Lecture compares various beliefs on death in U.S., Asia

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Every day — across the entire the world — people die and children are born.

But what all the countries of the world don’t share is their beliefs on life and death.

In her lecture Tuesday evening in the International Center titled “Birth and Death as Moment or Process? Intra-Cultural and Cross-Cultural Ambivalence” MSU assistant professor Ann Mongoven examined the differences between the U.S. and Asia and how they treat life and death in medicine.

The conventional thought is that Americans typically think of life and death as moments, such as a child’s conception, while Asians generally consider it to be a process, such as a baby’s growth in the womb.

A society’s view of the beginning and end to life plays a significant role in modern issues such as abortion, organ donation and removing patients from life support, Mongoven said.

“Not only are the answers different for how we handle these kind of issues, but the questions that are being asked are different,” she said. “Not to oversimplify, (but) there are very diverse views on these issues within a cultural context. Some of them are greatly overlapping.”

The lecture was the first of this semester’s “Bioethics East-West: Cross-Cultural Conversations at the Edges of Life” lecture series, which details the different viewpoints in the U.S. and Asia on some of societies most difficult ethical medical issues, said Mongoven, who organized the series.

The series will bring in experts from many MSU departments as well as Japan and Korea to examine medical issues such as aging, stem cell research, death rituals and organ donation, Mongoven said.

“In addition to getting different cultural perspectives on these issues, we’re also getting different field perspectives,” she said.

In the U.S., if a person was on life support and had lost brain function, they would be considered dead, she said. In Asia that person would generally still be considered alive because they are still breathing, still have a heartbeat and likely still have a relationship with the world around them.

Asians typically treat abortion differently than Americans and they often go to temples to openly mourn the loss of their child after the operation and then move past the tragedy, Mongoven said.

Philosophy senior Curtiss Dixon said he was surprised by how open Asians were with these ethical issues, which he said was because of their view on life and death.

“They’re very OK as far as serious ethical issues like abortion,” Dixon said. “Here we’re very sensitive with every issue that comes up.”

Interdisciplinary studies in social science senior Kristen Kwasnik said she didn’t think there was one, true answer to whether life was a process or a moment, but said it was a mixture of both.

“Scientifically speaking, it’s a moment, but I feel like bioethically speaking it’s a process,” Kwasnik said. “The family that experiences a death would experience the process of actually losing the person and grieving and the rituals that followed — burial, ceremonial, however they decide to celebrate that persons life.”

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