The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly

In responding to an unjust legal situation involving human rights abuses, one approach is to seek a selective ban on some abuses if a more comprehensive ban is not feasible politically. While such an approach to embryo research or abortion, for example, can reasonably be applied, much harder to defend is regulation—that is, giving permission or instructions for others to do or prepare to do what we believe is morally wrong. Regulation necessarily involves us in wrongly intending that others choose wrongly, that is, in formal cooperation with evil. We should choose other means of making a bad situation better: selective banning or discouragement by, for example, withholding funding, and the mandating of acts that are good or potentially good in the context in which they are mandated. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.2 (Summer 2012): 241–248.

Advocates of active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide argue that a patient’s intractable pain and suffering are a sufficient justification for his life to end if he autonomously so chooses. Others hold that the non-utilization of life-sustaining treatment, the use of pain-relieving medication that may hasten a patient’s death, and palliative sedation may be morally acceptable means of alleviating pain and suffering. How a patient should be cared for when approaching the end of life involves one’s core religious and moral values, particularly concerning whether pain and suffering can have some sort of instrumental value. The author reasons why a patient who is terminally ill can find his suffering valuable for both religious and nonreligious goals. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.2 (Summer 2012): 251–261.

The use of sedation at the end of life is proving a difficult topic of bioethical debate. In spite of efforts to reach agreement on definitions and guidelines, the practice most commonly known as palliative, or terminal, sedation remains a source of ambiguity and confusion. The goal of this article is to offer the reader a primer on the topic of palliative sedation. Two specific objectives are proposed: first, to orient the reader to some of the principal elements of the clinical and bioethical literature on palliative sedation; and second, to describe what we believe to be some of the principal sources for a theological understanding and evaluation of the use of sedation at the end of life. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.2 (Summer 2012): 263–281.

A Catholic physician practices in a world that condones the use of contraception. In the effort to be morally consistent, Catholic physicians are faced with questions about the extent to which their participation in providing contraceptives constitutes immoral cooperation in evil. Particular challenges face resident physicians, who practice under attending physicians and within the constraints of local and specialty-wide training requirements. The author examines the nature of the moral act of referring for contraception and argues that, in limited cases, there is a moral distinction between a referral and an intra-residency patient transfer, and the latter may be morally licit according to the principle of material cooperation. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.2 (Summer 2012): 283–309.