ROCKHAMPTON priest Fr Kevin McGovern had a hand in some of Australia’s most contentious health ethics debates of the past decade.
He contributed to health ethics guidelines on IVF and reproductive technologies, organ and tissue donation and transplantation, mitochondrial donation and pandemic decision making at a national level.
After nine years, Fr McGovern is stepping down from his role with the Australian Health Ethics Committee, and Australian Catholic University Queensland Bioethics Centre director Dr David Kirchhoffer will take his place.
“I had nine very interesting and productive years on AHEC,” Fr McGovern said.
“After nine years, I think I reasonably decided it was time for someone else to take over that role and I’m absolutely delighted that David Kirchhoffer has been chosen to be on the new AHEC – I think David will do a very good job in that role.”
Fr McGovern brought a Church-based perspective to emerging health ethics concerns.
He said the Church often acted as a cautionary agent in these fields and “a good corrective to the hype that sometimes comes with new cures”.
“If you look at what you find in newspapers, the story they want to write is – ‘new cures found, disease eliminated, happy ending for all’ – and you see lots of stories like that in the papers,” Fr McGovern said.
“Because that’s the narrative that we want, it sometimes happens that researchers can be too optimistic in claiming what they’re able to do.
“I think given that happens, it’s an appropriate role for the Church to be cautious about these things and to just make sure that the hype doesn’t get ahead of what can actually be done.”
An example of concern was the acceleration and increased spread of research that affected human genetics and the human genome.
“In principle, if we are able to find solutions to some of these serious diseases that would be a wonderful thing because it would allow people to enjoy a better quality of life and horizons opened up for that wouldn’t otherwise exist,” he said.
“But at the same stage, like anyone else in this field, I would be cautious to proceed in a way that is evidence-based, and we need to be cautious because we’re affecting the human genome and in some cases we’re making changes that would be passed down through the generations and we have to be pretty confident that we’re able to do things that will improve life rather than make it worse.”
Fr McGovern was brought onto the committee in 2012 after his work on the Heerey Review of Australia’s Commonwealth Laws on cloning and embryo research, which reported in June 2011.
From 2013 to 2017, Fr McGovern was on a working group that arrived with the national health guidelines for IVF and reproductive technology.
From 2017 to 2019, he worked on ethical guidelines around organ and tissue donation and transplantation.
In 2019, he worked on mitochondrial donation.
When COVID arrived in early 2020, AHEC had a new task to provide ethical advice for decision makers during a pandemic.
His group produced a document, Decision Making For Pandemics: An Ethics Framework, which offered principles to guide Australia’s response to a pandemic.
He said his team ended up being “quite proud of the document” and he hoped it could be of benefit to decision makers during this pandemic and the ones to follow.
Upcoming health ethics debates
Fr McGovern is keeping his eye on three topics for future health ethics debates – big data, artificial intelligence, and genetics and genomics.
Big data is a field that looks at how to analyse, systematically extract information from, or otherwise deal with data sets that are too large or complex for normal computer software.
In health, big data might refer to genetic and genomic information or general health information.
Fr McGovern sees two big issues here – privacy and making sure the links drawn in big data are accurate.
He said if decision makers used a linkage made by big data to decide that people with a particular gene did not respond well to a particular treatment, then that could be a life-or-death situation for the individual.
This tied in with his concerns about artificial intelligence.
These days, AI is used and trusted to sort, analyse and draw the conclusions in big data.
Fr McGovern said this could lead to what was called a black box.
A black box was “where we put the information in one end and some conclusions come out the other end, but because of the complexity of the process we don’t really know what happens inside the black box”, he said.
“There’s a saying – ‘garbage in, garbage out’,” he said.
His third area of concern was the emerging field of genetics and genomics.
Having safeguards around the intention of the research was his major concern.
He said it was important that people who were on the quest to improve healthcare were able to raise questions of ethics “so that the science is influenced by human concerns rather than going forward because researchers want to continue their research project”.
An imperfect system for an imperfect world
Fr McGovern said the process of an independent committee report to a bill on the floor of parliament was “an imperfect system, which works imperfectly”.
He said there had been such widespread acceptance of legislation for euthanasia that the “very real human concerns” about the state providing the means for people to kill themselves had fallen on deaf ears.
“Hopefully in all of that, if we don’t have the capacity to stop a law which is going to be a bad law, in many cases we can at least do something to make a bad law slightly less bad,” he said.
“That’s always an unsatisfying outcome but less bad is better than more bad.
“In the work I’ve done at AHEC, my hope is I’ve made some reports better and I’ve made some reports less bad and that’s kind of what you do in these things in an imperfect world.”
Fr McGovern said for nine years he had been in a situation of trying to influence the process from within.
“There’s some things you can do from within and some things you can’t … but the way society works is we all try to get involved where we can and we all do our best to come up with guidelines and laws which are as good as they can be, and it was certainly a privilege for me to be able to contribute to those processes, hopefully to have some impact for good.”
