Bioethics

When Leon Kass Speaks, We Should Listen

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One of the perks of what I do is becoming friends with some of the great thinkers of our time, and one of those is Leon Kass. Kass is the reigning intellectual champion for upholding intrinsic human dignity. He also served splendidly for about six years as the chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics [...]

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Circumcise to Save Billions in Medical Costs

Declining rates of circumcision could cost society big time when the boy babies become men and risk STDs from engaging in risky activities. From the LA Times story: Declining rates of circumcision among infants will translate into billions of dollars of unnecessary medical costs in the U.S. as these boys grow up and become sexually [...]

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Let Science End “Tyranny of the Womb!”

Science gained tremendous regard in the last few hundred years because the knowledge thereby gained allowed us to improve the lot of the human race in ways few would have ever conceived in all of previous human history. But a hubris has crept in — the mad scientist syndrome, if you will — that sees [...]

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Bioethics the Spearpoint of Attack on Religious Liberties

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I have noticed that my writing seems to flow in patterns. Much of that is caused by the flow of news, but I think some of it has to do with certain stories getting my attention, after which I connect dots and become acutely conscious of certain ebbs and flows of advocacy. Needless to say, [...]

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Thank God Hippocrates Was Pagan

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To suggest that one cannot or should not defend the sanctity of human life in the public square by using publicly accessible secular language is to remove a necessary tool for making the case for valuing and protecting all human life. While religious arguments are good and necessary even in the public square, secular arguments [...]

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UC Davis Punishes Professors for Unethical Medical Experiments

Good for UC Davis. It has punished two medical professors for conducting unethical medical experiments on brain cancer patients. From the Associated Press story: Two University of California, Davis, neurosurgeons have been banned from performing medical research on humans after they were accused of experimenting on dying brain cancer patients without university permission, the Sacramento [...]

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The Attack of the Raging Secularists

I will be doing an every-other-Friday column for First Things’ “On the Square,” and am most pleased. Today, I illustrate how bioethical issues have become the battle ground for a secularist assault against freedom of religion, by seeking to shrink the core liberty to a straight-jacketed “freedom of worship.” From the piece: Article 18 of [...]

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Peter Singer Attacks Religious Liberty

Peter Singer, the crass infanticide and “speciesism” promoter is an atheist. Bully for him, and who cares? But his antipathy toward faith may explain his hostility to, and utter confusion about, religious liberty. Singer has written that Obamacare’s “Free Birth Control Rule” doesn’t violate religious liberty because Catholic hospitals and universities can simply turn over [...]

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Human Exceptionalism and Equality Must Be Defended On All Fronts

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC Here is my contribution to the Human Exceptionalism Symposium at the Human Life Review. First, I get into why the issue is so fundamental. From, “The Struggle For Human Equality: It Must Be Defended on All Fronts:” Human exceptionalism, as I wrote in the original [...]

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Hippocrates Was a Human Exceptionalist

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC Jennifer Lahl, head of the Center for Bioethics and Culture (for which I consult), weighed in on human exceptionalism at the Human Life Review symposium, which debates whether religion is necessary to the defense of HE. No, she says. From, “Thank God Hippocrates Was a [...]

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