Issues 75-51

Issue 64: Sass, Hans-Martin: Brain Life Criteria and Abortion: Kriterien des Hirnlebens und Schwangerschaftsabbruch. 1991

Controversies in the abortion debate between Apro choiceä and Apro lifeä positions threaten to tear the fabric of society apart. This paper presents a middle ground, which is robustly rooted in Western moral tradition, which allocates essential responsibilities to the pregnant woman, and which can serve as a platform for societal consensus. Strong Christian and humanist traditions suggest the introduction of a formula for moral evaluation of biomedical brain life criteria for full moral recognition and legal protection of animate human life, in symmetry to the formula for moralevaluation of the biomedical criteria of brain death. A Uniform Determination of Life Protection Act could read as follows: An individual developing or having integrated brain functions has the right to moral recognition and legal protection. A determination of integrated brain function must be made in accordance with accepted medical standards. Conservative bioethical assessment of established biomedical facts suggests the protection of human life from the presence of neocortical synapsis formation at the end of the 10. week of pregnancy up to the absence of integrated brain functions at the end of life. The responsibility of terminating a pregnancy prior to the 10. week of pregnancy rests solely with the pregnant woman. Free consultation should be made available to her; for juveniles consultation should be mandatory. Legislators and regulators have to provide for social environments in which decisions to abort are not made for economic reasons or because contraceptives had not been available; they may not paternalistically dominate moral decisions made by pregnant women, where theologians and ethicists disagree on the moral status of the early embryo.