Forgiving Seventy-Times-Seven

While I was on the faculty at Trinity College Theological School, I had the privilege of being invited to serve on the Human Ethics Committee of the Royal Melbourne Hospital. As we know, the Royal Melbourne Hospital is the teaching hospital of Melbourne University. It is directly attached to the Faculty of Medicine.

Like all teaching staff of any university, medical faculty members are expected to continue to research and develop new knowledge in the field of medicine. The medical faculty's research obviously concerns human beings.

When we fall sick, we go to doctors, specialists, and surgeons to treat us, and in almost every instance, we share a lot of personal information with them and confide in them with a lot of confidence. All our doctor visits go fine; often, they do not ask for our permission before asking us personal questions. We only sometimes think twice before we share personal information with doctors because we assume that what we tell them will assist them in diagnosing our illness and treating us best.

However, if the doctors were to visit us to gather information so they could study our illness, the story would be different. They cannot do that without the prior approval of the Hospital's Ethics Committee or the University they come from.

The purpose of the Human Ethics Committee at the Royal Melbourne Hospital was precisely this. We, the Committee, had to interrogate all study proposals of doctors and medical faculty members and give approval before they could start interviewing or talking to any patient. 

There were Ethics Committee meetings at the hospital each week, and five researchers would come and present their projects to us. The Committee was made up of 10 members. Of the ten members, only 3 had anything to do with medicine. The other seven members were lawyers, social workers, community workers, laymen, laywomen, academics, and theologian-priests. I was the theologian-priest member.

The Committee's purpose was to ensure that doctors respected human ethics during their research. We would even go to the finest details, such as questioning where and how the people would be interviewed and where they would keep the notes.

Just because a professor of medicine had a long list of letters after their names, they couldn't go and do tests on people and ask people or patients questions to enable their studies. 

I remember two interesting applications. One was from a Professor of Neurology who wanted uncontrolled access to the records of recovering alcoholics living in halfway houses. His arrogance was getting in the way of human ethics, and his application was turned down. He was asked to re-submit.

The second application, which was submitted for approval towards the end of my tenure on the Committee, came from a specialist children's psychiatrist. This doctor had applied to access the medical records of 40 young girls between the ages of 14-16 who had abortions between 2000 and 2002. A sample of 40 was proposed for the research to stand as an authentic study. The psychiatrist had wanted to contact the girls to follow up on how they were mentally coping with the abortion in their post-teen years in adulthood. Various aspects of the specialist psychiatrist's application were interrogated over seven meetings before it received the approval of the Ethics Committee.

The application received a lot of attention from me because the purpose of the psychiatrist's application was to find out how the religious beliefs of the girls, especially their understanding of forgiveness, had played a part in them finding or not finding healing from their trauma. The forgiveness of God for them for having aborted a life, and their forgiveness to the unborn child that was aborted due to whatever the circumstances were.

After my term on the Committee ended at the end of 2006, as a researcher myself at the Theological School, I contacted the psychiatrist and joined a team of five researchers. In joining the project, I, too, had to work within the stringent ethical guidelines I had contributed to the process before the application was approved. 

The year I spent with these researchers and the young women they interviewed was a life-changing experience for me. 

In a meeting with the young women who had aborted lives, I learned that even though five or six years had passed since the abortions, they were struggling with profoundly disturbing questions. These questions varied from questioning themselves: whether the fetus they had aborted was a living human being or not?; whether life began at conception or at some point thereafter?; whether the lives of late-term abortions knew the mother and her circumstances that led to the abortion?; and whether both the baby and God had forgiven them for what had happened five or six years ago. 

Some girls were torturing themselves to understand whether the life they had aborted was a precious soul that God had sent to this world and whether they had destroyed that soul.