Approximately 45 international speakers from 16 countries discussed critical issues surrounding scientific practices at the two-day conference including gene editing in humans and across species (CRISPR experiments), sex selection, assisted reproduction techniques, prenatal testing and diagnosis, neonatal care, euthanasia, and gender-affirming surgery.
On the opening day, Professor O. Carter Snead, an American legal scholar and bioethicist from the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, shared insights from his book “What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics,” and invited conference participants to first consider the “anthropological question [about human nature, human flourishing, and human identity]” as a framework to examine the conference topics and case studies.
Snead stated that current laws and policies related to abortion, assisted reproduction, and end-of-life decisions in the U.S. and abroad reflect a reductive “expressive individualism” as described by philosopher Charles Taylor and sociologist Robert Bellah, whereby a person’s worth is primarily defined according to “their capacity to choose life pathways” and pursue personal projects.
“Expressive individualism doesn’t take our embodiment or incarnational nature into account. It can’t make sense of our vulnerability, our reciprocal dependence, and our natural limits,” Snead explained. “It leaves entirely out of the field of view the weakest and most vulnerable, the elderly, the disabled, children both born and unborn.”
More than 400 people from 19 countries across five continents attended the congress in person or online to listen to academics, researchers, medical doctors, health care specialists, as well as family members whose lives had been directly impacted by the work and example of Lejeune.
“Never in my life would I have thought that a doctor, much less a prominent one, would have the humility to contact the mother of a child from a foreign country to spare them a trip to Paris,” recalled Domitília Antão, a mother of a child with Trisomy 21. “I will never forget his gaze, which immediately infused hope in our discouraged hearts. We were amazed by such simplicity considering his great competence, so much tenderness. We were treated like his family.”
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