The reflections were signed by the 26 EU accredited bishops, members of COMECE.
The document deals not just with the treatment of patients in a neuro-vegetative coma, but with a whole other series of questions too: from the fully human use of instruments made available through technological progress to ways in which to put a stop to human organ trafficking and “transplant tourism”.
From the differentiation of terms (sexual and reproductive health or maternal and infant health - as happened at Rio+20 - to opportunities for human “improvement”: cognitive development, mood improvement, body appreciation, life prolongation.
The bishops write that biomedical technology creates expectations in people but it risks widening the North-South divide. And they do not hide their concerns about organ and human cell trafficking which is yet another method of exploiting the world’s poorest.
These concerns were expressed during UNESCO’s first ethical committee meeting on bioethics and human rights, held at the Bruno Kessler Foundation – Centre for Religious Science in Trento.
“What we call right to health is not only written in our genes - the centre’s director, Alberto Bondolfi, from Switzerland said –it is the result of adequate and non-discriminative health policies.”
So working in the field of bioethics today means above all reflecting on the discrimination, which can be serious, that exists in the world in terms of the varying ease of access to treatments, medication and research. We must not forget that in many countries there is also gender discrimination.
The bioethics agenda needs to become even broader on social and environmental issues, because it is a question of justice versus injustice, UNESCO experts stated, reiterating what was said at the last World Health Organisation meeting in Geneva and in the concluding document of the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development.