Center on Human Exceptionalism
Charles de Gaulle once remarked that France without greatness isn’t France. Nowadays, we’re wondering whether France without common sense can still lay claim to greatness, or to much of anything else. The wonderment is more than rhetorical. For the nation that once gave the world the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” now adds to its legal system a concept Read More ›
Imagine visiting your 85-year-old mother in the hospital after she has a debilitating stroke. You find out that, in order to survive, she requires a feeding tube and antibiotics to fight an infection. She once told you that no matter what happened, she wants to live. But the doctor refuses further life-sustaining treatment. When you ask why, you are told, Read More ›
WHEN OREGON VOTERS legalized assisted suicide in 1994, state regulators had a problem. They wanted to authorize doctors to prescribe barbiturates as killing agents. But the federal government regulates the use of these drugs under the Controlled Substances Act, and federal law did not permit their use to intentionally kill. Ordinarily, that would have been that. The feds, not the Read More ›
WHEN JOHN CAMPBELL’S TEENAGE SON CHRISTOPHER became comatose after a car accident in 1994, the last problem Campbell expected was obtaining proper medical treatment for his son. Campbell, a corporate executive, had excellent health insurance and was convinced Christopher would receive the best of care. But then something awful happened. One month after the accident, Christopher developed a burning fever. Read More ›
Support for organ donation in this country is, as the clich has it, a mile wide and an inch deep. This is understandable. Most people favor the concept of giving “the gift of life” in the abstract. But when it comes to permitting their own loved ones’ body parts to be “harvested” for transplantation — a decision families must make Read More ›
Looking back, it’s clear that abortion and adoption are issues that cannot be separated. But the link wasn’t necessarily evident when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled abortion legal in 1973. It took three decades for bipartisan consensus to emerge that abortion was unlikely to be declared illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court and that efforts to promote adoption were the Read More ›
STEM CELLS are undifferentiated “master cells” in the body that can develop into differentiated tissues, such as bone, muscle, nerve, or skin. Stem cell research may lead to exponential improvements in the treatment of many terminal and debilitating conditions, from cancer to Parkinson’s to Alzheimer’s to diabetes to heart disease. Indeed, break-throughs in stem cell research reported just in the Read More ›
Brave New World has arrived at last, as we always knew it would. On January 22, 2001, Britain’s House of Lords voted overwhelmingly to permit the cloning and maintenance of human embryos up to 14 days old for the purposes of medical experimentation, thereby taking the first terrible step toward the legalization of full-blown human cloning. Meanwhile, an international group Read More ›
During the first three decades of the 20th century the eugenics movement thrived in the United States and throughout much of the Western world. Meaning “good in birth,” eugenicists believed that society could improve the physical, mental, cultural, and social health of humanity through selective breeding techniques that would eventually eliminate feeblemindedness, epilepsy, criminality, insanity, alcoholism, and pauperism. This utopia Read More ›