bioethics

A little noticed litigation in the United Kingdom could be a harbinger of medical woes to come here in the United States. Leslie Burke, age 44, is suing for the right to stay alive. Yes, you read right: Burke, who has a terminal neurological disease, is deathly afraid that doctors will refuse to provide him wanted food and water when Read More ›

Consumer’s Guide to aBrave New World,by Wesley J. Smith(Encounter, 219 pp., $25.95) Leo Strauss found it telling that Machiavelli mentioned only one other figure who served as the teacher of princes, the office that Machiavelli was claiming for himself. And that was Chiron the centaur, who was aptly constituted to be a tutor of princes because he was half man, Read More ›

Ever since embryonic stem cells were first extracted from human embryos in 1998, biotechnologists, abetted by a compliant media, have promised they would soon lead to miraculous medical cures for degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. First, we were told, all that would be needed were stem cell lines extracted from “surplus” embryos “left over” from in vitro fertilization 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 ›

Original article Jack Kevorkian shocked consciences and turned stomachs a few years ago when he advocated using assisted-suicide victims as subjects of medical experimentation, a process he planned to call “obitiatry.” Even though Kevorkian is now in prison in Michigan, it appears that his idea of medically experimenting on the bodies of dying people is gaining adherents in the bioethics Read More ›

The animal-rights/liberation movement is living high on the hog these days. In the last election, for example, activists induced Florida voters to grant gestating sows a state constitutional right to be kept in a space large enough to turn around in. As a consequence, the two pig farms in the state that had used gestation crates to confine pregnant pigs Read More ›

This article, published by BreakPoint, mentions Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley Smith: According to Wesley Smith of the Discovery Institute, “futile-care” theory is “one of the most dangerous topics [under discussion] in contemporary bioethics. The rest of the article can be found here.

Original Article Who should have the right to decide whether you receive life-sustaining medical during a critical or terminal illness? Most would say with great confidence, “Me. Or, if I am unable to decide, then my family.” That should be true. Indeed, it used to be true. But in a growing number of hospitals, your right-to-decide is being taken away Read More ›

When President Bush selected bioethicist and author Leon R. Kass to head the President’s Council on Bioethics, many were outraged. Kass, a critic of human cloning, was accused of being a Luddite who would use his position to stack the council deck against “scientific progress.” But that is not how Kass viewed his mandate. He envisioned that the council would Read More ›

Is all human cloning wrong? Should doctors be allowed to kill people in permanent comas and harvest their organs? Would it be moral to deny expensive medical procedures to the seriously ill and disabled in order to provide health coverage for the uninsured? Do elderly people have a duty to die to spare their families and communities the financial and Read More ›