The Bioethics Declaration: Society and the Future

In one line

Four articles that widen the frame from the individual to society, to the generations after this one, and to the living world they will need.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: article 14 makes the promotion of health and social development a central purpose of governments shared by all sectors of society, and lists five things that progress in science and technology should advance; article 15 requires that benefits be shared with society as a whole and the international community, in particular with developing countries, and that benefits not constitute improper inducements to participate in research; article 16 requires that the impact of life sciences on future generations, including on their genetic constitution, be given due regard; and article 17 requires due regard for the interconnection between human beings and other forms of life and for the protection of the biosphere and biodiversity.

Article 14: social responsibility and health

14(1). The promotion of health and social development for their people is a central purpose of governments that all sectors of society share.

Note the two halves. It is a central purpose of governments, so the obligation is placed on the State; and it is one that all sectors of society share, which reaches the private sector without pretending to bind it.

14(2). Taking into account that the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition, progress in science and technology should advance:

• (a) access to quality health care and essential medicines, especially for the health of women and children, because health is essential to life itself and must be considered to be a social and human good;
• (b) access to adequate nutrition and water;
• (c) improvement of living conditions and the environment;
• (d) elimination of the marginalization and the exclusion of persons on the basis of any grounds;
• (e) reduction of poverty and illiteracy.

This is the most striking provision in the Declaration and it should be read carefully, because it is not the provision a reader expects in a bioethics instrument.

It states a direction for science itself. Not what science may not do, but what progress in science and technology should advance. That is a purposive obligation of the kind stated in article 12(b) of the 1997 Declaration, that applications shall seek to offer relief from suffering.

Three of the five items are not medical at all. Nutrition and water, living conditions and the environment, and poverty and illiteracy. The article treats those as the proper objects of scientific progress, which is the recognition that health is produced by conditions rather than by clinics, the same reasoning that underlies article 3 of the 1997 Declaration and section 3(3) of the MTP Act's reference to the woman's actual or reasonably foreseeable environment.