Center on Human Exceptionalism
MANY WHO SUPPORT Terri Schiavo’s threatened dehydration assert that removing a feeding tube from a profoundly cognitively disabled person results in a painless and gentle ending. But is this really true? After all, it would be agonizing if you or I were locked in a room for two weeks and deprived of all food and water. So, why should we Read More ›
One evening, during the second term of President Ronald Reagan, Terri Schiavo and her husband Michael decided to watch a television movie about Karen Ann Quinlan. Quinlan, as most readers know, had a tragic life. After overdosing on a combination of drugs and alcohol, she fell into unconsciousness and never awakened. Her parents won a lawsuit in the New Jersey Read More ›
WHEN TERRI SCHIAVO collapsed in 1990, causes unknown, she could have had no idea that 13 years later people the world over would know her name and care very much about whether she lived or died. Yet what began as a private tragedy—a vivacious young woman stricken in the very prime of her life with a brain injury that left Read More ›
POLLS SHOW that most Americans want to ban all human cloning. President Bush is eager to sign such a measure into law. The House has twice enacted a strong legal prohibition with wide, bipartisan votes. But cloning advocates have so far blocked passage of a ban in the Senate (Brownback/Landrieu) by asserting that “therapeutic cloning” might someday provide stem cell Read More ›
For more than ten years, conscious and unconscious cognitively disabled people who use feeding tubes have been legally dehydrated to death in the United States. This intentional life-ending act—clamping feeding tubes and denying all sustenance—has become so ubiquitous that, generally, little attention is paid. This public indifference was shattered by the Terri Schiavo litigation, an epic legal, political, and media Read More ›
It was bound to happen. First, proponents of the culture of death brought us physician-assisted suicide (PAS). Now, we must contend with IAS – Internet-assisted suicide. Yes, you read right. As reported by Julia Scheeres in the June 8 San Francisco Chronicle, suicide promotion and facilitation has entered cyberspace. In “A Virtual Path to Suicide,” Scheeres demonstrates how indifferent to Read More ›
For many years, the bunker-buster in the pro-assisted-suicide arsenal has been its supposed inevitability. Pointing to multiple public-opinion polls showing support for assisted suicide generally in the high 60-percent range, euthanasia advocates claimed that only a rigid, religiously motivated minority – e.g., Catholics – was keeping Americans from accessing the “ultimate civil right.” Soon, they cheerily predicted, the anti-assisted-suicide medievalists Read More ›
The animal-rights/liberation movement (ARL) will never win an award for truth in advertising. If the facts serve their cause, yes, they will tell the truth. But if a half-truth or even an outright lie better suits their purposes – well, what does honesty matter when the cause of ending human hegemony over animals is so important and just? Perhaps the Read More ›
IT IS BECOMING INCREASINGLY clear that the bio-anarchists leading the charge to Brave New World want a virtually unlimited license to engage in human cloning. The proof is in the legislation they keep trying to pass. It is bad enough that in Washington, senators Orin Hatch, Republican of Utah, and Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, have introduced the Human Cloning Read More ›
PEOPLE for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has finally and unequivocally come off the rails. Attempting to convince us to become vegetarians, the anti-human advocacy group has mounted a new public relations campaign asserting that the eating of meat is the equivalent of the torture and slaughter of Jews by the Nazis.This odious message isn’t insinuated subtly between the lines. Read More ›