re: Vatican Updates Health Care Charter (National Catholic Register, 2/13/17)

Thanks to the translation work of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, hard copies of the Vatican's Updated Charter for Health Care Workers are now available in English.  It is the best compendium of Catholic medical ethics / bioethics, which you will want to supplement with relevant medical information and original magisterial teaching.  Like the original, the updated charter consists of sections on procreating, living, and dying, between its introduction and conclusion.

In its introduction, the Charter reminds us that the vocation of health care is to be greatly honored.  All that the it proclaims about procreation rests on the truth that “11….The inseparable bond between conjugal love and human generation, imprinted on the nature of the human person, is a law by which everyone must be guided and to which everyone is held.”  While the Church clearly prohibits so-called embryo "transfers" from one woman to another, some have suggested - even after the Vatican's Dignitas Personae of 2008 - that a door might be yet be ajar for consideration of exceptions for so-called "snowflake adoptions." I find nothing in the Charter to support this.

The section on "Living" is the largest in the Charter and covers a vast array of areas, including potentially abortifacient "interceptives" and "contraceptives."
Like Dignitas Personae before it, the Charter offers NO guidelines for any supposed "moral" use of interceptives or contragestatives, indicating the need for change in practices at Catholic hospitals.  From a medical standpoint, Doctors (Rev.) Juan Vélez, Rebecca Peck, Chris Kahlenborn, Walter B. Severs, Walter Rella, Julio Tudelo, Justo Aznar and Bruno Moznegga, as well as the Catholic Medical Association, have been warning us that there is NO way to use interceptives or contraceptives without the very real risk of causing abortion.

While footnote #167 might seem to infer a favorable judgment on the use of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells, Section 30 of Dignitas Personae appears to preclude their use.  Dr. Diane Irving tells us that "'Some iPS cell are potentially embryos'....Given the ability of cells to be reverted to the embryonic stage, she said, 'any human cell can be used for reproductive purposes,' so pro-life people must start making very careful distinctions about what type of cell is being created and used and the methods used to obtain them" (LifeSiteNews, 4/23/13).

The Church has NOT issued a definitive judgement on brain death criteria.  Dr. Peter Colosi (Our Sunday Visitor Newsweekly, 8/8/12) notes that "The medical studies of Dr. Alan Shewmon of UCLA Medical School are quite convincing indications that brain dead people are not dead, or at the very least that we do not have moral certainty that they are."  The updated Charter includes this 2008 cautious quote from Pope Benedict XVI: “In an area such as this, in fact, there cannot be the slightest suspicion of arbitration and where certainty has not been attained the principle of precaution must prevail. This is why it is useful to promote research and interdisciplinary reflection to place public opinion before the most transparent truth on the anthropological, social, ethical and juridical implications of the practice of transplantation."