Volume 13, Issue 4, Winter 2013
Mathew Lu
Pages 625-633
Contraception, Abortion, and the Corruption of Medicine
The Obama administration’s HHS mandate to force Catholic and other religious organizations to provide insurance coverage for morally objectionable practices has been the source of a great deal of controversy. While the religious liberty question has received the most attention, the mandate reveals a yet deeper problem in the mainstream acceptance of contraception and even abortion as normal parts of medical practice. The author argues that these practices constitute a deep corruption of medicine itself, away from its original meaning as a kind of restorative justice grounded in a substantive understanding of the human good and toward a formalist emphasis on preference satisfaction and patient autonomy. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.4 (Winter 2013): 625–633.