KEK/WCC" "
The “Church and Society” Commission of the Conference of European Churches (KEK, an organization representing 126 Churches of Orthodox, Protestant, Anglican and Old Catholic tradition) recently approved a document with the title “Genetic screening and predictive medicine”. Expressing satisfaction about the progress achieved by medical genetics, the document focuses attention on the “real difficulties” that accompany predictive medicine (aimed at identifying, through genetic tests, any predisposition towards certain illnesses), such as the risk of promoting a view of the future presented as an “inescapable destiny” and that of forms of discrimination linked to the search for the “perfect child”. The document, drafted by the Commission’s work group on bioethics, points out that “the attention traditionally concentrated on disease has now shifted to the risk of disease. This development may make it to possible to understand, treat and even prevent some pathologies”, but it is essential “not to arouse false hopes” since “at the present time most predictions are in actual fact less reliable that is commonly stated”. According to the work group, it is equally important to “permit each person to know what it is that constitutes the depth of his being, without thereby wholly defining him”, because the identity of the human being is “different from and far more than his genes”. At the same time, warns the document, “predictive medicine is accompanied by some difficulties that need to be tackled”: first of all, “the reversal of the perception of time”. For each of us, says the document, “the future is open and indeterminate… and it is just this openness and indeterminacy that are the source of hope and action”. Genetic prediction “reverses this order, generating a feeling of predestination, of an inescapable destiny that “slowly invades the present”. Since the God of the Bible “opens the scope for freedom beyond any kind of determinism maintain the scientists and theologians of the commission predictive medicine, in its doctor-patient relation”, needs to take into greater consideration “the need to respect the autonomy and freedom of each person by defending his or her responsibility”. A further risk of predictive medicine is that of “promoting forms of unacceptable eugenics”, such as “the liberal eugenism that aspires to create ‘the best possible child'”. Any kind of discrimination for genetic reasons would have negative repercussions “on labour law, on the system of social protection and on health insurance”, says the document.
