Issues 100-76

Issue 89: Sass, Hans-Martin: Die Würde des Gewissens und die Diskussion um Schwangerschaftsabbruch und Hirntodkriterien. 1st edition: January 1994; 3rd edition: June 1994

Dignity of Human Life (Menschenwürde) as a key moral and legal principle governs private and public assessment of criteria for abortion and death. While dissens between pro-life and pro-choice battle-groups challenges the individual consciousness as well as legislation and regulation, whole-brain-death criteria also have come under conceptual and technical scrutiny recently and threaten an existing consensus on brain-death criteria. Sass reviews the recent biomedical and bioethical debate on the moral and legal assessment of the beginning and the end of human life and develops a pro-conscience model, a formula for a 'Uniform Life Protection Act' protecting animate human life from the beginning to the end of integrated brain functioning and including a 'Conscience Clause' for those whose systems of belief requires the moral recognition of earlier forms of unborn life or who for themselves choose criteria for death other then existing brain-based criteria. He introduces the priciple of subsidiarity as an instrument in clinical ethics and in public policy to protect the Dignity of Human Life as expressed in the 'Dignity of the Consciousness' (Würde des Gewissens) and to reduce clinical uncertainties, societal controversies and legal and regulatory paternalism.