Recently, I wrote still another post, prophesying into a vacuum of sorts, in which I explored some of the dangers of assuming that Christians, or any others with strong moral beliefs, can enter fully into shared medical insurance programs or even basic medical systems with those who hold differing moral beliefs. That essay, Through the Looking-glass: Religious Liberty and Religious Toleration, concentrated on the current public to-do about Obamacare and its so-called mandate to all medical insurance providers: all must provide a full range of contraceptive and abortion benefits.
Can technology help us to solve these problems as we often and unrealistically believe it will fully solve some of our important practical problems? In this recent article, Next-Generation DNA Sequencing to Improve Diagnosis for Muscular Dystrophy, we learn of an improvement in technology, one which might help expectant parents to plan for a child with a severe medical problem. Or will it lead to more abortions of a selective type?
Whatever view you have on abortion, it’s clearly an issue which deeply divides Americans and others. As Alasdair MacIntyre told us in various books: we no longer even share a common, public language for defining our various positions or discussing the resulting conflicts. Under these conditions, each technological advance can become good news for the optimists on both sides of a deep divide or bad news for the pessimists. Each technological advance tends to widen the chasms between those who speak different moral languages and to anticipate a different sort of moral order or to fear a different sort of moral disorder in our environments or in a greater world.