A Catholic physician practices in a world that condones the use of contraception. In the effort to be morally consistent, Catholic physicians are faced with questions about the extent to which their participation in providing contraceptives constitutes immoral cooperation in evil. Particular challenges face resident physicians, who practice under attending physicians and within the constraints of local and specialty-wide training requirements. The author examines the nature of the moral act of referring for contraception and argues that, in limited cases, there is a moral distinction between a referral and an intra-residency patient transfer, and the latter may be morally licit according to the principle of material cooperation. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.2 (Summer 2012): 283–309.

Conscientious objection in the health care field—that is, refusal on the part of a medical professional to perform or cooperate in a procedure when it violates his or her conscience—is a growing concern for international legislators and a source of contentious debates among ethicists and the general public. Recognizing a general right to conscientious objection based on individual liberty, and thus a subjective right, could have negative consequences. Conscientious objection in health care settings should be fully protected, however, when the objection is based on principles that are fundamental to the medical profession and the legal system. Examples from Italy and other nations show how protections there safeguard conscientious objection when a health professional objects to taking a human life. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.4 (Winter 2012): 611–620.

Researchers seek government support for “three-parent IVF” in the United Kingdom, for the purpose of bringing to clinical practice new techniques for avoiding inherited mitochondrial diseases. The author describes the development and processes of pronuclear transfer and maternal spindle transfer and offers an ethical evaluation of this cutting-edge science in light of the Church’s teaching in Dignitas personae. Promoting a eugenic mentality, both pronuclear transfer and maternal spindle transfer involve a radical manipulation of the human genome, inherited from three parents and passed on to future generations. Pronuclear transfer and maternal spindle transfer are immoral, because they represent an offense to marriage and the marital act and involve the destruction of innocent human life. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.4 (Winter 2012): 589–596.

Critics sometimes claim that Catholic moral principles unreasonably oblige patients to adopt life-preserving medical treatments “at all costs,” even when the treatments are excessively burdensome or futile and when their adoption may badly disadvantage patients’ family members or caregivers. The author argues that this is a mischaracterization. Because of obligations arising from our relationships, not only is it sometimes licit to refuse lifesustaining medical care, but we sometimes have a duty to refuse it. This is the case when the treatments are morally extraordinary and when adopting them would unfairly disadvantage someone for whom we have responsibility. The author argues that this conclusion is not inconsistent with the duty we have to properly care for our own lives or with moral principles prohibiting self-killing. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.4 (Winter 2012): 621–630.

Over the last fifty years, medical practice has shifted to an autonomy-based model that promotes patient self-determination as the basis for decision making. Physicians and other health care professionals are often expected to acquiesce to patients’ wishes, even when these wishes are for inappropriate medical care. Three cases are used to illustrate specific conflicts between a professional’s understanding of the science of human biology and a patient’s autonomy. Medical professionals must carefully evaluate issues of patient autonomy in their practices if they are to provide care that displays deep respect for the full human dignity of their patients combined with respect for their own professional role and expertise. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.4 (Winter 2012): 653–673.

Following a series of undercover sting operations organized by Live Action at several Planned Parenthood clinics in 2008, there has been renewed interest in truthfulness and lying from the perspective of St. Thomas Aquinas. Some scholars have used these stings as an opportunity to criticize Aquinas’s position on lying, while others have defended the position of the Angelic Doctor. What implications does this renewed discussion of truthfulness and lying have on medical practice? Although deception in medicine has long been the subject of scholarship, an authentic Thomistic analysis may shed new light on the issue and renew support for truthfulness in medicine while still permitting the prudent masking of the truth for the patient’s benefit. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.4 (Winter 2012): 633–651.

The 2012 contraception mandate issued by the US Department of Health and Human Services has intensified the debate over a health care practitioner’s right to conscientiously object to providing contraception. This paper approaches the debate over conscientious objection to contraception from a pharmacist’s standpoint. It shows that contraception is the cause of or a contributing factor to observed psychosocial suffering and is not “preventive health care” as labeled. It argues not only that a pharmacist should have the right to conscientiously object to dispensing contraception but also that, given the mission of the pharmacist as a health care practitioner, a pharmacist is obligated to refuse to dispense contraception. The paper argues that the obligation to refuse to dispense contraception applies to all who are involved in the provision of health care. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.4 (Winter 2012): 675–696.

Traditional natural law theory grounds morality in human nature. In particular, it defines what is good for us in terms of the ends for the sake of which our natural faculties exist. For the traditional natural law theorist, our sexual faculties have two natural ends, procreative and unitive, and what is good for us in the context of sexuality is therefore defined in terms of these ends. The article provides an overview of this approach to sexual morality and its implications, and explains why the natural law theorist holds that the procreative and unitive ends cannot be separated. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.1 (Spring 2013): 69–76.

The author offers, first, an account of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Aristotelian-inspired understanding of the object of a moral act and of what morally that species contributes to the act of which it is a part. Then, with special (but not sole) attention to two passages in Aquinas cited frequently by the proponents of the new natural law theory—that is, Summa theologiae 2-2.64.7 and the commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences 2.40.1.2—the author argues that a close analysis of Aquinas’s remarks on objects and intentions does not support the claim that the new natural law theory is Thomistic. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.1 (Spring 2013): 79–104.

This essay argues that the new natural law theory (NNLT) propounds five errors that place it on a collision course with the traditional Thomistic understanding central to the moral magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. These root errors are argued to be (1) the denial of the primacy of speculative over practical truth, (2) the negation of unified normative natural teleology expressed in the NNLT doctrine of the putative “incommensurability” of basic goods prior to choice, (3) failure to affirm the transcendence of the common good, (4) negation of the essentially theonomic character of the natural law, and (5) the intentionalist construction of human action. The teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas is held to be a superior light for understanding Catholic moral life. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.1 (Spring 2013): 105–131.

The article aims to articulate and defend St. Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of the transcendence of the political common good and argues against the new natural law theory’s view of the common good as limited, instrumental, and ordered toward the private good of families and individuals. After a summary of John Finnis’s explanation of the common good in Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory, the article presents an analysis of the political common good in Aquinas’s Summa theologiae and De regno. This analysis shows, contrary to Finnis, that for Aquinas the political common good transcends the private good of individuals and families, that it consists in the virtuous life of the political multitude, and that the family is insufficient to lead men to virtue apart from the civitas. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.1 (Spring 2013): 133–155.

In Intention and her subsequent essays that addressed human action, Elizabeth Anscombe made signal contributions to the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, and to western philosophy more broadly. The new natural law theory of Germain Grisez, John Finnis, Joseph Boyle, and their collaborators mistakenly claims to be consonant with Anscombe’s work. A central reason for this misappropriation lies in the failure to understand the ways in which Anscombe does and does not deploy a “first-person perspective” in analyzing intentional action. Far from supporting the new natural law, Anscombe’s work, rightly understood, provides arguments for rejecting it. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.1 (Spring 2013): 47–56.

Does God have any relevant role in the new natural law theory of Germain Grisez and John Finnis? Finnis declared in Natural Law and Natural Rights that he wanted to offer “a theory of natural law without needing to advert to the question of God’s existence or nature or will.” Grisez claims that “man’s ultimate beatitudo cannot consist in the vision of God.” Indeed, there is no consistent role for God in their philosophical theory. In this article, the author shows that their mistakes about God depend first on their metaphysical way of looking at nature, which is closer to thinkers like Hume and Kant than to Aristotle and Aquinas; and second on some strong misunderstandings in moral philosophy about the concept of ultimate end. He shows the unfortunate theological outcome their flawed metaphysics and morality have already produced. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.1 (Spring 2013): 35–45.

Whether the new natural law theory counts as a plausible interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas is not a mere antiquarian question in the history of philosophy but is itself a philosophical question, which bears on how we should interpret and assess the NNLT. Through an examination of problems in Germain Grisez’ influential paper “The First Principle of Practical Reason,” which proposed an interpretation of Summa theologiae I–II, q. 94, a. 2, it is argued that the NNLT is on every major point at odds with Aquinas, such that the NNLT involves a rejection of the classical and Catholic traditions of natural law and not a reformulation, revival, or saving of that tradition. The NNLT gives a flawed account of individual morality, not a Thomistic account of law as binding a community. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.1 (Spring 2013): 57–67.

The moral debate on living-donor organ transplantation (LDOT) historically focused on how to overcome the problem of the mutilation inherent in such a medical operation. In time, theologians began proposing justifications of LDOT that assumed that “mere removals” did not constitute mutilation. The example of mutilation as an “intrinsically evil act” in Veritatis splendor would seem to have closed the debate. Nevertheless, many theologians continue to address LDOT as a question of justifying a mutilation. The authors provide a brief summary of the major contributors before and after Veritatis splendor to show that confusion still exists, and then propose new approaches to help resolve this important bioethical issue. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.3 (Autumn 2013): 427–436.