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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...