ASSISTED SUICIDE/EUTHANASIA activists are sure a restless bunch. They never seem able to settle on the right terminology to convince people to support legalizing mercy killing. First, it was euthanasia, a perfectly fine word that had a meaning generally akin to today’s concept of hospice before being hijacked by the right-to-die crowd in the early 20th century. When “euthanasia” didn’t Read More ›
“British scientists have been given permission to perform therapeutic cloning using human embryos for the first time,” reported the August 11, 2004, BBC News. What a remarkable statement. Not the fact that the UK will permit researchers to create human cloned embryos-that has been on the drawing board for some time. What made this report so startling was that the Read More ›
John Kerry has a well-deserved reputation for waffling and attempting to get on every side of every issue. Now, he’s done it again by signing up as a co-sponsor (along with Senators Orin Hatch and Dianne Feinstein) of what could be called the Human Cloning Legalization and Legitimization Act of 2003 (S. 303). The legislation isn’t really called that. Such Read More ›
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 ›
Consumers 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.