Scientists have discovered the remains of a Neanderthal child with Down syndrome. Today, it may now be that more babies with Down syndrome are killed in the womb than are born. Read More ›
Cardiologist and New York Times columnist Sandeep Jauhar has published a piece advocating that doctors and bioethicists be empowered to force treatment on some patients. He writes in the context of wanting to compel hospitalization on a schizophrenic patient with serious heart problems. From "Doctors Need a Better Way to Treat Patients Without Their Consent:" Read More ›
Bioethics has always been about granting "experts" in the field tremendous influence over public policy. And now, one of the most prominent practitioners in the field — the president and CEO of the Hastings Center Report, a prestigious bioethics journal — has urged that bioethicists expand their "expert" advocacy to issues of "global" importance. Read More ›
It is sometimes said that desperate circumstances require desperate measures. But desperation can also lead to the exploitation of the vulnerable. Such would be the case if we created a market in live-donation human kidneys. Read More ›
I have long predicted that normalizing transgender surgeries would be followed eventually by doctors intentionally disabling patients with Body Identity Integrity Disorder (BIID). Well, here it comes. A doctor in Quebec "treated" a BIID patient by amputating two of his healthy fingers. Read More ›
This proposal suffers from the same fatal ethical flaw. Prisoners are hardly in an equal bargaining position. Nor should they be induced to turn themselves into a natural resource ripe for the harvest. Read More ›
Two principles of Catholic health-care ethics forbid removing healthy organs and sterilizing a patient absent a necessity caused by a pathology, such as cancer. These principles are increasingly in conflict with the transgender movement that has the ACLU and others suing when Catholic hospitals refuse transgender surgeries based on these religiously based precepts. Read More ›
Israeli researchers appear to have created what they are calling “synthetic mouse embryos,” using embryonic stem cells — without fertilization — and developed them about halfway through a normal mouse period of gestation. Read More ›
What happens if the doctors and nurses you depend on lose their compassion? What happens if they become your accuser rather than your healer? Read More ›
The core problem with contemporary bioethics is that the movement denies human exceptionalism. In this view, being human is morally irrelevant. What matters are capacities, such as the ability to value one’s life, which make one a “person.” Read More ›
