been conceived through IVF” and statistics show a high number of young women have had abortions, Marin Catholic’s Mayer said. “These are issues the students are dealing with.”
“It’s going to be up to us to make these moral decisions,” said Marin Catholic senior Alonzo Page, 18, who attended an Oct. 9 seminar sponsored by the Archdiocese of San Francisco, “Rediscovering the Family in a Technological Age: Bioethical Considerations.” Because he knows several classmates were conceived using IVF, Page said he was glad that the Catholic Church teaches every life is sacred. “There is nothing wrong with the person.” Page said. “All children are good.”bioethics courses
By Valerie Schmalz
From November 5, 2010 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
