Medicine and Justice

I had lunch with Deb today. Deb & I first met three years ago as new doctoral students in Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary. We now co-facilitate Fuller's online ethics course, and Karla & I frequently get together with her and her husband Murray for dinner, cards, or movies.

We have two other things in common: Deb underwent several months of chemotherapy two years ago, and she shares my ambivalence toward the purported comradery of "cancer survivors."

I sometimes joke as if surviving cancer were a heroic feat on my part--"I stared at death and death blinked"--but in reality, it was a long, unpleasant process of self-discovery that left me permanently suspicious of the notion of heroism itself. I can't say whether I'm a better person because of it. I can say that I really like life as I've known it, and that I have no idea whether this life would be as rich if my experiences with cancer were written out of it. But to use "cancer survivor" as a ticket into some elite club runs counter to everything I experienced in the first place. Of course, I would want to be available to come alongside anyone facing cancer, but one's bout with cancer is personal enough to make it impossible for me to imagine that we automatically have a connection or that I have some bit of wisdom to pass along.

For her part, Deb's identity has more to do with her involvement in activities related to social and economic justice than with her medical history. Having had breast cancer, she knows that she would make an easy poster child for medical research, but she's aware that the beneficiaries of such research would be people who, like herself and like me, can afford decent medical care. The needs of forty million uninsured Americans, eleven million undocumented aliens, and some three billion undernourished citizens of the world receive less attention and funding than the ailments of the affluent. Everyone cares about breast cancer, she says, because it predominantly affects wealthy white women; but nobody holds a fund-raising parade to broaden the scope of our humanitarian concerns.

It's not that either of us looks lightly on the sacrifices others have made to keep people like us alive. That we are still here is a gift from God and from a large network of committed professionals and volunteers, and we owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude. But I do have to agree that in our commitment to medical research and improved treatments we often overlook potentially embarrassing questions concerning who gets to enjoy the fruits of that research, who gets left out, and why race, national citizenship and economic privilege continue to play such vital roles in dividing the spoils.