From its earliest days, the contemporary bioethics movement recognized the importance of religion. Early leaders, such as Richard McCormick, Paul Ramsey, and J. David Bleich brought religious perspectives to bear on the issues emerging from medicine's remarkable successes of the late twentieth century. Eventually, as other—read "secular"—disciplines and luminaries gained ascendancy in the emerging field, the view that bioethics had to speak in a secular tongue to achieve credibility in the public arena gained widespread acceptance. All the same, religion's importance to bioethical deliberation has never been simply dismissed.
Members of ethics committees and other deliberative ethics bodies have long recognized religion as an important feature of the landscape. How did, could, or should religion be a part of their deliberative process, informing whatever conclusions they reached?
How religion makes a difference in an ethics forum's work varies according to the context, commitments, and purposes of the forum in question. Ethics committees in religiously affiliated—or, if one prefers the current term, faith-based—health and human service organizations should, presumably, differ in important respects from ethics committees in other organizations. But how? How might religion—its values, convictions, ways of seeing and being—make a difference in the life of an ethics committee?
Plausible answers include the committee's composition, the structure of its deliberative process, the issues it identifies, the factors it examines in reviewing a case, the values and principles it counts as good reasons, its use of the statements and stances of the affiliated religious group—to name a few. The way these considerations play out will also depend on the kinds of care and service the organization provides. In this Bulletin Dan Dugan, Jan Heller, and Janet Hisbon offer a sampling of the multiple, often subtle, influences of religion in contexts ranging from the acute care hospital to varied settings of long-term care, to the provision of child and family services.
In public policy, on the other hand, questions of how to value religion itself, and whether or how to incorporate religious beliefs and values in the policymaking process, press for attention. The National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) has considered such questions in its deliberations, including its review of this summer's hot topic: federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research. In analyzing the issues and NBAC's approach, J. David Bleich suggests a policy alternative designed to address religious misgivings about federal support.
The conversation about religion and bioethics is, of course, ongoing. Questions about religion in the work of ethics committees and other forums will undoubtedly remain a significant theme in that conversation.
