About Bioethics: Volume 4: Motherhood, Embodied Love and Culture / Nicholas Tonti-Filippini

The contemporary culture includes technicism, evidenced by the takeover of healthy women’s bodies by technology, including the pill, emergency contraception, abortion, reproductive technology, invasive prenatal testing and the mantra of choice that inevitably devalues women and their bodies and tends to perceive motherhood as a restriction on freedom. How should a young man behave when he finds his partner is pregnant? What does the new National Curriculum on sex education say to him? In this book the author explores both the technological options and the unique love that exists between a man and a woman. Questions such as pornography, homophobia, homosexuality, same sex marriage, masturbation and sexual abuse by clergy are dealt with frankly by someone who has lived through the cultural developments and who holds that human love imitates divine love so that neither seeks to dominate nor to possess the other. Love is the opposite of mere use. In an authentic relationship, the gift each makes is unilateral, not a bargain or exchange, even though so much of what married couples do is governed by an underlying sense of balance or fairness. Love precedes justice, but is never unjust. Gender difference enriches marriage with unpredictability, joy and humour, but also creates the opportunity to be a complementary gift to the other in which the union is so much more than the individuals who choose to create it. As a Philosopher and a respected Bioethicist, the author explains the contemporary excitement over the Theology of the Body, new claims about Scripture, and the challenges of contemporary culture and science for women and men who wish to love responsibly and well.

– Madge Fahy, C of H (Papal) Past President, Catholic Women’s League Australia Inc.

– Hon. Christine Campbell, Member of Parliament, Victoria.

– The Most Reverend Anthony Fisher OP, Bishop of Parramatta.

Professor Nicholas Tonti-Filippini BA (Hons), MA (Monash), PhD (Melb), FHERDSA, KCSG is Associate Dean and Head of Bioethics at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Melbourne. The Institute is associated with the John Paul II Institute in Rome and the Lateran University. It is registered as a higher education provider in Australia to provide graduate courses in Bioethics, Theology of Marriage and Family, and Religious Education. Professor Tonti- Filippini is a philosopher who has specialised in bioethics for the past 30 years including having been Australia’s first hospital ethicist and Director of Bioethics at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, 1982-1990. He is well known internationally and has published widely in Bioethics. Nicholas Tonti-Filippini recently chaired an Australian Government public enquiry to produce recommendations for trade in human tissue and tissue products.