Ethicists link up across Australia.
By Anthony Barich
Catholic bioethicists from around Australia have agreed to form a national bioethics network to better inform bishops, politicians and others on critical issues.
The decision was made at the August 17-19 Catholic Health Australia national conference in Hobart, where a new partnership was also formed to deliver education programs on the Catholic moral ethos across the network of CHA member hospitals and aged care services.
Church-run bioethics centres that have until now operated independently in their own dioceses will now have regular contact including quarterly phone conferences to discuss current issues and to better advise Australia’s bishops.
The network will be better able to coordinate resourcing media and responding to media inquiries.
With a current build-up of legislation on ethical issues of interest to the Catholic Church coming before various Australian legislatures, the new network will also act in a formal advisory capacity to pre-empt or respond to such matters, especially those that could affect CHA members.
CHA Chief Executive Martin Laverty said the new network is timely; State, Territory and Federal governments around Australia have already flagged a number of pieces of legislation centring on ethical issues, and the network’s principal purpose is planning and engaging with parliamentary and public debate around the country “in a national consistency” on behalf of those working in Catholic health.
With Tasmanian Parliament currently considering the Green’s Dying With Dignity Bill, Mr Laverty said that the focus for the Catholic Church’s bioethics network nationally needs to be supporting the Archdiocese of Tasmania, and those Catholic healthcare institutions in the Apple Isle to “prosecute the arguments against euthanasia”.
Rev Dr Joseph Parkinson, director of Perth’s LJ Goody Bioethics Centre, told The Record that the national bioethics network is a long overdue idea that would bear fruit quickly, especially with WA and Tasmania facing pressure to legalise euthanasia.
He said that even in the one meeting in Hobart, he had gained many good ideas about tackling the current euthanasia issue in WA, as the Tasmanian Parliament is currently debating the Greens’ Dying with Dignity Bill.
Hobart Archbishop Adrian Doyle made a personal presentation at the invitation of the Joint Standing Committee on this issue with Calvary Hospital’s senior anaesthetist.
“Tasmania has legislation on euthanasia before parliament and we will have it at some point, so if there are things we can learn there that will benefit other states we should pass that on,” Rev Dr Parkinson said.
He said that the new network will also give the Australian bishops a wider body to consult, and hopefully give CHA more of a national voice when it speaks on ethical issues. The network would not usurp the role of the bishops, who have the “right and duty to give leadership” on these issues, Dr Parkinson said.
Pro-choice advocates in NSW have also used the case of Queensland police in March charging a 19-year-old Cairns woman and her boyfriend with criminal offences involving an allegedly self-administered medical abortion after illegally importing RU486.
Labor MP Bonnie Barry claimed that Queensland faced “a legal medical emergency" over the case which would open the door for the state to follow last year’s lead from Victoria and decriminalise abortion.
Cherish Life Queensland president Teresa Martin called these claims “ridiculous”, but the pro-choice movement has been emboldened by Victoria’s passing of the Abortion Law Reform Bill in 2008 that removed medical practitioners’ rights not to participate in the provision of abortion on the grounds of conscientious objection.
Rev Dr Parkinson said that, “at some point, someone will move similar legislation (as the Victorian Abortion Law Reform Bill) here (in WA), and the newspapers will go to Archbishop Barry Hickey for comment, so he needs to be well-armed with solid information both about the Victorian situation and the situation here so he can give a clear and informed statement.”
Mr Martin said that nearly one in 10 Australians are cared for by Catholic institutions.