Bioethics, healthcare policy, and related issues.
I saw the just-released Neil Young concert film, “Heart of Gold”, last week, and it was lovely. In terms of production values, it is far from Jonathan Demme’s best work - at certain times it looked distinctly amateurish - but it does a perfectly acceptable job of conveying the concert performance and the music, which is all that really matters. It’s a simple film - a straightforward record of the best of two nights’ performances at Ryman Auditorium, Nashville (the “Grand Ol’ Opry”), by Young and a huge group of backing musicians, some of them major stars in their own right, with little filler or “backstage secrets” nonsense to break it up. It contains a few chuckles - one of Young’s longtime bandmembers recounts that he slipped in the back door of his first recording session with Young, decades ago, and they had recorded five tracks together before introducing themselves; Young also explains from the stage that the “old man” in his hit song of that name (”Old man take a look at my life / I’m a lot like you were . . .”) was the caretaker on his farm, who couldn’t believe that a “rich hippie” had enough money at such a young age to buy a big spread like that. Mostly it just contains people making music, and the movie rarely gets in the way of its own story, which is a very good thing. Young comes across as a gentle, wise man moved by a kind of sweet longing for connection with friends and family. (It is hard to believe he once wrote “Southern Man” or “Ohio”.) In fact, I was struck by how many of his songs are explicitly about friendship, and how much he values it the older he gets - they far outnumber his songs about romantic love, the standard grist for the country/rock mill.
It’s a very enjoyable movie whether you’re a Neil Young fanatic or not. I recommend it to anyone. But enough of that. It was the bioethics content of the concert that I really wanted to comment on.
More frequently than you would expect, anti-choicers simply can’t control themselves, and throw back the curtain on their real agenda and tactics. The editors of National Review Online do so today with their critical take on the South Dakota abortion ban, arguing both that it will likely fail and that it goes too far outside the “savvy incremental strategy” already in place to chip away women’s rights an inch at a time until there are none left. In truth, that strategy was always evident, and pro-choicers have been pointing this out all along. But somehow, many people managed to convince themselves that the medievals really cared about their issue du jour - that the fight at any given moment really was about waiting periods, or parental notification, or dilation-and-extraction, or whatever, and not really about the wholesale loss of women’s reproductive freedom across the board - that these issues were substantive matters that touched on some moral point the anti-choicers felt was unique and significant, and were not merely carefully focus-grouped tactics in an assault on the basic principle of autonomy that underlay them all. And each time the anti-choicers let us peek behind the curtain, we discover that what they’re really up to is exactly what they appeared to be up to: arrogating control of women’s bodies to their own reactionary, misogynist, sex-fearful, overwhelmingly male, religious-extremist selves. Is anyone listening this time?
Contemporary bioethics is often said to trace its history back to the research-abuse scandals of the post-war years - Nazi medical abuses, the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study and other American scandals, and others. Systematic attempts to bring medical research into a moral framework, beginning with the Nuremburg Code, were among the first formal advances into rationalized medical ethics, and helped inform the debates that soon followed on clinical practice. In the US, the Belmont Report and the establishment of Institutional Review Boards to ensure compliance with requirements for ethical safeguards revolutionized medical research and put the force of federal law behind ethical principles for its conduct. The IRB regulations, despite various complaints and criticisms, remain a linchpin of resarch ethics in the US. They are the mechanism of enforcement of principles of informed consent, risk/benefit proportionality, and non-maleficence in research. In the spirt of “no good deed goes unpunished”, however, some law school professors have identified IRBs as a threat to . . . freedom of speech, as guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
