A Question of Choice : Bioethical Reflections on a Spiritual Response to the Technological Imperative

This text seeks to make a contribution to our understanding of the way our society responds to issues of death and dying.

The transdisciplinary research which informs this discussion is situated in the disciplines of bioethics and palliative care, it uses postmodern notions of discourse and power to explore an organizational response to working with the dying at the Karuna Hospice Service.

In modern, Western, technological societies, biomedicine is the dominant discourse which underpins our care of the terminally ill.

Bioethics has recently emerged as a discipline concerned with resolving the many ethical dilemmas arising from such a physiological, technologized approach to death.

Rather than to add to such studies, this research looks in the direction of alternative ways of responding to the dying in our community.

The Karuna Hospice Service was chosen for this research as it presented the possibility of a holistic and spiritual alternative to the positivist, reductionist hegemony of scientific medicine.