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When is it okay to kill a zombie? The Walking Dead returns tomorrow night in the wake of a moral dilemma: Should zombies be killed on sight, or quarantined as sick humans? We look at some of the issues surrounding zombie murder, and want to hear what you think about the ethics of killing these infection-spreading cannibals. We open at the beginning of the zombie pandemic. There are rumblings of an infection on the news, of people who have turned suddenly violent and spreading disease through their bites. You look out the window and see a bloody-mouthed being shuffling in...

February 8, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The conundrum faced by the organ transplant industry, that the removal of vital organs kills the “donor,” can be “easily obviated by abandoning the norm against killing,” two leading U.S. bioethicists have said. In an article titled, “What Makes Killing Wrong?” appearing in last month’s Journal of Medical Ethics, the authors have moved the argument forward by admitting that the practice of vital organ donation ignores “traditional” medical ethics. “Traditional medical ethics embraces the norm that doctors … must not kill their patients. This norm is often seen as absolute and universal. In contrast, we...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, ACA, or "Obamacare"), signed into law March 2011, in the near term creates more than 100 new health care bureaucracies, a large increase in taxes, and new government expenses of $500 billion. Most importantly, however, it will create an incentive and penalty regime for health care institutions and professionals that will compromise traditional professional medical ethics. Embedded in PPACA is a system of mandates and incentives derivative of guidelines for efficient patient care that means some rationing. An example most often raising objections in the public discussion of PPACA is the Patient...

FRONT ROYAL, Virginia, July 29, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - When a child is delivered stillborn, a small flower or other token often marks the door of the mother’s recovery room to help staff recognize the loss. According to one Catholic doctor, the same symbol was used in at least one Catholic hospital where doctors routinely induced labor to hasten the death of a child diagnosed with a genetic defect - a practice she says occurs in “a handful� of Catholic hospitals across the United States. Dr. Lorna Cvetkovich told a bioethics conference at Christendom College in Virginia this month about her...

In 1992, my friend Frances committed suicide on her 76th birthday. Frances was not terminally ill. She had been diagnosed with treatable leukemia and needed a hip replacement. Mostly, though, she was depressed by family issues and profoundly disappointed at where her life had taken her.Something seemed very off to me about Frances’s suicide. So I asked the executor of her estate to send me the “suicide file” kept by the quintessentially organized Frances and was horrified to learn from it that she had been an avid reader of the (now defunct) Hemlock Quarterly, published by the aptly named Hemlock...

The BBC has received hundreds of complaints from views over a program it aired Monday night showing an assisted suicide of a person killing himself at a suicide tourism facility in Switzerland. The program featured footage of a man dying at a Dignitas suicide tourism clinic in Switzerland and it was hosted by Sir Terry Pratchett and it showed millionaire Peter Smedley taking a lethal cocktail of drugs that resulted in his death. Almost 900 people contacted the BBC to complain while just 82 supported the showing of the program. Four senior peers complained abotu the program and accused the...

After country music star Randy Travis thrilled listeners at a concert last year to raise funds for the Terri Schiavo foundation, the Beach Boys are heading up the concert this time around. The Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network is using the concerts as a way to raise critically-needed funds to support its work helping disabled patients like Terri and their families as the next step of their mission following Terri’s death. She was killed by her husband, who won a highly-disputed court order allowing him to remove her feeding tube and take her life during the course of a...

ROME February 4, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A prominent American professor of Catholic medical ethics has said that in “brain death” criteria there is no “moral certitude” that a patient is really dead, a condition laid out by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI as necessary for removing organs. The available evidence, he said, “raises a reasonable doubt that excludes ‘moral certitude’ that ventilator-sustained brain dead bodies are corpses.” Professor E. Christian Brugger, a Senior Fellow of Ethics at the Culture of Life Foundation gave this judgment in a question and answer article published today by the Rome-based news...

The story of an Australian couple who aborted twin boys because they want to use IVF to ensure they have a daughter is attracting a lot of attention, especially among pro-lifers, and understandably so since the case seems to foreshadow an ethics-free future of eugenics.  But the couple, who want a girl to replace the infant daughter they recently lost, is so far still barred by Australian law from pursuing their quest for a female baby. The state of Victoria, where the unnamed couple lives, does not allow sex selection using IVF unless it is done to avoid the risk...

"...Mr. Rupak is a pioneer in a controversial field at the crossroads of reproductive technology and international adoption. Prospective parents put off by the rigor of traditional adoptions are bypassing that system by producing babies of their own—often using an egg donor from one country, a sperm donor from another, and a surrogate who will deliver in a third country to make what some industry participants call "a world baby." "...Mr. Rupak is learning to navigate the uncharted nature of his field—the stateless babies, the ethical complexities. His expansion to Greece, a European Union member nation, is specifically intended to...

Judge Forces Obama Admin to Stop Funding Embryonic Stem Cell Research Washington, DC -- A federal judge on Monday issued a decision forcing the Obama administration to stop funding embryonic stem cell research with taxpayer funds. The judge ruled the executive order Obama issued allowing such funding contravened a federal law prohibiting taxpayer funding of the destruction of human embryos. http://LifeNews.com/bio3145.html

NIJ BEETS, Netherlands, August 12, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A woman has been arrested for killing her four newborn children and packing their remains away in suitcases in the Netherlands - a country where infanticide is legal as long a doctor administers the dose. According to Radio Netherlands Worldwide, the unnamed 25-year-old woman was a well-known and liked dentist’s assistant in the rural town of Nij Beets, in the Dutch province of Friesland. She managed to keep the infanticides secret for years until her Wednesday arrest, and remains now in police custody. Police were tipped off by a suspicious neighbor who...

www.catholicnewsagency.com Study shows problems for adults conceived by sperm donation Alana Sveta and Olivia Pratten. New York City, N.Y., Jun 12, 2010 / 07:56 am (CNA).- A recent report by the Commission on Parenthood’s Future indicates that adult offspring of sperm donation struggle with questions of identity as a result of not knowing their biological father. Fr. Thomas Berg, who specializes in bioethics, told CNA that the practice of sperm donation has “grossly underestimated” the human need to connect with one's biological parents. The report, “My Daddy’s Name is Donor: A New Study of Young Adults Conceived Through Sperm...

Singer explains Benatar’s antinatalist philosophy, which bases its moral framework by weighing the consequences of existence, in this way: “everyone will suffer to some extent, and if our species continues to reproduce, we can be sure that some future children will suffer severely. Hence continued reproduction will harm some children severely, and benefit none.” Singer then invites readers to engage in a thought experiment: "So why don’t we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction!"

It was only a matter of time before someone would construct a serious formal argument for solving the growing organ shortage by euthanasing brain-dead or unconscious. It has finally happened. The only surprise is that it has been made by an Oxford don who is the editor of the leading journal, Bioethics. Professor Julian Savulescu and his associate Dominic Wilkinson, in an early on-line article, “Should we allow organ donation euthanasia? Alternatives for maximizing the number and quality of organs for transplantation”, contend that their proposal could supply as many as 2,200 more organs each year in the UK. Savulescu...

Scientists have discovered that the DNA of babies conceived through IVF differs from that of other children, putting them at greater risk of diseases such as diabetes and obesity later in life. The new research could explain why IVF babies tend to be at higher risk of low birth weight, defects and rare metabolic disorders. The changes are not in the genes themselves but in the mechanism that switches them on and off, the study of which is known as epigenetics. “These epigenetic differences have the potential to affect embyronic development and foetal growth, as well as influencing long-term patterns...

Bioethics: Five years after a budget-busting $3 billion was allocated to embryonic stem cell research, there have been no cures, no therapies and little progress. So supporters are embracing research they once opposed. California's Proposition 71 was intended to create a $3 billion West Coast counterpart to the National Institutes of Health, empowered to go where the NIH could not — either because of federal policy or funding restraints on biomedical research centered on human embryonic stem cells. Supporters of the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, passed in 2004, held out hopes of imminent medical miracles that were...

Progressives Discover Bioethics Natalia Angulo, January 12, 2010 The Center for American Progress sponsored the event Progress in Bioethics to promote a stronger relationship between scientific innovation and politics on the grounds that bio-politics is the next frontier. The event’s tagline revealed an ulterior competitive motive, perhaps, which set the tone for the panel discussion: “After more than a decade of conservatives’ dominance of public bioethical debate, progressive bioethics is finally in ascendance.” Editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Michael Tomasky began by pointing out that “Conservatives don’t do nuance” [when it comes to ethical issues]. That there is...

This isn't an idle exercise. Bioethics matters. The field exerts tremendous influence over the most important questions of public policy and moral values: How should we treat the most vulnerable and dependent among us? What makes us human? Indeed, is it even morally relevant that one is human? Trends in bioethics, thus, illuminate where we are as a society and the nature of the culture we are creating for our progeny. 10: The ascendance of an anti-human environmentalism.Deep ecology, the most radical expression of environmentalism, maintains that human beings are the world's enemy -- the AIDS of the Earth, as...

LifeNews.com Note: Center for Bioethics and Culture consultant Wesley J. Smith, is also a Senior Fellow in Human Rights and Bioethics at the Discovery Institute and the associate director of the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide. He is the author of the Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World.   "Flash Forward" is a new and interesting television drama presented on the ABC Television Network. The premise is brilliant - due to reasons still unknown, everyone in the world (except the bad guys) blackout for two minutes seventeen seconds. Planes crash, people collapse on the streets, swimmers...

Front Royal, Va., Dec 5, 2009 / 10:06 am (CNA).- Fr. Thomas J. Euteneuer, President of Human Life International has called for Americans to be watchful of President Obama's appointments to the new Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, claiming the unlikelihood of the advisors to share the pro-life sentiment of the majority of Americans.On November 24, President Obama signed an Executive Order creating the new Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, whose purpose is to advise the President on concerns emerging from advances in biomedicine and related areas of science and technology."As our nation invests...

Oh-oh: Here they come. For years, organ transplant ethicists and some in the bioethics community have agitated to increase the supply of donated organs. There is nothing wrong with that in the abstract, of course. Increasing the supply would alleviate much human suffering and is devoutly to be wished.  But therein lurks a great danger. Increasing supply is a worthy goal only so long as the organs are obtained ethically. But there is a growing chorus among the medical and bioethical intelligentsia to obtain more organs by harvesting living patients. Yes, some of our most influential voices now seek a license to...

October 06, 2009, 0:00 p.m. The Convenient DeathBy the Editors Wait for patients to die before taking their organs, and the organs won’t be as fresh. Let doctors take the organs from living patients — even if it means causing them to die a little faster than they otherwise would — and the supply of usable organs will go up. Some other patient will get a second chance at life, and the dead guy won’t miss anything: What could possibly go wrong with this idea? The editors of Nature are well aware that this proposal might seem a little...

Question from the bottom of page 2: Most proponents of the right to die would agree with your ideas about euthanasia. But you lose them when you suggest that it's OK to kill a baby before it's 28 days old, because until that time, it is not self-aware and "doesn't have the same right to life as others." Answer: I wrote that in 1995. I have changed my position. Now I believe you should look at every individual case.

After World War II, the U.S. government invested an enormous amount of money in medicine; medical research, medical procedures and medical technologies. This investment made contemporary scientific medicine into American medicine, characterized by a continuing flow of new treatment possibilities. These advances raised all kinds of ethical questions. Some were personal and individual, others were social and political. Both type questions are addressed by a new academic discipline called bioethics. The first attempt to develop a scientific medicine took place in Greece in the 5th century B.C. It was called Hippocratic medicine. Closely linked with this first scientific medicine was...

Obama science czar John Holdren stated in a college textbook that "illegitimate children" born to unwed mothers could be taken by the government and put up for adoption if the mother refused to have an abortion. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, argued that "illegitimate childbearing could be strongly discouraged" as a socioeconomic measure imposed to control population growth. As previously reported, WND has obtained a copy of the 1970s college textbook "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment" that Ehrlich co-authored with Malthusian population alarmist Paul R. Ehrlich and Ehrlich's wife, Anne. The authors argued involuntary...

On June 5, 2008, the Starr family's life changed forever. Patrick Starr, father of two and a softball fanatic, was playing his favorite sport when he collided with another player and fell backward, striking his head on the field. The impact caused brain damage that put the Pasadena man into a coma, in which he has remained ever since. Now his wife of 16 years, Beth, is prepared to let him go - but she wanted to be sure she and their children Ashleigh, 15, and Zachary, 8, are financially secure first. "That's what he would want," she said. Starr...

TEL AVIV – There is no moral concern regarding cloning human beings since human embryos, which develop into a baby, are "only a handful of cells," argued President Obama's newly confirmed regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein. "If scientists will be using and cloning embryos only at a very early stage when they are just a handful of cells (say, before they are four days old), there is no good reason for a ban (on cloning)," wrote Sunstein, who was confirmed by the Senate last week as administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. "It is silly to...

Cass Sunstein, President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), has advocated a policy under which the government would “presume” someone has consented to having his or her organs removed for transplantation into someone else when they die unless that person has explicitly indicated that his or her organs should not be taken. Under such a policy, hospitals would harvest organs from people who never gave permission for this to be done.

For the last couple of weeks we have been blasting Cass Sunstein on this blog. Many of you have also picked up the sword and begun fighting this Obama appointment as well. Now, we need to really stand up. The Senate will be coming back into session next week and Harry Reid has already mentioned that he wants to make confirming Sunstein one of his first priorities. We CANNOT let this happen. Check out this story today on Sunstein from Matt Cover at CNS News. If this doesn't make you pick up a phone and call your Senator, I don't...

42.90 Euros Per Arm The German company Tutogen's business in body parts is as secretive as it is lucrative. It extracts bones from corpses in Ukraine to manufacture medical products, as part of a global market worth billions that is centered in the United States. Anatoly Korzhak, a pensioner and former engineer, died in Kiev on August 5, 2004. His body was picked up at 2 a.m. and taken to the forensic medicine institute in the Ukrainian capital. That same night, Korzhak's daughter, Lena Krat, received a telephone call and was asked to come to the institute as soon as...

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 27, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - "Question with boldness." That is the motto of radio host and FOX News television host Glenn Beck, who says he asks questions no different than ordinary Americans - he just has an army of researchers to help him explore these questions. But what the question explores is the disturbing relationship between eugenics, Nazism, and the imposition of Obama's health care plan upon the United States.Like the old adage "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it," Beck has looked back to the past to get a glimpse of the future....

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Louisiana's top prosecutor said Friday he will not reopen a probe into allegations of euthanasia at a hospital crippled by Hurricane Katrina, despite new statements from a doctor that he drugged a terminal patient to "get rid of her faster." Dr. Ewing Cook said that as staff at Memorial Medical Center desperately tried to care for and evacuate patients, making spot assessments of which ones might survive, he scribbled "pronounced dead at" on the patient's chart, intending to fill in time and other details later. "I gave her medicine so I could get rid of her...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- The latest news from the world of genetic manipulation comes from scientists who are conducting research on monkeys that they say could lead to the birth of a human being with three parents in order to eliminate the possibility of inheriting and genes that could cause certain diseases or conditions. Genetic engineering has long caused problems for pro-life advocates and bioethicists because of the manipulation involved and research that destroys human life in order to create a so-called perfect human race. It also leads, they say, to a society which devalues the disabled and the physically...

If President Obama wants to better understand why America's discomfort with end-of-life discussions threatens to derail his health-care reform, he might begin with his own Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). He will quickly discover how government bureaucrats are greasing the slippery slope that can start with cost containment but quickly become a systematic denial of care. Last year, bureaucrats at the VA's National Center for Ethics in Health Care advocated a 52-page end-of-life planning document, "Your Life, Your Choices." It was first published in 1997 and later promoted as the VA's preferred living will throughout its vast network of hospitals...

Hollywood takes up a social issue, hard data and clarity can be elusive. My Sister’s Keeper, a drama in theaters this summer, provides a handy example of Tinseltown’s tendency to let tears trump truth. Told through a series of flashbacks, the plot is set in motion by a medical specialist’s shocking proposal to a mother desperate to save her gravely ill child: Create a genetically engineered sibling who can donate bone marrow and other vital tissue to cheat death. That suggestion would stop most parents in their tracks. But this mom grabs hold of the idea and runs with it....

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/2009/08/15/obamacare-compassion-and-choices-seeking-to-become-planned-parenthood-of-death/

Obamacare and the Ghost of Terri Schiavo Why Americans Worry About The Democrats Pulling Grandma's Plug Dan McLaughlin Wednesday, August 12th at 4:54PM EDT 2 Comments NPR’s headline on yesterday’s town hall on health care by President Obama: Obama Says His Health Plan Won’t ‘Pull The Plug On Grandma’ The NY Daily News had a similar headline using that quote in this morning’s print edition, as does this Reuters item; the NY Post less delicately shortens the headline to ‘WE WON’T PULL PLUG ON GRANNY’.This is not the place the White House wanted to be in right now. Even George...

MONTREAL, August 11, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - An Angus Reid-La Presse poll carried out on August 4 and 5 has found that more than three quarters of Quebecers agree that euthanasia should be legalized in Quebec.Jaideep Mukerji, Vice President of Public Affairs at Angus Reid Strategies, said he was surprised by the results of the poll of 800 adults in Quebec."You'd be surprised how Quebecers are in favor of euthanasia and that their opinion on the subject is clear," Mukerji told La Presse, adding that support for the legalized killing was consistent across most social and economic strata."The responses of Quebecers...

Recently in a Washington Times radio interview, RNC Chairman Michael Steele was expressing his concerns regarding health care reform. He commented that the GOP’s handling of my sister Terri Schiavo is an example of what he fears, stating, “It is inserting itself into the very fabric of the decisions that you make, have to make every single day. It’ll make the Terri Schiavo case look like a walk in the park.” I understand the point that Michael Steele was trying to make. He was using Terri as an example of what it would mean if the government was to get...

The doctor will kill you now Posted: July 23, 2009 1:00 am Eastern By Andrew Longman © 2009 I have commented before that the purpose of socialized medicine is not health care, but rather government-run death care. The choker bill presently being rammed down America's throat in the Congress is no exception. In light of the recent history where hospitals have forcibly dehydrated people to death, everyone should pay attention to their gag reflex. On page 430 of the 2009 Death Care Act we find: (B) The level of treatment …may range from an indication for full treatment to an...

ROME, JULY 19, 2009 (Zenit.org).- The idea that some people are genetically inferior, and need to be eliminated or prevented from reproducing, is a mentality that still persists, despite the battering it took after the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. In a revealing interview published July 12 in the New York Times Magazine Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States was asked about abortion, among other topics. Referring to the Supreme Court decision that opened the doors to abortion, Roe v. Wade and subsequent decisions about abortion funding, Ginsburg commented: "Frankly I had thought...

Senator Ted Kennedy, who is now 76 years old and was ( diagnosed with brain cancer) in May of last year, is telling the world that nationalized medical care is "the cause of his life." He wants to see it pass as soon as possible, before he departs this vale of tears. The prospect of Kennedy's passing is viewed by the liberal press with anticipatory tears and mourning. But they are not asking the proper question by their own lights: That question -- which will be asked for you and me when we reach his age and state in life...

Obamacare dictates end of life counseling every five years (or more)... See for yourself: Here is the section dealing with end of life counseling for seniors. This section talks about possible life sustaining treatment. These orders, of course, will be "standardized and uniquely identifiable throughout the State." This life sustaining treatment will be "guided by a coalition of stakeholders includes representatives from emergency medical services, emergency department physicians or nurses, state long-term care association, state medical association, state surveyors, agency responsible for senior services, state department of health, state hospital association, home health association, state bar association, and state hospice...

Last month, President Barack Obama quietly disbanded the President's Council on Bioethics, a deliberative body whose changing cast of erudite and ideologically diverse members had spent the past eight years thinking through today's toughest moral questions. Members received only one day's notice of the council's dissolution, forcing them to cancel a planned meeting and leave unfinished several major reports that were due to be released soon. Their abrupt dismissal received little press, aside from a New York Times article that noted Obama's reason for dismantling the council. According to White House press officer Reid Cherlin, the council was "a philosophically...

Bioethics: The former director of the National Institutes of Health, once an enthusiast for embryonic stem cells, now says their future has "dimmed." So why is the administration bailing out research into such therapies while troubled states like California have committed billions?Aside from creating or saving a few research jobs, the administration's decision to federally fund embryonic stem cell research is, as we've noted, a bailout of bad science. It throws money at an avenue of research that time and adult stem cell progress have passed by. Applauding the administration's move was Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., who echoed the claims...

You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much? If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn’t going to be good. But suppose it’s not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man — and everyone...

You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much? If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn’t going to be good. But suppose it’s not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man — and everyone...

Benedict XVI returns to the principal themes of his social encyclical reaffirming the need for a global commitment to development, to eliminate "social inequality and structural injustices that are no longer tolerable." The social question has become an "anthropological” issue which implies a way of conceiving man in truth, body and soul. Prayers for Honduras and a farewell ahead of holidays in Les Combes (Aosta Valley). Vatican City (AsiaNews) - "The absolutism of technology, which finds its clearest expression in certain practices contrary to life�, could "draw dark scenarios for the future of humanity": Benedict XVI returns to warn against...

VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI stressed the church's opposition to abortion and stem cell research in his first meeting with President Barack Obama on Friday, pressing the Vatican's case with the U.S. leader who is already under fire on those issues from some conservative Catholics and bishops back home...Afterward, the Vatican said the leaders discussed immigration, the Middle East peace process and aid to developing nations. But the Vatican's statement also underscored the pair's deep disagreement on abortion. "In the course of their cordial exchanges, the conversation turned first of all to questions which are in the interest of...