June 2012

UMass Stem Cell Bank Closes

Ah, the heady days of trying to overcome the evil BUSH!’s minor embryonic stem cell funding restrictions. You know, the ones that resulted in hundreds of millions spent in human embryonic stem cell research. Back in those days when hype and lies ruled the biotech discourse, states were tripping over each other in an Oklahoma [...]

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German Judge Outlaws Circumcision

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC Religious freedom is supposed to be a touchstone of liberty. But many secularists so disdain faith that they refuse to abide by the principle — or more commonly, attempt to shrink its parameters to a very limited “freedom of worship.” Now, in the aftermath of [...]

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Shrugging at Hard Euthanasia Truths

I have been fighting euthanasia since 1993. During that time, I have been startled at what resonates emotionally with people about doctor-prescribed/administered death, and those matters which are generally shrugged off as of little concern. If a sick person wants to die, that resonates. Look at the Kevorkian debacle. If a sick person is pushed [...]

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Peter Singer’s Views Deserve Scorn, Not Awards

It is a disturbing sign of the times that Princeton’s notorious bioethicist Peter Singer has been awarded Australia’s highest civic award “for eminent service to philosophy and bioethics as a leader of public debate and communicator of ideas in the areas of global poverty, animal welfare and the human condition.” This is a disgrace. Would [...]

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Treating Infanticide Respectfully Makes it Respectable

Infanticide — for which doctors were hanged at Nuremberg — is becoming an increasingly commonplace issue of debate. Indeed, it seems to me that the notion of killing babies is now precisely where abortion was in the 1960s. And we know what happened then. But back to the point at hand. The Journal of Medical [...]

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Altruistic Surrogacy Ban for Gays, Singles Wrongly Discriminates

When IVF began, we were told it was only to permit infertile married couples have children. It has since expanded geometrically to become an industry that also includes eugenic options, commercialization of gametes and uteruses, and facilitation of what were once called alternative lifestyles. It has resulted in treating nascent life as a natural resource [...]

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Failure of Cigarette Tax Bad Sign for California Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Proposition 29 was strikingly similar in concept to Proposition 71, which created the benighted California Institute for Regenerative Medicine in 2004. Proposition 29 would tax cigarettes. Proposition 71 borrowed money. Both were designed to use the money thereby obtained to establish a quasi state agency to fund special research projects, 29 against cancer and 71 [...]

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Finding the Consciousness in “Unconscious” People Worth the Cost?

Patients diagnosed as persistently unconscious may be the most scorned people on earth. I mean, who else could be called a turnip or carrot with impunity? It is within the context of this “unrepentent bigotry” that I analyze a hopeful story about increasing efforts to find the consciousness within the diagnosed unconscious. We have discussed [...]

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Send Eggsploitation to Italy

Thumbnail image for Send Eggsploitation to Italy

Friends,   Over the past year the CBC team has been working to have our award-winning documentary film Eggsploitation translated into Italian. Our translators, Gianfranco Amato and Josephine Quintavalle, are sending me a DVD, and we can’t wait to see it.   Translating the film was a key part of responding to an invitation to [...]

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Egg Freezing Not “Medical”

Science writer Ronald Bailey took to the pages of Reason last month to extol egg freezing as a splendid technology to promote female equality. Here’s the meme: Since men can father children even into old age, it is “discriminatory” (bad Darwin!) that women’s biological clocks stop ticking. Thus, by extracting eggs and freezing them — [...]

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