Center on Human Exceptionalism
THE BODY OF HOMICIDE VICTIM Joseph Tushkowski underwent “a bizarre mutilation,” proclaimed Oakland County (Mich.) medical examiner L.J. Dragovic in mid-June. According to the autopsy findings, the mutilator, after killing Tushkowski with a lethal injection, crudely ripped out his kidneys. He didn’t even bother to remove the dead man’s clothes, but simply lifted up the sweater, did his dirty work, Read More ›
People who are elderly, disabled, prematurely born, or seriously ill have much to fear from the medical intelligentsia — those bioethicists and moral philosophers who have in recent years transformed medical ethics. It was bioethicists and moral philosophers, after all, who made it acceptable to dehydrate to death people diagnosed as permanently unconscious — a practice that has already spread Read More ›
WHEN EUTHANASIA ENTHUSIASTS urged Oregon voters to legalize assisted suicide, they promised an open, rational, and carefully regulated system in which physician-hastened death would be a “last resort.” Voters were also assured that life termination would be conducted under the watchful and protective eye of the state, with rigorous guidelines strictly enforced to prevent abuse. Assisted suicide was to be Read More ›
The Clinton Administration recently issued a new set of rules permitting federally funded research on embryonic stem cells. The guidelines were hailed in many quarters as a victory for “science.” But what kind of science? Astonishingly, some supporters are offering arguments that echo the ideas of the racist scientists who paved the way for the Third Reich. The medical value Read More ›
The following is edited from an address delivered on July 15, 1996 as part of the annual C. S. Lewis Institute at Seattle Pacific University. The author would like to thank Prof. Michael Macdonald for his encouragement and for inviting the author to present the lecture. During the summer of 1932, Oxford don C. S. Lewis traveled to Ireland to Read More ›
Since their dramatic election victory last November, Republicans have been urged to avoid getting “bogged down in divisive social issues.” Yet as the controversy over President Clinton’s nomination of Henry Foster for surgeon general has shown, Americans are more concerned about so-called social issues than media coverage and elite opinion would indicate. This is particularly true of abortion, ostensibly the Read More ›
Today is my 76th birthday,” the letter began. “Unassisted and by my own free will, I have chosen to take my final passage.” Suicide. My friend Frances died in a cold, impersonal hotel room after taking an overdose of sleeping pills, with a plastic bag tied over her head suffocating the life out of her body. Frances was not a Read More ›
The right-to-life movement has mastered a powerful new tool of persuasion: medical technology. A recently developed science called fetology has greatly enhanced knowledge of the human unborn, and harbors an implied challenge to the legal practice of abortion. “Now for the first time, we have the technology to see the abortion from the victim’s vantage point,” says Dr. Bernard Nathanson, Read More ›