Free Republic

Let me pose a difficult question: Who gets to determine who lives and who dies? Personally, I don’t think that any human has the right to do so. Human life is in the hands of God, and God only. But there are those who believe that people, specifically pregnant women, should be able to determine whether their unborn children deserve to live or not. As you all know, I am talking about genetic testing, specifically amniocentesis, and its link to a much greater problem, abortion. Ultimately, whenever a woman goes to a clinic for testing, she is considering aborting what...

Some commentators object to the way in which fertility clinics make pornography available to men as an aid to masturbation when those men produce sperm for evaluation, storage or IVF. These objections typically rely on claims that pornography is generally harmful to women, unnecessary and dissociates sexual acts from conception. In light of these objections, certain commentators want fertility clinics to divest themselves of pornography… …Both the porn industry and sperm retrieval are predicated on metaphorical surrogacy. In both cases, a substitute takes the place of a human body and thereby severs the ancient link between orgasm in intercourse and...

'The push for transgender rights is no longer about equality, it’s now a cleverly crafted lie that comes at the expense of women,' said Égard Watches owner, Ilan Srulovicz. There is hope for corporate America after all. Égard Watches is bucking the politics of woke corporations and standing up against transgenders who are damaging the integrity of women’s sports. The Florida-based boutique timepiece and jewelry company launched a campaign celebrating women, and taking issue with transgender athletes in sports, the Washington Times’ Valerie Richardson reports. The digital advertising campaign, called “What is a Woman,” is a response to the woke...

“…but Hannah had no children.” - 1 Samuel 1:2 Is IVF, AID, or AIH (forms of Artificial Insemination) ethical from a Christian position? There are two views by which I would like to investigate this. First by way of Joseph Fletcher who opposes the Bible, and second by way of the Biblical picture. ...Fletcher believes that AI is an answer for a problematic dilemma which carries couple to a wonderful end. (He is a avid adherent to Consequentialism – that the means does not matter so long as the ends are acceptable.) Though AI and IVF may involve masturbation, this...

Golly gosh, you learn something new every day about the IVF industry. And you thought it was just about gurgling, picture-perfect infants. IVF porn is one of those sordid things that everyone knows about but no one has the stomach to talk about. Last year’s “Private Life”, a highly-praised Netflix film about a middle-aged couple going through IVF, is typical. Equipped with a cup, the exasperated husband enters a cubicle where a wall-mounted screen is playing hard-core porn. It’s part of the fertility furniture. Back in 2010, a British health think tank, 2020Health published a brief report, Who Said Pornography...

1. A common method of sperm retrieval (masturbation with the assistance of pornography) involves a violation of the sixth commandment (Matthew 5:28; Colossians 3:5; Exodus 20:14). 2. Many ethical and practical issues are the same here as with surrogate parenting. A review of surrogate parenting material would be appropriate. 3. Sperm banks raise valid social and legal concerns re: paternal rights, the rights of children to know their parents, transmission of diseases, and a checkered past of mismanagement resulting in mistaken insemination of sperm. I reject the argument that sperm banks presume for humans the authority of God. The role...

Human beings bear the image and likeness of God. They are to be reverenced as sacred. Never are they to be used as a means to an end, not even to satisfy the deepest wishes of an infertile couple. Husbands and wives "make love," they do not "make babies." They give expression to their love for one another, and a child may or may not be engendered by that act of love. The marital act is not a manufacturing process, and children are not products. Like the Son of God himself, we are the kind of beings who are "begotten,...

In the wake of announcements from multiple pharmaceutical companies about safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines, many are expressing ethical doubts about whether it is OK to take these vaccines. Do Catholics have a moral duty to decline an inoculation if it was unethically produced using a cell line that came from an abortion? The short answer is “no.” This has been discussed and explained in several magisterial church documents in recent years. In 2008, for example, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reminded us in the Instruction Dignitas Personae that: “Grave reasons may be morally proportionate to justify...

Joseph Meaney, PH.D., speaking Friday in an interview on EWTN Pro-Life Weekly, said that the experiment gone wrong was predictable, because “science, as it emerges into new areas, makes a lot of mistakes.” WASHINGTON — In the wake of a gene-editing experiment gone wrong, the president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center said that the Church must stand firm against the unborn being “sacrificed on the altar of scientific research.” Medium’s science publication OneZero reported last week that scientists in the United Kingdom recently conducted an experiment where they deleted a gene from human embryos using the CRISPR technique. They...

I have finally learned to say someone “died by suicide” rather than “committed suicide.” While the Catholic Church does teach that taking one’s own life is grave matter, we now recognize that those who die by suicide are often in such an altered mental state, they may not capable of acting with deliberate consent. Therefore, it is our obligation to pray and hope for those who died by suicide, just as we may hope for the salvation of all the dead. But that only speaks to the culpability of the dead. Can we not also hope that fewer people will...

In vitro fertilization is the process of joining a woman’s egg (ovum) and a husband’s sperm in a lab rather than inside a woman’s body... When the egg is fertilized by the sperm, the result is a living embryo, which is then implanted in the woman’s womb so that it can develop like any other baby. Evangelical Christians differ on the moral acceptability of this procedure. My own position is that, in principle, the teachings of Scripture present no moral objection to a married couple using IVF (as long as no human embryos are destroyed in the process), because it...

The quiet heartbreak and pain of infertility is well known to many evangelicals, whose aspirations to have a child have been frustrated for reasons they cannot understand or control. It is frequently a secret burden that couples carry, which only emerges into the open as they reveal their struggles to family, friends, and doctors. The weight of infertility and the value of children has increasingly prompted infertile couples to pursue procreation by every means possible: artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and even surrogacy have all found their way into evangelical communities. Yet while evangelicals have become increasingly aware of the...

IVF clinics may soon use a controversial screening technique to get rid of embryos which are likely to grow up with low IQs. A company in the US offering tests which can pick out 'mental disabilities' – and, in theory, predict intelligence – has confirmed it is in talks with fertility clinics. The news has stoked fears about a rise in designer babies, which could be created by parents wanting to erase undesirable traits from their children. Experts say it is 'repugnant' to think about terminating embryos because they are expected to have lower than average intelligence.

The field of bioethics seems to be less and less concerned about what is considered ethical in medicine, and more and more concerned with justifying a culture of death. It’s no longer enough for abortion to be legal; bioethicists are increasingly calling for the murder of born infants to be permitted. And though these calls for legal infanticide are always met with outrage, they continue to come. Finnish bioethicist Joona Räsänen has argued in the medical journal Bioethics that pro-life arguments against infanticide “are not convincing” and “cannot show infanticide to be immoral.” While Räsänen has not argued for infanticide...

What It Is: The “Hollywood EGF Facial”, otherwise known as the “Penis Facial” thanks to stars like Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett, who both swear by it for radiant, glowy skin Who Tried It: Jillian Ruffo, Associate Beauty Editor Why We Tried It: Let me ask you this: Would you pass up the chance to have skin that looks as smooth as Blanchett or Bullock’s? (We didn’t think so.) Level of Difficulty: 2, if you factor in very mild pain and upkeep It all started back in March, when Blanchett opened up about her skincare secret: a special facial at...

May 8, 2018 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An Alabama child who suffered multiple skull fractures in an auto accident and was declared “brain dead” by doctors, regained consciousness only one day before the physicians planned to remove his organs, according to a report by Fox News in Mobile, Alabama.  The boy, 13-year-old Trenton McKinley, was being pulled in a small utility trailer by a child’s dune buggy driven by his friend, who applied the brakes suddenly and caused the trailer to flip over and to land on top of McKinley’s head, fracturing his skull. McKinley “died” several times while doctors treated him,...

NEW YORK – The Holy and Sacred Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate elected unanimously today the Very Reverend Archimandrite Nathanael Symeonides as Metropolitan of Chicago. Immediately following the election, His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios of America stated: “I express my wholehearted congratulations on the election of Very Reverend Archimandrite Nathanael Symeonides as Metropolitan of Chicago, wishing the abundant blessing of God on the sacred ministry the Church has entrusted him with. The newly-elected Metropolitan has served as Deacon, Priest and Director of the Department of Inter-Orthodox, Ecumenical and Inter-Religious Relations for a number of years, and I am certain that he...

Humanae vitae, Blessed Pope Paul VI’s encyclical reaffirming the Church’s defense of the sanctity of human life, was promulgated fifty years ago this year. It was dated July 25, 1968. When July rolls around later this year I shall have some things to say, God willing, about the encyclical’s content. What I’m talking about here is some of the aftermath of the document’s promulgation.Only some. I’m going for a broad picture and in as few words as possible. I shall not deal, for instance, with the epic fight of Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle to preserve doctrinal orthodoxy at the Catholic University...

A new documentary about the scale of Nazi medical experiments has reopened old wounds in France...trending on Twitter. Dr Michel Cymes, the star of a French television medical advice programme, believes that the remains of some of the 86 Jews tortured and mutilated by SS doctor August Hirt may still be in the anatomy collection of the University of Strasbourg. He first raised the theory in his 2015 bestseller, "Hippocrates in Hell", The remains of Jews on which Hirt tested mustard gas at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp near the Alastian city were supposed to have been buried after it was...

Belgian doctors fear the number of French people heading over the border to seek help to end their lives could shoot up and are warning that the road to the end is paved with problems. With the number of French people considering euthanasia as a viable way to end their daily suffering on the rise, the burden is largely falling on neighbouring Belgium. While active euthanasia, by which a person deliberately causes the patient's death, remains illegal in France, the procedure became legal in Belgium 15 years ago. What's the law in France? During Francois Hollande's leadership in March 2015,...