By Wesley J. Smith Remember the U.K. cases of Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans — in which doctors and courts forced small children off of life support wanted by parents based on the “experts” view that dying was in the patient’s “best interest?” Well, a similar “futile care” imbroglio has come to Texas. Tinslee Lewis, …
Continue reading "Parents — Not Bioethicists — Should Decide about Baby’s Life Support"
By Wesley J. Smith Editor’s note. This is excerpted from a post that appeared at National Review Online. Bioethicist Jacob M. Appel wants the bioethics movement to educate your children about the policy and personal conundrums that involve medical care and health public policy. He claims that “most of us give little thought” to issues …
Continue reading "Keep Bioethics out of Elementary and High Schools"
The experts are engaged in a civil war about the principles of their own discipline By Michael Cook The etymological roots of the “bioethics” suggest that its subject is the principles governing the morality of dealing with life, especially human life. For a word coined to describe a new discipline in about 1970, it has …
Continue reading "The crumbling house of bioethics"
By Wesley J. Smith Editor’s note. Wesley’s great columns appear at National Review Online and are reposted with the author’s permission. “CRISPR” is an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. “Quango” is a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation. I have been covering the bioethics movement since the late 1990s, writing several books (one award-winning) on …
Continue reading "Nature: Bioethics Is Obsolete"
By Dave Andrusko Even before I came to National Right to Life, lo these many years ago, I knew that by and large the bioethics set was composed of some strange characters. There were, of course, notable exceptions. You think of Gilbert Meilaender and J. David Bleich and Wesley J. Smith, and John Keown, but …
Continue reading "“Fetal reduction” and the Case of Identical Twins, a coldblooded academic exercise"
By Dave Andrusko It isn’t often that someone genuinely merits the title of “giant” in his or her field. Too often we affix that label to women and men who make significant contributions but not path-setting ones. But if anyone earned that description, it would be philosopher and bioethicist extraordinaire Daniel Callahan, who passed away …
Continue reading "Daniel Callahan: R.I.P."
By Wesley J. Smith Editor’s note. The following is excerpted from Wesley’s testimony before the Texas Senate Committee on Health and Human Services in favor of legislation to change the state’s 10-Day Rule, which allows hospitals to remove a patient’s life support against their or their family’s will. You can watch the beginning of his …
Continue reading "Texas rule allows hospitals to withdraw treatment that keeps the patient alive when the doctor/bioethics committee thinks the patient should die"
By Dave Andrusko Editor’s note. I drive by the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC, every day on my way to work. Today I noticed the current exhibition is titled “Americans and the Holocaust.” The following, written a while back, discusses an exhibit that was exceptionally helpful to understanding the origins of the Nazi Holocaust. Not …
Continue reading "Reflections back on “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race”"
By Wesley J. Smith Julian Savulescu represents all that I find so objectionable about the mainstream bioethics movement. Rejecting the sanctity/equality of human life, utilitarian in outlook, embracing a eugenics point-of-view, the Oxford professor–what does that tell you?–would lead society in a way opposed by most of the very people bioethics claims to serve. Savulescu …
Continue reading "Why Bioethics Should “Fail”"
By Wesley J. Smith Doctors are incredibly knowledgeable. They understand when people are terminally ill or unlikely to survive a traumatic injury. But they are not infallible. People don’t die by the numbers. Some patients prove unexpectedly resilient. Sometimes true miracles occur, or at least there are no scientific explanations for the disappearance of diseases …
Continue reading "Battling “Futile care” and “Quality of Life” determinations in order to save loved ones"
By Wesley J. Smith Joseph Fletcher (1905–1991) was one the most influential philosophers and bioethicists of the twentieth century. His advocacy blazed the path for many of the radical social transitions we are experiencing today. He gained fame as the prime proponent of “situational ethics,” popularly known as social relativism. But his work in bioethics …
Continue reading "Joseph Fletcher’s dark dreams becoming our reality"
By Michael Cook Today, your doctor is likely to be a “stranger at the bedside,” making decisions according to a “new morality” of bioethics, rather than the traditional Oath of Hippocrates, writes Dr Jeffrey Hall Dobken in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. Dr Dobken writes from the perspective of a doctor who is …
Continue reading "A dissenting view of modern bioethics: “What about the sick patient?”"