The arguments surrounding abortion, physician-assisted suicide, and similar issues revolve not around when life begins but when our responsibility for life begins, according to former pro-choice doctor Kristin Collier.

Collier, associate professor at the University of Michigan, gave two lectures at Hillsdale Oct. 11. One focused on how she became a  Christian and pro-life, and the second addressed the ethical implications of physician-assisted suicide.

“How will patients trust me if they come in to me and they’re not sure if I’m going to heal them or kill them?” Collier asked.

This wasn’t always Collier’s view, however. After she started practicing medicine, she struggled with the idea of how a benevolent God could allow death and suffering.

“I’ve seen people bleed out in front of me from their mouths. I was like, ‘I want nothing to do with God, or really anything to do with his people,’” Collier said.

After Collier got married, her husband, Tim, became a Christian and began taking their children to church, but Collier said she still wasn’t interested. When Collier struggled to breastfeed her youngest child, Isaac, a lactation consultant, Brandy, helped her. A year later, Collier sent Brandy a thank you email, and Brandy, a pastor’s wife, invited her to a Bible study.

“People ask me, ‘What did you hear exactly that was so moving for you?’” Collier said. “And really, I heard hope. As a physician, all I see are broken bodies, broken people, and to hear one day that there’s a hope of resurrected bodies, and God took on flesh and came to us in Jesus Christ as a man, and he will wipe every tear away from our face, and he will accompany us to the end of the age — that is hopeful.”

Even after her conversion, however, Collier said she was unsure how her Christianity should affect her professional life, especially on topics such as pregnancy termination.

“I thought, ‘How could I, as a self respecting female physician-scientist, change my mind about abortion?’” Collier said.

However, Collier said, by the grace of God, she eventually came to see abortion for what it was.

“Abortion is violence against women,” Collier said. “It’s violence against our prenatal brothers and sisters. And it’s violence in the person who performs the abortion.”

Collier’s faith informs her to push back against what she calls a “culture of death” pervading modern society. In the practice of abortion and assisted suicide, she said she sees an epidemic of the devaluation of human life taking the country to “diabolical places.”

Collier described people who are afflicted with disability, cognitive decline, or terminal illness are often considered “socially dead” by healthcare systems. 

“There are all these people, not just the prenatal child, whose dignity we find deeply inconvenient to us, and we exclude them from our moral sphere of concern,” Collier said.

When an audience member asked her on the moral equivalence of taking someone off of life support to physician-assisted suicide, Collier said intent is a key difference. 

Physician-assisted suicide and abortion differ from healthcare actions such as removing life support because they “aim at death,” whereas removing life support merely changes the conditions of your life, according to Collier.

Collier claimed that the adoption of physician-assisted suicide would lead to other, more humane, end-of-life options, such as hospice, being threatened. In her slideshow, she cited an article from the BBC describing how U.K. hospice clinics that don’t offer assisted suicide will face a lack of funding.

“If I believe as a physician that every human being has inherent worth and inviolable dignity because of the imago Dei, then it’s always wrong for me to aim directly at their death,” Collier said.

Collier stressed the significance of viewing the human person with dignity, giving examples of those negatively affected by assisted suicide.

“She talked about different stories of people, because a lot of people, when they’re arguing about this, want to say it just affects one person,” said freshman Ben Leavesley.

Senior Daniel Doyle said he appreciated Collier’s perspective as someone who hadn’t always been a Christian.

“I think it’s very common for Christians who have been raised with a worldview that puts abortion as an evil thing — which I believe it is — but it’s easy to have the perspective that people who don’t agree understand that and willfully object, because they have this evil position,” Doyle said. “She was able to deconstruct it in a very charitable way that I think is useful to students to then go out into the world where a lot of people think abortion is completely fine.”

Collier closed both lectures with a challenge to the audience: do we have the courage to defend the imago Dei in today’s world?

Quoting author Ilya Kaminsky, Collier concluded, “At the trial of God, we will ask, ‘Why did you allow all this?’ And the answer will be an echo, ‘Why did you allow all this?’ Let us all be courageous defenders of human dignity until the Lord himself returns.”