Human Exceptionalism

This article, published by The Village Voice, references Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith:

In his book Forced Exit (Times Books), Wesley quotes neurologist William Burke: “A conscious person would feel it [dehydration] just as you and I would. . . . Their skin cracks, their tongue cracks, their lips crack. They may have nosebleeds because of the drying of the mucous membranes, and heaving and vomiting might ensue because of the drying out of the stomach lining.

Bureaucracy has trumped morality in the Netherlands. How else can one explain a country where, when doctors admit publicly that they commit eugenic infanticide, the leaders’ response is not to prosecute them for murder, but instead to urge that guidelines be created under which future baby killings can openly take place? The “Groningen Protocol” — named after a pediatric hospital Read More ›

As Terri Schiavo approaches her 94th hour without food or water, tensions rise across the country on both sides of the issue. Below, Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, attorney, and ethicist, released a statement regarding the latest ruling by a judge in Florida to block Terri’s feeding tube to be reinserted, thus sustaining her life. Read More ›

YOU PROBABLY DIDN’T HEAR ABOUT IT, since it received such little media coverage, but last week, by a nearly 3-1 vote, the United Nations General Assembly urged the world to “prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life.” True, “The United Nations Declaration on Human Cloning,” is not Read More ›

IF ACADEMY AWARDS were given for the greatest lost opportunity, Million Dollar Baby would have won them, too. As anyone who has been paying attention to the ruckus mounted ably and righteously by the disability rights community must now know, the movie climaxes with Frankie, Clint Eastwood’s character, euthanizing the once indomitable Maggie, his boxing protégé, played by Hillary Swank. Read More ›

The Supreme Court had barely announced that it was accepting the federal government’s appeal of Oregon v. Ashcroft, and the mainstream media was already reporting the story incorrectly. For example, the Associated Press’s lead paragraph about the news stated: The Supreme Court said Tuesday it will hear a challenge to the nation’s only assisted-suicide law, taking up the Bush administration’s Read More ›

Let’s call it “stealth human-cloning legalization.” It’s easy to do: First, write a proposed law that you claim outlaws human cloning. But then, engage in a little slight of hand here, some redefining of a few crucial terms there, and viola! — your supposed cloning ban actually authorizes human cloning, implantation, and gestation through the ninth month. That is what Read More ›

IAN WILMUT, the co-creator of Dolly the Sheep, now intends to clone human life. This is quite a shift for Wilmut. When he and Keith Campbell entered the science pantheon with their announcement of the birth of Dolly, they forced the world to grapple with the question of whether it is moral to clone human life. But Wilmut claimed not Read More ›

Demagoguery comes easy to the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The most recent example comes out of Australia, where PETA is mounting an international boycott against that nation’s wool industry over the admittedly unpleasant — but necessary — Australian sheep-ranching practice known as “mulesing” (described below). Yet the defensive response of the Australian wool industry after being Read More ›

BIOTECHNOLOGY is becoming dangerously close to raging out of control. Scientists are engaging in ever increasingly macabre experiments that threaten to mutate nature and the human condition at the molecular level. Worse, many scientists have made it clear that society has no right to apply the brakes. According to this view, scientists have a constitutional right under the First Amendment Read More ›