The purpose of the conference is to bring together Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish perspectives on caring for patients who can no longer speak for themselves. As America ages, the challenges of caregiving—both ethical and social—will only become more serious and more difficult. The questions before us are both very practical and very theoretical: we must think about what gives human life its worth and dignity; about the meaning of death in the age of modern medicine; about the relationship between the generations in a world where the incidence of dementia and long-term dependence are much-increased, while the ties of family and community have often weakened. We face difficult life-and-death decisions for the persons entrusted in our care, difficult legal and policy decisions about how such decisions should be made, and difficult theological and philosophical questions about the nature of human dignity and human equality.

EPPC President Edward Whelan, Senior Fellow Adam Wolfson, and Fellow Eric Cohen all participated in this conference.

PARTICIPANTS

Gilbert Meilaender (Discussion Leader)
Gilbert Meilaender, Ph.D. Richard & Phyllis Duesenberg Professor of Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University. Professor Meilaender is an associate editor for the Journal of Religious Ethics. He takes a special interest in bioethics and is a Fellow of the Hastings Center. His books include Body, Soul, and Bioethics (1995) and Bioethics: A Primer for Christians (1997). A revised edition of Bioethics: A Primer for Christians will come out in 2005. He also serves as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.

Rabbi Yitzchok Breitowitz (Discussion Leader)
Yitzchok Breitowitz is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Maryland and Rabbi of the Woodside Synagogue in Silver Spring. He is a frequent lecturer on medical, family ,and business ethics and has authored articles on brain death, organ donation, physician-assisted suicide, stem cell research, and the new reproductive technologies. He is a 1976 graduate of Johns Hopkins University and a 1979 graduate of Harvard Law School.

Richard Doerflinger (Discussion Leader)
Richard M. Doerflinger is Deputy Director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Among his duties is the preparation of policy statements and congressional testimony on abortion, euthanasia, embryo research, human cloning, and other medical-moral issues for the bishops’ conference.He is also Adjunct Fellow in Bioethics and Public Policy at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Boston, and serves on the Advisory Board to the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity in Bannockburn, Illinois. Mr. Doerflinger has testified before Congress, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, the National Institutes of Health, the President’s Council on Bioethics, and several state legislatures on ethical issues involving human embryo research and cloning.He has also spoken and published widely on these and other medical-moral issues, including contributions to Hastings Center Report, Duquesne Law Review, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, the Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine (Our Sunday Visitor Press 1997), the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, and the American Journal of Bioethics.He holds a B.A. degree and an M.A. in Divinity from the University of Chicago, and conducted doctoral studies in Theology at that institution and the Catholic University of America.

Leon Kass
Leon R. Kass, M.D., Ph.D., is the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago (on leave of absence) and Hertog Fellow in Social Thought at the American Enterprise Institute. His numerous articles and books include: Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (1984); The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (1994); The Ethics of Human Cloning (1998, with James Q. Wilson); Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying (2000, with Amy A. Kass); Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics (2002); and The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (2003). He also serves as chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics.

Edward Whelan
Edward Whelan is President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and directs EPPC’s program on The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture. A lawyer and former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Mr. Whelan has served in positions of responsibility in all three branches of the federal government. Most recently, before joining EPPC, he was the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

Thomas Cole
Thomas R. Cole is the Beth and Toby Grossman Professor and Director of the McGovern Center for Health, Humanities, and the Human Spirit at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.He is also a Professor of Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University.Cole graduated from Yale University (B.A. Philosophy, 1971), Wesleyan University (M.A., History, 1975) and the University of Rochester, (Ph.D., History, 1981). Dr. Cole has published many articles and several books on the history of aging and humanistic gerontology.His book The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (Cambridge University Press, 1992) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.He is senior editor of What Does It Mean to Grow Old?(Duke, 1986), the Handbook of Humanities and Aging (Springer, 1992, 2nd edition 1999) and Voices and Visions: Toward a Critical Gerontology (Springer, 1993).The New Yorker noted his co-edited Oxford Book of Aging as one of the most memorable books of 1995. His most recent co-edited book is Practicing the Medical Humanities (2003).

Paul McHugh
Paul R. McHugh received his medical education at Harvard Medical School with further training at the Peter Bent Brigham (now Brigham and Women’s) Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, and in the Division of Neuropsychiatry at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.After his training, he was eventually and successively Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University School of Medicine, Clinical Director and Director of Residency Education at the New York Hospital Westchester Division; Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Oregon Health Sciences Center.He was Henry Phipps Professor and Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1975-2001.The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine named him University Distinguished Service Professor in 1998. Dr. McHugh was Founder and First Director, Bourne Behavioral Research Laboratory of New York Hospital, Westchester Division at Cornell.From 1992-2001, he directed the Blades Center for Clinical Practice and Research in Alcohol/Drug Dependence at Hopkins.In 1986-89, Dr. McHugh was Chairman of the NIH BioPsychology Study Section.He received the William C. Menninger Award, American College of Physicians, 1987, and the Joseph Zubin Award from the American Psychopathological Association, 1995.He was elected to the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences in 1992.In 2001, he was appointed by President Bush to the President’s Council on Bioethics and in 2002 by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to the National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People.

Adam Wolfson
Adam Wolfson is consulting editor of Commentary and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He was formerly the editor of The Public Interest and also served as a consultant to the President's Council on Bioethics. He is a graduate of Harvard (AB) and University of Chicago (PhD), and his articles have appeared in The Pubic Interest, The Weekly Standard, National Review, and elsewhere.

Philip Overby
Philip Overby M.D is originally from Minneapolis and studied English at Kenyon College. He obtained an M.A. from St. John's Great Books program, and then attended medical school at the University of Minnesota. He is currently a fellow in Pediatric Neurology at Johns Hopkins, working on the non-surgical treatment of pediatric neurologic disorders such as seizures, strokes, and cerebral palsy.

William Saunders
William L. Saunders is the Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Human Life & Bioethics at the Family Research Council.He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina and the Harvard Law School.He was profiled in Harvard's first Guide to Conservative Public Interest Law. He is a regular columnist for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly and for TheFactIs web page.He writes frequently on bioethics issues in journals, and appears on radio and television on these subjects.

John Collins Harvey
Dr. John Collins Harvey, Professor of Medicine, emeritus, was educated at Exeter, Yale, and Johns Hopkins.He did his residency training in internal medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and postgraduate work at Hopkins, the Medical Labs of the Army Chemical Corps, Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland and Guy’s Hospital Medical School in London, England.He served on the faculty of medicine of the Johns Hopkins University for 25 years rising to the position of Professor of Medicine before he came to Georgetown University in 1973 as Professor of Medicine. After part time study for ten years while serving as Professor of Medicine at Georgetown University he earned his doctorate in Moral Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, Maryland in 1988. 

Eric Cohen
Eric Cohen is editor and founder of The New Atlantis. He is also director of the program on Bioethics and American Democracy, and co-director of the program on Science, Technology, and Society at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.  His essays and articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Weekly Standard, The Public Interest, First Things, Commentary, and elsewhere, and he is the co-editor (with William Kristol) of The Future is Now: America Confronts the New Genetics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). He was previously a fellow at the New America Foundation and managing editor of The Public Interest. He also serves as a senior consultant to the President's Council on Bioethics.

Father Thomas Berg
Fr. Thomas Berg is associate professor of moral philosophy at the Center for Higher Studies of the Legion of Christ in Thornwood, NY. He received an MA in Liberal Studies from Wesleyan University and a PhD in philosophy from Rome’s Pontifical University Regina Apostolorum. His areas of interest include natural law theory, personhood theory, and biomedical issues dealing with the beginning of human life. He is also the founder of the Westchester Institute.

Father Daniel Mindling

Joe Capizzi

Austin Ruse