LIFE & WHO DEFINES IT!

A renewed interest in the human body, in its embodied, material sense, as well as a concept, emerged within feminist, post-modern and post-humanist frameworks, as well as in the sciences since the nineteen sixties in response to the unparalleled developments in biomedicine and technology in the late twentieth century. Indeed ‘bioethics’, an extension of the Human Rights Movement and ‘medical ethics’ emerged in the nineteen sixties and has enveloped biomedical advancements in a plethora of questions that relate not only to health care and the quality of life, but also who decides what is considered to be ‘life’ and when it is deemed to have begun or ended. Issues such as identity (selfhood), agency (the ability to act and effect change) and autonomy (free will and self-governance) are important in this discussion.

Reproductive technologies, which identify genetic disorders by amniocentesis, chorionic villus sampling, pre-implantation diagnosis and cloning technologies raise a number of questions in regards to autonomy, such as whether the freedom of choice in sexual reproduction has been removed by medical screening that determines which embryo is genetically desirable to implant into the recipient mother; and whether women are free to make choices when they are constrained by other issues such as their economic situation, their access to family and community support systems and social and economic pressures to produce a healthy child. Do individuals have autonomy when they may be given partial information when undergoing experimental gene therapy or in medical experimentation? How can individuals make an informed decision when health care professional formulate their language in terms that non-medical individuals do not fully understand? In regards to genomics, we might ask the question: How is our identity affected by the knowledge that we are the carrier of unwanted genetic material that may be passed onto our children, or that our genes indicate that we predisposed to cancer, heart disease and any other number of debilitating or life threatening diseases. How do notions of genetic determinism affect our agency? How much agency does an individual have when life is determined not by the quality of embodiment particular to a person, but a value defined by medicine?