On the front lines of the pro-life movement are scores of dedicated warriors working to change the hearts and minds of abortion proponents. One of those individuals here in the Diocese of Columbus is uniquely qualified to defend the intrinsic value of all human life through faith, reason and medical expertise.
Dr. Ashley Fernandes, MD, Ph.D., is a committed Catholic and also the associate director of the Center for Bioethics at the Ohio State University College of Medicine and an associate professor of pediatrics at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus. And when he’s not teaching or speaking about medical ethics, he’s also a practicing pediatrician.
Next month, the nationally recognized physician and ethicist will serve as a featured speaker at the 17th annual Divine Mercy Medicine, Bioethics & Spirituality Conference, a virtual event sponsored by Healthcare Professionals for Divine Mercy. His talks during the three-day conference for those in healing professions include “The Enduring Significance of the Hippocratic Oath in a Secularist Culture” and “Pediatric Bioethics.”
Since Fernandes earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University in 1999, a medical degree from Ohio State in 2003 and a doctorate in philosophy from Georgetown University in 2008, he has given hundreds of similar presentations focusing on the moral reasoning for every person, not just physicians, to protect all human life from the womb to the grave.
That’s sometimes not easy when you’re teaching at a public university and working in a secularist culture with medical students who are influenced by pervasive “pro-choice” arguments.
“I’m sure that some people don’t like what I say,” Fernandes said, “but I’m not ‘preaching Catholicism’ in my job. I’m simply trying to create an environment of openness where students who might not have heard another point of view not only can hear that point of view but also can reflect on the experience of the things we know in Catholicism to be true. This is a foundational principle of natural law philosophy, which saints such as Thomas Aquinas and Pope John Paul II used effectively to dialogue with those different from them.
“By having courage in certain instances and speaking out against things that are wrong – censorship and one-sidedness within the ethics curriculum – I can hopefully be kind of like the ‘restraining hand,’ if nothing else.”
Using euthanasia as an example, Fernandes explained that most medical schools likely present only a pro-assisted suicide viewpoint.
“So if I teach a course on that, I’m going to invite the students to read articles about the other side – our (Catholic) side. These articles are not explicitly theological – they are often empirical, showing that the medical and sociological evidence favors life. If a committed pro-euthanasia medical student reads (perhaps for the first time) an article expressing a philosophical opposition to it, that’s a good thing for them,” he said. “On the other hand, if a student brings up religion or their Christianity, I’m not going to immediately shut it down. I’m going to let them speak and create that environment of openness.
“God made us to gravitate to the truth and to affirm truth things through our experience. So by just allowing people to engage in dialogue with one another, then I think there has to be this element of confidence, that if people are open minded, and they use reason, that they will be led to certain truths about the human person.”
Another scenario that Fernandes presents to students to make them think beyond popular rhetoric on life issues is the human dignity of persons with disabilities.
“You can press students and push them to say, ‘Well, people with disabilities can’t function the same way able-bodied people can, so what is it that gives them their dignity?’” he said. “Have you ever reflected on that? And when you guide them into an uncomfortable position of self-reflection, then they start to think, ‘Well, if it can’t be based on what they do or what they don’t do or what they did, then what is our human dignity based on?’
“And a lot of students find that they have to keep going back and back and back and trying to establish things like the dignity of human life for the sake of sanctity of human life, if you will, in things that are transcendent.”
According to most surveys, most medical students support abortion. They are offered training in abortion procedures, but there’s a misconception that doctors are required to perform an abortion or provide referrals to individuals seeking one.
“I can give you one example that really comes to mind,” Fernandes said. “I was teaching a class to fourth-year medical students who were about to graduate. I was explaining to them that conscience protection is given to medical students and residents and physicians who don’t want to do certain things, because it violates their philosophical or religious convictions.
“Two of them were going into OB (obstetrics), and they were very pro-choice. And they said, ‘Well, that’s not true. If someone wants an abortion, you have to give it to them, or you have to refer them.’ I said, ‘Actually, that’s not true. I’m not sure where you learned that,’ but they said, ‘Well, we learned it in our curriculum here.’
“So I went up to my office, I brought some of the evidence like a printout of the statute in Ohio and the federal laws, and they looked at this and they were stunned. They were visibly stunned. And they said to me, ‘You know, we don’t agree with the pro-life movement, but if we had known this, we wouldn’t have been so angry.’
“So that’s kind of an example where I feel like it opened their mind, not to necessarily becoming pro-life all of a sudden but to an understanding of the other points of view: ‘Yeah, medical students who are pro-life are actually within their rights within the law, and they’re using their conscience.’ And once these pro-choice medical students understood that, they were more tolerant. I consider that a victory.”
Fernandes’ embrace of the intermingling of science, faith and reason is rooted in his Catholic upbringing.
His deeply devoted Catholic parents came to the United States from the Goa state of southwestern India, a Portuguese colony that considers St. Francis Xavier its patron saint, in the early 1970s. Fernandes’ father also was a physician, and the five boys in the family followed in his footsteps and were accepted to medical school. Three of them completed the curriculum, and one left to enter the priesthood. Another brother is a judge in Toledo.
“My mom was kind of the pious half, and my dad was more of the intellectual – let’s dissect this, let’s look at the philosophy of theology,” Fernandes said. “The intellectual arguments for my mom were not really as important as how holy you were inside – whether you said your rosary and whether you prayed every day.”
As an undergraduate at the University of Toledo, he knew he wanted to be a doctor but also became fascinated with philosophy. He graduated with a double major in biology and philosophy with an emphasis on bioethics.
After two years of medical school at Ohio State, he left to pursue graduate studies in philosophy at Johns Hopkins and then returned to complete his medical degree. He then did a residency in pediatrics in St. Louis from 2003 to 2006 before returning to Ohio to start his professional career at the Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine and then coming to Columbus in 2014.
“I’ve found that the more I studied, the more I learned about science, the more I learned about medicine, the more I learned about philosophy, those truths didn’t contradict Church teaching,” he said. “There was a harmonious element. It made more sense the more I studied.”
Fernandes describes his career as having his feet in two worlds – the secular, which is clinical, and medical ethics. From a Catholic perspective, the challenge is to spread the truth about human life that’s palatable to Christians and non-Christians.
“There’s that conversion process, and you look at it from the point of view that a doctor takes an oath to preserve life and that we have to look at all human life having a value,” he said. “I think that element of medicine – that all human life has a value – is under the greatest threat.
“And now we’re seeing the challenge on the other end of the spectrum to where medical students and doctors are talking about how is it really life if an advanced Alzheimer’s patient can’t remember anything about their previous life but can function?
“Of if you’re in the ICU in a persistent vegetative state, is that life, or maybe biological life but it’s not human life, or even through these various iterations of this? And it’s qualified in other respects like, ‘Well, it may be human life, but it may be OK to take that life anyway.’ It is a deep societal and cultural debate about what constitutes a person.
“And I think in medicine and science, we’re really developing this materialism about the human person, that the person is the sum of genes and biology, and anything which was not empirical is not real (but) only the things that we can test, we can verify.”
From the secularist’s perspective, he noted, the reasoning is that if people want to kill themselves, they should be allowed to do so.
“In Catholicism, we really place a value to suffering, but in the materialist view, as soon as you yourself are tired of suffering, there’s nothing after this life, right?” Fernandes said. “You just become worm food. You’re just atoms. We’re randomly here by accident. So if you suffer, it really doesn’t serve a purpose beyond this life.”
With more technological capabilities now available than at any time in human history, physical and spiritual healings are made possible that reinforce the natural law that states every life at every stage has worth.
“There is no contradiction between faith and reason,” Fernandes emphasized. “As Pope Benedict pointed out, and every pope has pointed out, technology has to be used at the service of the human person in a way that reveals, and not obscures, that person’s dignity, which is why Catholicism is beautiful in that it’s very well balanced.
“Ultimately, technology has one purpose, and that is to reveal the truth of the dignity of man. We can’t just embrace something because it is science, or because it is a new medical technology. If you think about abortion, your ability to kill an unborn child in the womb is a technology, and simply because doctors do it doesn’t mean doctors ought to do it.”
Partly due to the technology in place today, Ohio and other states have initiated heartbeat laws that prohibit abortion once a baby’s heartbeat can be detected in the womb. There’s also real hope that the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion in the United States will soon be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The law is always a reflection of the codification of a moral point of view,” Fernandes said. “So whenever you see a statute that’s pro-life or a law that’s pro-life, that to me is a good sign that the culture is changing underneath it.”
