Whose life is it anyway? A reflective dialogue between religious and secular bioethical perspectives

Abstract

Summary Notions such as “a right to die”, “a duty to die” and “self-ownership” are examples of newly emerged concepts in the spectrum of human society. Such sensitive controversial notions partly occurred due to third-millennium health care technologies advancement, the far-reaching effects of globalization, the unprecedented rise in human rights that are represented by protecting the right to self-determination and, most importantly, the scarce medical resources. Methodically, reflecting on the earlier mentioned contentious variables is becoming a mandatory step, at least from the perspective of nurses as official human-life advocates. This can enable them to approach such sensitive issues to help their clients make wise decisions about life and death matters. Therefore, one of the main aims of this manuscript is to compare the Abrahamic religious-driven perspectives with secular bioethical perspectives in terms of problematic issues regarding terminating life. Of equal importance, this manuscript aims at finding a middle ground or a common language between the secularized and religious-driven bioethical perspectives regarding the aforementioned central bioethical issue. To achieve these aims, a systematic comparative reflection methodology was used. By which, the author supported the presented claims by relevant literature. The extracted evidence based on the reviewed literature confirmed that both secularized and religious perspectives regarding life-death issues under the umbrella of self-determination are well supported. However, it is obvious that the religious outweigh the secular-driven perspective considering the fact that the religious-based perspective unconditionally cherishes the sacred human life, regardless of any clinical, sociopolitical, cultural, legal, personal, and most importantly, financial variables. Religious perspective does not discriminate between supporting a twenty-year-old young man's life and stopping support of a ninety-year-old man's life simply on the basis of an age variable or scarce medical resources. In addition, this manuscript confirmed that a middle ground could be established by inviting an open interdisciplinary, interreligious, inter-professional, and cross-cultural communication among the principal stakeholders. Finally, in a secular-driven health care system, like the American model or the European model, it is valuable to re-invite the spiritual and religious aspect of care to help the clients to base their critical decision on a solid foundation. Both clients and health care providers, nurses in particular, need to be open to the unlimited space of the metaphysically divine world in their practice arena and to rethink the broad-spectrum options that they have in life-death issues before making their decisions. Moreover, reintegrating religiosity and spirituality into nursing and medicine professional practice can upgrade the professional identity of them to the next level through fulfilling the entire aspects of holistic health care.