Category: Bioethics

By Wesley J. Smith Entry into medical and associated professional schools may soon depend on possessing the proper moral views as well as good grades. Say you’re a brilliant student who dreams of becoming an oncologist and saving thousands of lives from cancer. In the not too distant future, if some bioethicists have their way, …

We are embodied, vulnerable and mutually dependent human beings, argues an American scholar in this profoundly important book. By Greg Walsh What does it mean to be human? How legal systems answer and should answer this profoundly important question is addressed by O. Carter Snead in What It Means To Be Human: The Case for the …

By Wesley J. Smith I have been following — and criticizing — the bioethics movement for more than twenty years. As I see it, the mainstream view seeks to instill a utilitarianist philosophy on both the ethics of medicine and the public policies of health care, including where “common morality” — as the views of …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …