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Document Details : Title: Ervaring serieus nemen Subtitle: Een pleidooi voor het geweten Author(s): DRESEN, Grietje Journal: Tijdschrift voor Theologie Volume: 47 Issue: 2 Date: 2007 Pages: 136-154 DOI: 10.2143/TVT.47.2.3203521 Abstract : This article reflects on the section about ‘The Experience or Meshing of Care Providers and Clients’ in the previous position paper. Its authors urge that we take women’s experience seriously in the internal church debate. The purpose of doing so would be to use women’s perspective to modify an unbalanced, hard and fast position. Yet, they also examine women’s experiences critically because they assume that these are largely influenced by social factors, especially the range of treatments that reproductive medicine can offer. As the title of the section discussed here indicates, they postulate that these experiences are fundamentally determined by the meshing of supply and demand. This article expands upon their presupposition, but also expresses a few reservations. It examines which social factors influence the use of reproductive medicine. The author distinguishes three groups of factors: 1) the range of new reproductive techniques; 2) women’s changing social role and the resulting combination of care and salaried work; 3) diminished social cohesion and solidarity combined with greater demands on individuals’ economic performance and flexibility, representativity and responsibility to care for themselves. These factors make the care for children, with or without disabilities, more difficult and make their prospects more menacing. For these reasons, there must be a guarantee of good counselling and the government must follow-up the range of reproductive techniques critically and subject them to restrictions imposed in legislation and by permits; this is currently the practice in the Netherlands. This must ensure that parents can truly decide in freedom. An initial prerequisite is that social solidarity in the welfare system becomes no more eroded than it now is. Parents are not the ones primarily responsible for social tendencies and individualisation, but they should feel supported by a caring society when making difficult decisions regarding reproductive medicine (and prenatal diagnosis). Within these conditions, the author argues for trusting the prospective parents to make conscientiously any decisions that could affect the future of their child. In this regard she notes two fundamental reservations to the article by R. Ammicht-Quinn e.a. She points out that the authors want to do justice to women’s experiences, but apparently intentionally avoid using the term conscience within the moral decision process that they describe. The author regrets this, because the concept of conscience has a well-defined (if not uncontroversial) place in customary usage and in Catholic tradition. Conversely, neither the concept of experience nor experiences as such play a role in church thinking about sexuality and reproduction. In addition, the author regrets that the article of Ammicht-Quinn e.a. ends with ‘visions’ that distract from defining a practical position within the church. |
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