Bioethics

After restricting funding for primate research for ethical reasons, the National Institutes of Health has followed up by banning funding of fetal tissue research. From the NIH press release:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) today announced a new policy ending the use of human fetal tissue in NIH-supported research, marking a significant milestone in the Trump Administration’s efforts to modernize biomedical science and accelerate innovate.

Effective immediately, NIH funds will no longer be used to support research involving human fetal tissue from elective abortions. The policy applies across the NIH Intramural Research Program and all NIH-supported extramural research, including grants, cooperative agreements, other transaction awards, and research and development contracts.

We have to remember the gruesomeness of some of this research: For example, the experiments in which the scalps of 20-week aborted fetuses were grafted onto rodents.

What is the real human cost of abortion—especially chemical abortion? In this powerful and deeply personal conversation, Toni McFadden shares her abortion story with unflinching honesty. As a teenager facing an unplanned pregnancy, Toni had a chemical abortion believing it was the only way out. What followed wasn’t relief—but years of silence, trauma, emotional grief, and spiritual brokenness. Toni recounts what the abortion pill experience was really like, the isolation she felt, the long road of unhealed pain, and how abortion affected not only her—but also the child’s father, her future marriage, and her family. She also shares how a slow, unexpected encounter with faith led to real post-abortion healing, forgiveness, and redemption. This episode confronts the human cost of Read More ›

The “dead donor rule” (DDR) is a legal and ethical mandate that requires vital organ donors to be truly dead before their body parts are procured. A corollary to the rule holds that people cannot be killed for their organs. The DDR promotes trust in the system and protects the vulnerable — but is flexible enough to permit living donations of one kidney and parts of a liver from altruistic donors. Utilitarian bioethicists have long argued against the DDR and its corollary based on the notion that killing those who are dying or want to donate will relieve the suffering of people who want to live and need an organ. And here we go again. The Journal of Medical Ethics Read More ›

Work continues apace toward the goal of gestating babies outside a woman’s body. Scientists have now implanted human embryos in “organoids” made of tissues that mimic the uterine lining. From, “Researchers are Getting Organoids Pregnant,” published in the MIT Technology Review:

In three papers published this week by Cell Press, scientists are reporting what they call the most accurate efforts yet to mimic the first moments of pregnancy in the lab. They’ve taken human embryos from IVF centers and let these merge with “organoids” made of endometrial cells, which form the lining of the uterus.

The reports—two from China and a third involving a collaboration among researchers in the United Kingdom, Spain, and the US—show how scientists are using engineered tissues to better understand early pregnancy and potentially improve IVF outcomes…

In each case, the experiments were stopped when the embryos were two weeks old, if not sooner. That is due to legal and ethical rules that typically restrict scientists from going any further than 14 days.

First, a semantical point. The organoids weren’t “pregnant.” That seems unduly anthropomorphizing to me. They mimicked natural processes. If gestating machines ever are used to mature human embryos and fetuses outside a woman’s body, as mechanisms, they won’t be “pregnant” either.

What’s really happening to women and girls in China? In this episode, I sit down with Reggie Littlejohn, Yale-trained attorney and founder of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, to expose what many experts call the greatest crime against women in the world. Women’s Rights Without Frontiers is a global coalition fighting to end forced abortion, gendercide, and sexual slavery in China. Reggie is widely recognized as an international expert on China’s One-Child Policy—now the Three-Child Policy. Reggie is also the founder and president of the Anti-Globalist Alliance, an international counterforce to the Great Reset, and the co-founder of the Sovereignty Coalition, a non-partisan movement dedicated to defending U.S. national sovereignty and personal medical freedom against threats both foreign and domestic. For Read More ›

The black market in human organs does not receive nearly enough attention. China is probably the worst offender here, with political prisoners like Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghur Muslims arrested, tissue-typed, killed, and harvested to supply well-off buyers who don’t want to wait in the donation queue. We are far too nonchalant about that murderous commerce. Now, a gruesome story out of Nigeria vividly illustrates the sheer evil of this trade in human tissues. From the Daily Mail story: Over 100 decomposed and mutilated bodies have been discovered in a suspected illegal organ-harvesting slaughterhouse in Nigeria. Police have sealed off a hotel and private mortuary in the Umuhu autonomous community in Ngor-Okpala district in southeast Nigeria’s Imo state following a Read More ›

When you hear the word feminism, what comes to mind? This episode launches a multi-part series digging into the real history of feminism: what the early feminists actually believed, how modern feminism drifted, and the bioethical fallout in the realms of sex, contraception, abortion, and women’s place in society. In this powerful conversation, legal scholar, mother of seven, and one of the most compelling voices speaking into women’s rights Erika Bachiochi uncovers the forgotten roots of the early feminist movement. These women understood something our culture has lost: that equality is something deeper than sameness, and freedom isn’t about escaping responsibility. They believed in a moral vision rooted in human dignity, virtue, and the profound responsibilities that emerge from sex, Read More ›

In China, they’re killing people for their organs. China’s secret, state-run forced organ-harvesting genocide is bigger, darker, and more gruesome than anyone could imagine. In this explosive interview, Dr. Torsten Trey, Founder and Executive Director of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH), exposes how Falun Gong practitioners became the CCP’s largest pool of victims with millions detained since 1999. They’re blood-tested in custody not for their health, but to match their organs to waiting buyers. Dr. Trey reveals how China built an on-demand transplant system, where organs — even hearts — appear within days. The only way that’s possible is if living prisoners are being killed to order. He walks us through the massive surge in transplants after 1999: internal Read More ›

In this powerful episode of Bioethics Babe, Emma Waters, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology and the Human Person, joins Arina Grossu Agnew to unpack the hidden costs of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and the ethical questions surrounding the fertility industry. While IVF is often hailed as a miracle solution for infertility, few people stop to ask what’s lost when life begins in a lab instead of the womb. Emma explains why IVF bypasses the real causes of infertility, the moral and physical risks it poses, and how Restorative Reproductive Medicine (RRM) offers a healthier, more human-centered alternative that heals the body rather than replacing it. We discuss: If you’ve ever wondered what IVF means for medicine, Read More ›

Transhumanism offers a (delusional, in my opinion) hope to blaze a materialistic path to immortality. Transhumanists yearn, for example, to upload their minds to computers, thinking that will do the trick. It won’t. Even if the “mind” could be uploaded, it would merely be software that mimicked a person’s beliefs. The “uploaded” subject would still be dead.

Now, according to an interesting story in the New York Times, China has apparently jumped onto this longevity train and is devoting much energy and many resources to the life-extension project:

China, eager to catch up with and, whenever possible, surpass the West in biotech, artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies, has made the longevity industry a national priority, pouring billions into research and related commercial spinoffs.

“They have improved very rapidly. A few years ago, there was nothing here and the West was still far ahead,” said Vadim Gladyshev, a Harvard Medical School professor who has done pioneering work on longevity, including an experiment that extended the expected life span of old mice by connecting their circulatory systems to young mice.

Chinese researchers, he said during a recent trip to China to attend two scientific conferences, “are rapidly catching up.”

Well, that sounds ominous. Are we really going to use the blood of the young to keep the old from dying? Why, yes. Some of the hyper-rich in Silicon Valley are already doing that, including Larry Ellison, who receives blood transfusions from his son. Imagine the exploitive possibilities!