Bioethics

Many Western countries and jurisdictions are legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide. That opens up a problem for the death pushers. Since states aren’t going to get into the wet work of the actual killing, medical professionals and caregivers are going to be conscripted to do the deadly deeds — even if that means violating their religious beliefs and moral consciences.

Instead of resisting this rank authoritarianism, the medical and bioethics establishments are increasingly going along. This proposed coercion includes requiring doctors’ participation in suicides when patients starve and dehydrate themselves to death — known as VSED for “voluntary stop eating and drinking.”

As I wrote a few weeks ago here, the British Medical Association just so opined. And now, following closely in that guidance’s wake, a major article in the Journal of Health & Biomedical Law argues similarly — using dementia patients as the prime example — that doctors have to both inform patients about their right to commit suicide by VSED and ease the process by providing palliative care against the agony that killing oneself in that manner causes.

I once respected Anthony Fauci. But, during the Covid pandemic, I believe his power and the astonishing international celebrity generated by a fawning media went to his head. Worse, his hubris brought great disrepute on public health institutions and harmed the nation and its people.

But mainstream bioethicists — mostly political progressives who deploy their supposed authority as experts to push mostly left-wing health and political causes — see Fauci as one of their own. With the doctor now in some hot legal water, and his reputation visibly tarnished by recent disclosures from his diary and text messages, prominent bioethicists have published an open letter telling us to leave Fauci alone. From the “Open Letter of Support for Anthony Fauci from the Bioethics Community,” published in Bioethics Today (emphasis within the text):

As individuals concerned with ethics in science, medicine, and public health, we wish to express our dismay at the approach taken by Senate leaders to pursue an unwarranted, ill-advised, and frankly bizarre vendetta against a scientist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, rather than making a sincere effort to learn from the painful experiences of the pandemic to improve national preparedness. No human is perfect, but Dr. Fauci deserves appreciation for his decades of service to American science, and he deserves respect for taking on the difficult work of advising federal policy makers during the worst plague of this century. We condemn the decision to hold him legally in contempt of Congress as the outcome of a staged public persecution, and we fear the future implications of politically and legally targeting scientists who advise the government.

Hardly a “persecution,” and Fauci’s status as a “scientist” is irrelevant.

The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus famously wrote that bioethicists “professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as the unexceptional.”

He was right. Radical bioethical policies don’t just appear like magic out of the ether. Controversial—even pernicious—ideas are often debated in bioethics and medical journals where few among the public ever see them. Then, if a general consensus is reached within the field, policies once considered “unthinkable” are “suddenly” elevated into the justifiable and become unexceptional public policy.

Here are just two examples. Legalizing assisted suicide was once way beyond the pale. Then, bioethicists began arguing in favor of such laws, after which hastened death became debatable, then justifiable, and now, in many jurisdictions, so unremarkable that many thousands of people have died by that method.

Wesley J. Smith appeared on In the Market with Janet Parshall on August 13, 2026, to discuss the case of Baby Gabriel, a baby recently born via his surrogate after his parents ordered the surrogate to abort. Smith discussed the specifics of the case as well as the ethical issues with surrogacy. “It treats babies as so many products,” Smith explained. Smith also discussed a recent article from a professional journal calling for wildfires to be treated as a public health emergency. Smith explains why labeling everything a “public health crisis” is a danger to individual freedom. “It’s what I call a ‘technocracy,’ rule by experts,” said Smith. Read what Smith has written on these issues here:

An awful story has broken into the headlines illustrating the moral peril of commercial surrogacy. From the Texas Tribune story: [McKenna] West, a nurse, entered a surrogacy agreement in Alaska, where she lives, with the intended parents, Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed, through Worldwide Surrogacy Specialists, LLC, a Connecticut-based surrogacy agency. Typically under gestational agreements like the one that West signed with Gilkar and Ahmed, the intended parents, not the surrogate, have the parental rights to make choices relating to the fetus. The fetus West is carrying was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome at 20 weeks of pregnancy, and Gilkar and Ahmed allegedly asked her to undergo an abortion and they have said they will refuse to let the Read More ›

Media outlets are reporting that Stanford scientists used AI to create an artificial virus. From the Wall Street Journal story:

Artificial-intelligence systems have been displaying some eye-opening new abilities in recent weeks: breaking out of their enclosures, hacking other companies, lying to people.

And now, for the first time, an AI model has created a new virus. A whole family of them, in fact.

In a study published in the journal Science, researchers at Stanford University and elsewhere said they successfully directed an AI model to create a collection of simple viruses that only infect bacteria and pose no threat to humans.

These particular viruses may not be dangerous, but what about the next ones scientists manufacture? What about potential attempts to test their virulence in humans? The approach in the Stanford lab sure sounds like a new form of gain-of-function research to me.

The bioethicist Quill R Kukla, a philosophy professor at (the Jesuit) Georgetown University, also serves as the editor in chief of one of the most influential bioethics publications, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. To say the least, Kukla is well ensconced within the bioethical establishment.

I bring this up because Kukla was just interviewed about a newly published book the bioethicist authored, Sex Beyond “Yes”: Pleasure and Agency for Everyone. The interview was conducted without challenge by the president and CEO of the Hastings Center — the world’s most prominent bioethics think tank — for its “Bioethics Chat” feature. This is mainstream bioethics with exclamation points, and its content illustrates why I believe the predominant views in the movement are wildly out of sync with those of the general population they supposedly serve.

First, Kukla describes the book’s (which I have not read) sexual theses (emphasis within the text):

I wanted to write a book about good sex — sex that not only manages to avoid being unethical, but that is a joint activity built around pleasure, expressive and respectful of everyone’s agency, and fulfilling and worthwhile for everyone.…

I also wanted to write a book that genuinely spoke to the agency, pleasures, and experiences of all kinds of sexual subjects. In my book, queer sex, kinky sex, and sex for trans people, disabled people, old people, fat people, and nonmonogamous people are just as centered as is traditional sex between heterosexual monogamous couples. I tried to draw on the sexual wisdom of alternative sex communities such as queer and kinky communities, who have often thought and talked deeply about sexual agency because they cannot just slide unreflectively into the given heterocentric, patriarchal scripts provided by our culture.

In recent years, the term “service provider” has been deployed widely as a descriptor for doctors and other medical professionals. That’s unfortunate, as the terminology de-professionalizes those who work and study for years to become expert at delivering medical treatments, interventions, diagnoses, and counseling. And it concomitantly threatens to transform patients into mere customers; doctors, essentially into so many order takers.

Some physicians’ organizations have noticed the trend and are pushing back. A few months ago, an opinion article in the Annals of Internal Medicine argued that using the term “service provider” has negative ethical implications. From “Physicians are not Providers” (citations omitted):

First, the current use of provider in reference to institutions, insurers, physicians, nurses, physician assistants, and other clinicians lumps impersonal entities in with humans and obscures differences in clinical training and expertise.…

Second, the duties of physicians differ from those of individuals and entities who deliver commercial and other services.…This partnership is not transactional but rather relational.…

Third, use of the term provider undermines ethics and professionalism. Medicine is dedicated to serving others whose trust must be earned. As quoted in the ACP Ethics Manual, Francis Peabody said that medicine is not “a trade to be learned, but a profession to be entered,” with publicly declared values (in Latin, the “profess” in “profession”) and ethical duties to uphold.…

Fourth, language not only affects the perception and value attributed to what is being provided but can also alter one’s professional sense of self and influence behavior. Communication and language are key. To quote Robert M. McLean, MD, former president of ACP, “Patients share things with us that they share with nobody else, including close family.” Language should focus on “health and not healthcare, on relationships and not transactions, and on people and not products.”

That makes abundant sense to me.

Seven miscarriages. Two living children. Countless questions. What does it actually feel like to lose a child through miscarriage? What happens when the pregnancy test line starts fading and you realize you’re about to lose another baby? Why do so many women feel completely unprepared for the physical, emotional, and spiritual reality of miscarriage, despite the fact that roughly 1 in 4 pregnancies ends in miscarriage? In this deeply personal and moving conversation, Gabriela Anastasopoúlou shares her journey through a miscarriage, becoming a mom to her son, followed by seven miscarriages and secondary infertility, and the eventual birth of her daughter after years of unanswered questions and heartbreak. Gabriela opens up about: As a civil rights attorney and advocate for Read More ›

Did the women’s movement get hijacked? Former Cosmopolitan writer and Subverted author Sue Ellen Browder says yes, and she says she helped do it. In this eye-opening conversation, Sue shares what she witnessed inside Cosmopolitan during the height of the sexual revolution, how media narratives helped reshape American views on sex, marriage, motherhood, and abortion, and why she believes the women’s movement became fused with abortion politics. We discuss the influence of figures such as Betty Friedan, Larry Lader, Simone de Beauvoir, and Kate Millett, the origins of modern feminism, the role of propaganda in shaping public opinion, and what Sue uncovered in her research into Roe v. Wade. Was the sexual revolution an organic cultural shift or a carefully Read More ›