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Mainstream bioethics is left-wing politics by another name. Practitioners therefore often seek to expand the jurisdiction of the field to push their favored political agendas — for example, to issues of war and peace.

In the latest example of this tendency, an influential journal just published a piece of advocacy for transforming general practitioners into instruments of fighting climate change. Specifically, the authors of the article urges doctors to nag their patients into reducing their carbon emissions. First, the authors acknowledge that the primary role of general practitioners currently is to focus on the medical issues of each individual patient, not to promote societal reform:

The General Practitioner (GP) is expected to operate with a wide sphere of interest, exploring the wider determinants of health and illness in their patients. They may use a biopsychosocial approach that attempts to navigate the relationship between the individual, their wider social network, and psychological experiences [1]. Axiologically, however, GPs are still expected to primarily confine their scope of concern to the patient immediately in front of them; the professional role of the GP is hitherto considered as being to care for the patient as their ‘first concern’ [2], and only in rare cases should they subordinate that patient’s interests to wider concerns.

If a loved one invited you to be there at their assisted suicide, what would you do? Would you refuse, and risk hurting them or facing familial estrangement? Or would you accept, knowing that your presence may be interpreted as approval of their decision? Wesley J. Smith encourages listeners to wrestle with these deep ethical questions with Dr. Marcus Peter on Ave Maria Radio. “It really is an important issue for us to contemplate before the question comes because right now, one-third of the population of the United States lives in a jurisdiction where assisted suicide is legal.” Further reading:

Many big shots in the bioethics community continue to argue against “medical conscience,” insisting that doctors should be forced to perform all requested legal medical procedures — even if it involves the taking of human life — that can produce the result the patient wants.

In the latest ani-conscience broadside, published in the professional journal Bioethics, two internationally known bioethicists, Julian Savulescu and Udo Schuklenk, take an almost absolutist position:

Our argument is that patients have a right to receive health care when four necessary conditions are satisfied (citations omitted):

1. The treatment is legal in that jurisdiction.
2. Providing the treatment is consistent with constraints of distributive justice.
3. The treatment is in the patient’s interests.
4. The patient autonomously desires the treatment.

The doctors define “patient’s interest” as a “benefit recognisable within accepted professional standards of benefit and harm.” Note carefully that these are often ideological, as opposed to medical, positions.

Wesley J. Smith appeared on Driving Home the Faith, a production of Sacred Heart Radio, to discuss recent attempts to redefine the term “infertility.” The New England Journal of Medicine recently took issue with the World Health Organization’s definition of “infertility” and advocated for a revised definition that includes same-sex couples and single people. Smith explains why this categorical redefinition is problematic. “What it creates is an almost absolute right to have a baby by any means that is required to have that child,” Smith states. Further reading:

What if saving a human life could itself raise serious moral questions? Millions of human embryos are estimated to be frozen in the United States, many abandoned by the parents who created them through IVF. For some, the solution seems obvious: Why not adopt these embryos, give them a chance to be born, and welcome them into loving families? Does Catholic teaching support embryo adoption, or prohibit it? And if frozen embryos are human beings who deserve to be gestated, is leaving them frozen indefinitely morally comparable to abortion? These questions are deeply contested within Catholic bioethics. In Part 3 of our series examining the arguments for and against embryo adoption, we turn to the case in favor of prenatal Read More ›

The highbrow Dear Abby of the New York Times — a.k.a. The Ethicist (who is a philosophy professor at NYU) — published an inquiry from a reader whose “difficult aunt” is pondering assisted suicide. The Ethicist’s response was rather namby-pamby. From his answer:

It would be kind to give her a call, explaining that her messages left you concerned and uncertain about her situation. (A decision to seek MAID is a far cry from obtaining it; eligibility is subject to a formal medical assessment.) You can ask whether she has spoken to her doctors about MAID and what they’ve told her. Just be careful about offering more than you can give. You don’t have to make yourself available for an extended or continuing conversation.

The “difficult aunt” aspect of the question deflected from the truly pressing moral issue that the inquiry presented. What if you are asked to support someone with whom you are close — a parent, spouse, child, sibling, cousin, friend — in his or her decision to commit assisted suicide. More anguishing, what if your loved one wants you to be there for it? What would you do?

Should “nature” be accorded enforceable human-type rights? Not too long ago, the very notion would have been laughed out of town.

But no one is chuckling now. Over the last decade, support for granting legal rights to nature has steadily seeped from the radical fringe into the establishment mainstream.

So what are we talking about?

The usual definition states that nature—which, when you think about it, is everything that exists—has “the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles” in evolution. That comes close to a right to life for all of flora and fauna, doesn’t it?

Such proposals are already being adopted at both national and local levels. Hence, Peruvian bees have been granted rights. A Canadian town recently granted “the right to life, to natural growth, to integrity and to regeneration”…for trees!

We are often told that the family is the basic unit of society. But these days, the family is in trouble as an institution. Fewer people are getting married. Divorce rates are high. We face a birth dearth that is impacting our demography. We even see advocacy for estrangement between children and parents, brothers and sisters over political differences. It Read More ›

I am so used to ideologically extreme and transgressive articles published in science and other professional journals, that when one publishes commonsense commentary, I think it should be applauded. As most readers know, there is a great advocacy push underway to have AI declared to be — or soon to be — conscious and hence, entitled to “rights” as “persons.” (I have responded to this advocacy on several occasions.) Now, an article in Nature — written by three academics — strongly rebuts that blatant anthropomorphism. From “Three Reasons Why AI Is Not Conscious and Perhaps Never Will Be”: Between us, we’ve spent decades studying consciousness from diverse scientific perspectives: experimental neuroscience, theoretical neurobiology and philosophy of mind. On the basis of this work, we Read More ›

Could your miscarriage have been prevented? What if the cause of your pregnancy loss was something your doctor never investigated? Miscarriage affects approximately 1 in 5 recognized pregnancies. Yet too often, women are told their loss was simply bad luck, a chromosomal abnormality, or a consequence of age. They’re told to try again, sometimes without a thorough investigation into what went wrong. But what if some miscarriages aren’t inevitable? What if treatable medical conditions are being overlooked? And why are women who can conceive naturally but repeatedly miscarry referred for IVF without addressing the underlying causes? In this deeply personal episode of Bioethics Babe, host Arina Grossu Agnew shares her experience of two early miscarriages and sits down with returning Read More ›