Therapeutic clones, pre-implant and prenatal diagnosis and active assistance to the dying will be at the centre of the next “Week of Life 2003”, the annual event organized jointly by the German Episcopal Conference and the Council of the Evangelic Churches, due to open in Bayreuth, Germany, on 3 May. “Possibilities and limits of medical progress” is the theme of this year’s pro-life week (the 13th) which, in the words of Cardinal Lehmann, president of the German episcopate, “retains its actuality” in a “highly complex and technologically programmed” society like our own, which has a need for “ethical guidance”. The guidance that the Church may give serves he said to “ensure that the unrelinquishable ends of action remain clear”. This is a task that “Catholic and Evangelic Christians are preparing to perform in the dioceses and local churches by getting involved in and devoting their efforts to pro-life Week. Our task, recalls Lehmann, is that of “opposing the dream of the perfect man”, since it’s “a profoundly inhumane dream”: by progressing “too rapidly, man an imperfect and incomplete being could be regarded as a defect, a burden to be prevented, or a prohibitive insurance risk” to be avoided. Promoting all the diagnostic potential offered by present technologies Lehmann continued could mean that a person, “depending on the state of his illness, the qualities he possesses, considered either undesirable or capable of satisfying the needs of others”, may run the risk of being “selected, or discarded, instead of being welcomed”. Human life would thus become “something disposable, consumable, something to be used as we think fit and not as an end in itself”. On the other hand, “the possibilities of preventive medicine, which could become more significant in the years ahead, pose the danger of selection” and a consideration of the costs that could or should be invested in a particular person. For these reasons declares Lehmann “a medicine without ethical guidance will always lead to inhumane consequences”.
