Australian bioethicists have joined international experts in mourning the closure of the UK Catholic think tank, the Anscombe Bioethics Centre.
Founded in 1977, the world-famous centre is the UK’s oldest institution for bioethics research and will close at the end of July.
Dr Xavier Symons, the director of the Plunkett Centre for Ethics at Australian Catholic University, told The Catholic Weekly that the news was distressing.
“The United Kingdom is on the brink of legalising euthanasia and also recently liberalised its abortion laws,” he said. “It is unfortunate that at such a pivotal juncture the one Catholic bioethics centre in the British Isles has closed”.
Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP, who is a bioethicist himself and a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, has described the centre as “not just the premier Christian bioethics institute in Britain, but one of the finest in the world, Christian or secular”.
Margaret Somerville, a professor of bioethics at the University of Notre Dame Australia, is very familiar with Anscombe’s work.
“When I heard that it was closing, my heart sank,” she told The Catholic Weekly.
She described bioethics as an inherently “fragile” discipline because of its complexity, but one which is desperately needed.
“The issues that will face us, led by artificial intelligence and genetics, are enormous, unprecedented and very difficult,” she commented.
“A central question remains the old one, what does respect for human life at both the individual and societal level require that we not do that we now can do?”
In recent decades bioethics, the philosophical discipline which deals with life issues ranging from abortion to surrogacy to removal of life support to euthanasia, has become a crucial tool for defending laws which support human dignity.
It is particularly important in the United Kingdom, where high-level philosophical debates have had an outsized influence in other countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
The centre is named after Elizabeth Anscombe, a leading philosopher at Oxford University who was a Catholic convert and staunchly pro-life.
“The Anscombe Centre was carrying on a tradition of doing applied ethics that dates back to the mid-20th century and Anscombe’s seminal debates with her Oxford colleagues about the morality of killing, whether it be in war or in the context of abortion or euthanasia,” Dr Symons said.
“That tradition has been severely weakened now that the Anscombe Centre has closed.”
In a message on Anscombe’s website, its director, Professor David Albert Jones, explained that its corporate trustee, the Catholic Trust for England and Wales, the legal arm of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, had made the decision “on financial grounds.”
It had been supported by annual collections taken up in Catholic parishes in the UK and Ireland known as the Day for Life fund.
Professor Jones insists that these donations had not been wasted.
They “have helped educate and support generations of conscientious healthcare professionals, clerics, and lay people over almost 50 years. This support has also helped prevent repeated attempts to legalise euthanasia or assisted suicide in Britain and Ireland from 1993 to the present.”
The decision to shutter Anscombe has puzzled and exasperated some observers in the UK.
Thomas Pink, an emeritus professor of philosophy at King’s College London who is a former vice chairman of the centre’s governors, described the move as “very damaging” to the National Catholic Register. “The bishops’ conference should be increasing support for the centre at this time, not removing it,” he said.
Dr Michael Wee, a former researcher at Anscombe who is currently doing postdoctoral work at Oxford University, told The Catholic Weekly that the centre was unique in the world of bioethics.
It combined giving advice on ethical conundrums, dealing with the media, advocacy in Parliament, public education, and rigorous academic research.
“It helps for those seeking advice that there is an institution which has credibility, which has a brand name, which has history, which has a tradition of high-quality work and targeted help and outreach,” he said.
“It’s that sort of thing that can’t be built overnight.”
