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 ›
They keep threatening to do it, and now, they say they have. The flying-saucer cult, the Raelians, announced that its scientists have implanted a woman with a cloned human embryo. “The next announcement will be the birth of a baby,” their chief scientist Brigitte Boisselier, cheerily announced to the world. Whether this is actually true, or whether such an embryo 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 ›
LAST WEEK the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) made headlines when it issued a broadside that would, if followed by Congress, grant an open-ended license for biotech researchers to clone human life. True, the NAS recommended that Congress ban “reproductive” cloning, that is, the use of a cloned embryo to produce a born baby. But it also urged that human Read More ›