The Foundations of Christian Bioethics

This volume addresses the morality at the foundations of Christian bioethics.

It opens with an analysis of the marginalization of Christian bioethics in the 1970s and shortcomings of secular ethics in general.

Drawing on the Christianity of the first millennium, Engelhardt provides the ontological and epistemological foundations for a Christian bioethics that can remedy the onesidedness of a secular bioethics and supply the bases for a Christian bioethics.

The volume then addresses issues from abortion, third-party-assisted reproduction and cloning to withholding and withdrawing treatment, physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia.

Practices such as free and informed consent are relocated within a traditional Christian morality.

Attention is also paid to the allocation of scarce resources in healthcare and to the challenge of maintaining the Christian identity of physicians, nurses, patients and healthcare institutions in a culture that is now post-Christian.