4th Global Conference
Wednesday 12th July - Friday 14th July 2006
Mansfield College, Oxford
Session 4: Death of Babies
Chair: Kate Woodthorpe
Interpreting the Moment of Death
Carol
Komaromy
Director Health and Social Care, Open University, United Kingdom
The moment
of death receives a lot of attention in health and social care practice – as
it does in all professional groups concerned with the cause of death.
During a study into the management of death and dying in care home settings
for older people, I heard many accounts of the moment of death from care
staff, residents, relatives and friends of deceased residents and I have
written elsewhere (Komaromy, 2002) about the way that death bed scenes
carry different meanings. The accounts of death by Seymour (2001), Lawton
(1998) and Page and Komaromy (2005) explore some of these interpretations.
However, most of this literature is focused on professional views of
death. This is not surprising when the legal/medical requirement to record
the time of death requires professionals who care for dying people to
be present at the moment of death.
This paper offers further interpretations
on the moment of death and what it means when it occurs shortly after
birth. It is based on
the first of a series of interviews with people who have been affected
by the death of a baby and the meaning that each attaches to the moment
of death. The data for this paper is drawn from on an interview with
a woman whose grandson died just three hours after birth. The death was
totally unexpected and the medical team made considerable attempts to
resuscitate him. I explored the extent to which this moment carried significance
and the place of this moment in the family’s grief.
Hiding Babies: Making
Sense of Death and Grief
Jan
Bleyen
Faculty of Arts, Social History 1800-2000,
University of Leuven, Belgium
Drawing on open interviews of gynaecologists, midwives and pastors, the paper will demonstrate how in changing contexts the 'hiding' and 'showing' of the dead baby has been interwoven with shifting meanings. In this anthropological history of reproduction and death, the body and emotions, identity and personhood, two contradictory approaches of practicing and hence of making sense will be developed.
The Death of Innocents: Non-combatant
Immunity v. the Divine Fetus
Lloyd
Steffen
Chair, Religion Studies,
Lehigh University,
Bethlehem, PA, USA
A jus in bello criterion of just war theory holds that in order for a war to be just, those who are not directly party to the conflict must be granted immunity from involvement in the conflict. That is, noncombatant non-aggressors are rendered “innocent” in the sense that they are not legitimate targets for the use of force. The immunity provision of just war theory, which has been preserved in the Roman Catholic moral tradition, has never been absolute. The doctrine of “double effect” has often been invoked to render permissible as a ‘lesser evil’ a killing that is unwanted and unintended yet foreseen if all reasonable effort has been made to avoid such deaths. My project is to contrast the meaning of innocence as it is developed in the just war theory of noncombatant immunity with the notion of fetal innocence at play in the abortion debate. My argument is that some religious perspectives have overruled moral reasonableness and infused the conceptus, embryo, fetus with an innocence that is actually descriptive of divinity rather than of moral status. Many religiously grounded arguments against abortion—the Roman Catholic is the best known—refuse to refer abortion to double effect or to recognize the possibility of a “just abortion.” The innocence that provides the fetus with immunity from abortion is a total, absolute immunity, so that abortion cannot be justified even if a medical complication presents the fetus as a threat to a woman’s life. Fetal death from abortion has been extracted from a moral framework, and the meaning and value of the fetus has been so transformed that the fetus comes to possess a supra-moral standing that is recognizable as divinity itself. Fetal death from abortion, then, is like no other. I argue for the moral point of view on this matter and argue that this notion of the ‘divine fetus,’ and the immunity from moral scrutiny that flows from this absolutizing of the fetus is at best non-rational, at worst irrational, even fanatical.
© Inter-Disciplinary.Net 2006