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In a recent article that has to be read to be believed, Shannon Dea, co-president of Planned Parenthood Waterloo Region, responds to a call by a Canadian member of parliament to have a debate on the humanity of the unborn child, saying: “Medical science is irrelevant to the question of when a fetus becomes a human being — that matter is a legal and philosophical one, not a medical one.” Dea might as well have said that medical science is irrelevant to the question of whether or not a pig is a pig, or an elephant is an elephant, or...

I knew there was a catch. Peter Singer opined that broadening health care coverage is an important public good.  (I agree, but it is not a “right.”  Nor, is Obamacare the correct approach.  But those are not the subjects of this post.) Being a utilitarian who advocates valuing the lives of some over those of others (“quality of life” ethic), Singer doesn’t really support “universal” access. First, the give with one hand part;  From the Daily Princetonian story: There are many benefits to universal health care besides saving lives, Singer said. Universal health care, in the long run, would “reduce...

We have discussed the Baby Joseph futile care case here.  He is the baby who a Canadian hospital wanted to force off life support against the parents will and whose parents want a tracheotomy to help him live longer and at home. The impasse was resolved when the parents were able to move him to a St. Louis hospital.Well, now Peter Singer has come out against the parents.  From his column in the NY Daily News calling continuing care of Joseph “Deeply Misguided: “ Joseph’s parents, who have previously had another child who died from the same disease, objected...

EDITORS NOTE: THERE IS LANGUAGE THROUGHOUT THE COLUMN THAT MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME READERS. THANK YOU. On CNN recently, Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin ("The Social Network," "West Wing") called Sarah Palin an "idiot."Let's see to whom that label applies.Last week in the Huffington Post, Sorkin wrote a column attacking the ex-governor of Alaska and her TLC mini-series reality TV show, "Sarah Palin's Alaska." Sorkin opened with a quote from Palin on the hypocrisy of meat-eaters who condemn hunting for food. He then proceeded with this response: "You're right, Sarah, we'll all just go f--- ourselves now."That non sequitur was the...

This is a followup to my recent post about Peter Singer denying equal moral status to children until after two years of age.Defenders of Peter Singer like to say that we critics are just too dull to really understand what the great man is saying.  And hence, we distort his thinking on issues like infanticide.  But the real problem for Singerphiles is that we understand precisely what he advocates–and more importantly, where such thinking would lead.I make it a habit not to use Nazi analogies.  Singer is not a racist or anti Semite. Nor is he a totalitarian. But he...

I was alerted by Nat Hentoff about an assertion made by Peter Singer–as reported in the Catholic Eye–at a  Princeton conference around the abortion question, in which he claims that human beings don’t possess full moral status until after the age of two. I checked it out for myself. Yup. From my transcription of Panel II on 10/15/10 (press “Event Videos,” 20101015-panel two, to link to access streamed session) : Q (beginning at 1:25:22): When discussing at which point after birth we would give full moral status, you gave…a legal or public policy point about practicality… Forgetting the practical...

Unless we understand the ideological foundations of the Greens, we will fail to effectively address the challenge they pose. We will be left debating instrumental outcomes, as if they are based on the same foundations that underpin western civilisation. The Greens are at the cutting edge of a clash within western civilisation itself. The Greens are not a single-issue party. Their objective is “to transform politics and bring about Green government.” As part of a worldwide movement, this objective involves a radical transformation of western culture. In their manifesto, The Greens, Bob Brown and Peter Singer write that the origin...

PRINCETON, October 21 (C-FAM) A baby's cry, piercing the air from the back of an Ivy League academic hall, offered a disquieting counterpoint to a startling argument for abortion rights. “An infant has no moral status because he is not self-aware,” said Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics.  Singer argued this point at an historic conference he co-organized at Princeton University last weekend, seeking new dialogue on the heated issue of abortion. Remarkably, for a conference examining abortion, there was virtually no discussion about the act of abortion itself.   “We have to get rid of the idea of evil,” said Frances...

Many years ago we learned that Princeton’s own Professor Peter Singer had devised a method by which to excuse some human persons from the human race and welcome into it other entities which were in fact animals, not humans. As Professor Dianne Irving pointed out in a speech on the topic,  “Princeton’s Peter Singer—a ‘preference’ utilitarian…argues that some animals have more moral value than young human children or ill, disabled human adults.” Of course Singer is not alone. Most recently he has been joined by a cadre of animal rights activists who have brought their own spin to the question...

By rejecting human exceptionalism, modern bioethics threatens to destroy human equality and expose the defenseless to killing and exploitation. Take infanticide, which Peter Singer–among others–asserts should be permitted if the baby does not meet the utilitarian interests of the family.  And indeed, in the Netherlands and Flanders, studies show infanticide is ongoing–based on compaaasssssssion, of course.Infanticide is nothing new. The Romans exposed disabled babies on hills and murdered unwanted infants.  More proof of this was recently uncovered in the UK, where a mass grave of murdered infants from the Roman times was uncovered.  From the story: An extensive study of...

Peter Singer's June 6th essay for the New York Times about whether or not we should be the "last generation" to humans to live, suffer, and mess up the planet elicited much response (here is my post about it), and Singer has now responded to some of the responders. If nothing else, it confirms what his first essay demonstrated fairly well, despite its relative brevity: Singer's arguments are generally pedestrian and hollow, as well as sometimes incoherent. For example: The claims made by some readers that my essay reveals philosophers to be gloomy, depressed people are therefore wide of the...

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!"

NEW YORK, June 8, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Princeton philosopher Peter Singer one of the world’s foremost contemporary utilitarian philosophers infamous for his advocacy of infanticide, would like individuals to consider this question: would sterilizing the human race to spare future generations the pain of existence be a good idea?In a blog post for the New York Times entitled “Should this be the last generation?” Singer discusses in glowing terms the thought of South African philosopher David Benatar. Singer calls Benator the “author of a fine book with an arresting title: ‘Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into...

... Most thoughtful people are extremely concerned about climate change. Some stop eating meat, or flying abroad on vacation, in order to reduce their carbon footprint. But the people who will be most severely harmed by climate change have not yet been conceived. If there were to be no future generations, there would be much less for us to feel to guilty about. 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! Of course, it...

This may be the worst story of the year, at least in reference to domestic policy and crime. How bad is it? When Matt of Creative Minority Report tipped me to it this morning, I had to track it down to make sure it was on the level. A woman in Campbell County, Virginia smothered her newborn infant, and police are powerless to do anything about it: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR VIDEO The caller said a woman in her early 20s was in labor. When deputies arrived, they discovered the baby had actually been born around 1:00a.m., about ten hours...

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.

Take Peter Singer, author of "Animal Liberation." This publication has been the inspiration for PETA; featured in the movie "Legally Blonde" and is the animal rights bible to which animal rights activists turn for guidance the same way Christians reference the actual bible. Beyond rights for animals (see if you catch the irony here) Singer believes that abortion should be available for any reason, up to and beyond birth. That's right - if you eat a hamburger, he'll call you a murder, but if you kill a baby he'll say you're doing the right thing. He believes that killing a...

Newsweek, in all of its wisdom, is still arguing that Sarah Palin lied about the death panel provisions in ObamaCare, but we really should have a death panel anyways. The author of the below piece, Evan Thomas, writes that his 79 year old mother wanted to die but the doctors wouldn't let her because the assisted living facility she was staying at was sustained by Medicare. He didn't like this and muses on how we can fix health care in this country by, you guessed it, getting people into hospice care and out of hospitals. People need to die and...

Peter Singer is the most popular bioethicist around for the “in crowd” of the MSM.  The New York Times loves him, often offering him its coveted pages within which to engage in punditry, for example in support of medically mutilating a profound disabled girl so she wouldn’t mature. Ditto, the LA Times which let him push infanticide in its pages.  And now CNN brought him in has a health care expert. From the story: This morning, CNN’s American Morning tried to explain health-care rationing. Their guest? Princeton ethicist Peter Singer. The network failed to mention anything about Singer’s extremely controversial background as a euthanasia...

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?

Recovery Act Allocates $1.1 Billion for Comparative Effectiveness Research The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services today announced the members of the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. Authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the new Council will help coordinate research and guide investments in comparative effectiveness research funded by the Recovery Act. “Comparative effectiveness research can improve care for all Americans and is an important element of President Obama’s health reform plan,” said HHS Spokeswoman Jenny Backus. “President Obama is committed to openness and transparency and the Coordinating Council will host open meetings and...

All the "best people" like Peter Singer, the bioethics professor from Princton who, a few short years ago, was advocating POST-NATAL ABORTIONS! praise Obama's Shovel-Ready Healthcare! Please read his article. 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? The costs of the current health care system are becoming increasingly clear, and public sentiment for a more systematic approach may be...

My post last week criticizing Princeton ethics professor Peter Singer received a storm of protest, including comments from a much more respectable ethicist professor as well as email that I am fairly confident came from one of Singer’s own adoring graduate students. The primary charge from these defenders of Singer was that I was being unfair to the great man by calling his ethical views morally reprehensible. Almost on cue, however, a story has emerged that provides a concrete illustration of what health care reform using Singer’s principles would look like. Recall that Singer was suggesting that $50,000 was far...

<p>Following the mad recommendations of Peter Singer made in NYT's Sunday magazine, it pays to take a look at what is actually in the healthcare bill.</p> <p>It's worse than you can possibly imagine. Somehow, it manages to be Singer on steroids. Who wrote this bill. It has Singer's footprints all over it.</p>

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...

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...

WHY IS RICK WAGONER FIRED AND NANCY PELOSI STILL WORKING?April 1, 2009 Apparently, it's OK for Obama to fire the head of General Motors, but Bush can't fire his own U.S. attorneys. It is generally agreed that the Obama administration's demand that Rick Wagoner resign as chairman of General Motors is the price of GM's accepting government money. To promote the sales of GM vehicles, Obama says the government will stand by your GM car warranty. And all the taxpayers will get a lube job. The new GM owner's manual will come with a disclaimer: "Close enough for government work."...

PETER SINGER has written a new book. The prominent Australian philosopher, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, argues in "The Life You Can Save" that residents of the affluent West have it within their power to eradicate extreme Third World poverty and its attendant suffering. By donating money to charity instead of spending it on things we don't really need, he writes, everyone can save lives - and when you fail to do so, he suggests, "you are leaving a child to die, a child you could have saved." Singer told the Wall Street Journal last week that he...

Eugenics … death of the defenceless The legacy of Darwin’s cousin Galton By Russell Grigg Few ideas have done more harm to the human race in the last 120 years than those of Sir Francis Galton. He founded the evolutionary pseudo-science of eugenics. Today, ethnic cleansing, the use of abortion to eliminate ‘defective’ unborn babies, infanticide, euthanasia, and the harvesting of unborn babies for research purposes all have a common foundation in the survival-of-the-fittest theory of eugenics. So who was Galton, what is eugenics, and how has it harmed humanity?...

ROBOTS will be armies of the future in a case of science fact catching up to fiction, a researcher said today. Peter Singer, who has authored books on the military, warned that while using robots for battle saves the lives of military personnel, the move has the potential to exacerbate warfare by having heartless machines do the dirty work. "We are at a point of revolution in war, like the invention of the atomic bomb," Mr Singer said. "What does it mean to go to war with US soldiers whose hardware is made in China and whose software is made...

LifeNews.com Note: Award winning author Wesley J. Smith is special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. His current book is Consumer’s Guide to a Brave New World.Peter Singer is the Princeton bioethicist who first broke into the public's consciousness more than thirty years ago with Animal Liberation, a book in which he claimed that granting human beings special privileges based on being human is "speciesist"—discrimination against animals. Instead of society being human centric, he asserted that the lives and well-being of animals deserve "equal consideration" with those of humans. Singer's intent was (and is) to destroy human...

BIRMINGHAM, UK, July 2, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - "Ellen Westwood was due to die in February but her family's Catholic and for them, life is sacred." So begins the television coverage by the BBC of a battle by a Birmingham family to prevent the NHS from dehydrating their mother to death. According to the BBC's report, doctors decided on a Friday in February that Mrs. Westwood was "due to die" by the following Monday, but the family, with the intervention of their priest, fought the order to remove the woman's hydration. Mrs. Ellen Westwood, 88, was in Birmingham's Selly Oak Hospital...

Peter Singer is a calm, lucid and able debater, and our debate at Biola University in Los Angeles on April 25 was lively and hard-fought. Not for nothing is Singer considered a world-class philosopher and advocate. To watch the debate go to dineshdsouza.com and click on my AOL blog. Singer praised me for not simply making assertions of faith or hurling Bible passages at him but rather for using reason and argument to make my case . And I complimented Singer for stepping, so to speak, into the lion's den. (Biola actually stands for Bible Institute of Los Angeles.) Unlike...

Tempe, AZ (LifeNews.com) -- Arizona State University is coming under fire for inviting controversial infanticide advocate Peter Singer to speak on campus. The Princeton professor will reportedly receive $20,000 for the speech, where the audience will not be allowed to question him on his anti-newborn views. Singer promoted the notion as early as 1984 that parents of disabled newborns be allowed to kill the baby shortly after birth. In some cases, he says newborns with disabilities should absolutely be killed.He expanded on the idea with the publication of his book Should the Baby Live? The Problem of Handicapped Infants...

The Michael Vick dogfighting scandal is morphing into a broader NFL dogfighting scandal, as other NFL players also appear to be involved in this very weird pastime. But as animal-rights groups get more aggressive in their accusations and demands, the whole scene is getting stranger. And the closer you look, the more you see the deep conflicts in core values that fracture our society. among PETA's prohibitions, is the use of animal skins. The ball, as in football, is an inflated leather object endearingly called the "pigskin." Why does PETA oppose existing NFL conduct policy, and not football itself? J.C....

A Sherborn teen was charged yesterday with having sex with sheep at a farm near his home, and police reports suggest the encounters may have gone on for nearly a year. Roger Henderson II, 18, was arraigned yesterday in Natick District Court on charges of bestiality, cruelty to animals and breaking and entering in connection with an incident police say took place at Boggastow Farm on June 27. According to a police report, the farm's barn had been the target of at least a dozen break-ins between August 2006 and June 2007, prompting the property owner to install surveillance cameras....

GNIEZNO, Poland, June 18, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Every so many years some of the world's most eminent scholars and religious and political leaders meet in the Polish city of Gniezno to discuss matters pertaining to Europe, especially the uniquely European view of spirituality and the nature and dignity of man.The Gniezno Congress--which traces its roots back to the year 1,000 when Otto III arrived at the tomb of bishop martyr St. Adalbert in the city of Gniezno--is regularly attended by numerous presidents of European Countries, and, in 1997, was attended by the Holy Father John Paul II during his...

Eugenic Darwinism by: Wendy Cook, June 04, 2007 Charles Darwin is partly to blame for eugenics, according to Discovery Institute senior fellow John West. Merriam-Webster’s defines eugenics as “a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed.” Darwin said that because of our sense of compassion we couldn’t simply follow the dictates of reason and get rid of the unfit, “but he certainly provided the logical basis for why we should do so and later the eugenicists quoted this passage and they weren’t quoting it out of context,...

Here are some outrageous and racist comments by environmentalists. These are compiled and documented in my book Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism Is Hazardous to Your Health. John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club: Muir said American Indians are “mostly ugly, and some of them altogether hideous.” They “seemed to have no right place in the landscape,” he continued. Muir is still honored without qualification on the Sierra Club web site, which proclaims, “John Muir is as relevant today as he was over 100 years ago.” Paul Ehrlich, influential “overpopulation” guru and professor of population studies at Stanford University: In his best-selling book,...

Every generation has a few atheists who seem eager to tell the world how much smarter they are than everybody else.  The fact that such individuals still exist, and that they are still producing popular tracts in defense of their disbelief, is no surprise.  Nevertheless, because ideas have consequences, one cannot ignore the recent push by big-name skeptics to persuade Americans that there is no God and that we should therefore adopt a new set of ethical standards.  In previous times, most people had a solid enough understanding of moral truth that they were not easily persuaded by atheist...

What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You? By PETER SINGER [snip] Gates may have given away nearly $30 billion, but that still leaves him sitting at the top of the Forbes list of the richest Americans, with $53 billion. His 66,000-square-foot high-tech lakeside estate near Seattle is reportedly worth more than $100 million. Property taxes are about $1 million. [snip] Has Bill Gates done enough? [snip] Paul Allen (Microsoft). Allen, who left the company in 1983, has given, over his lifetime, more than $800 million to philanthropic causes. [snip] Allen....owns the Seattle Seahawks, the Portland Trailblazers, a...

November 30, 2006, 0:00 a.m. The Animal House Falls ApartPeter Singer shocks with monkeys. By Wesley J. Smith Is the animal-rights movement beginning to fracture? The evidence definitely points in that direction. Liberationists have been engaged recently in some nasty infighting over basic issues of ideology and the propriety of violent and intimidating protest tactics. Indeed, the antipathy among the various factions seems to have grown so intense that the animal-rights movement could soon segregate into antagonistic camps. A shattering blow accelerating this potential disintegration may have just been struck — ironically, by Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer, who is...

How Green Was My Campus Most colleges and universities seem to be in a race with each other to see who can be the most environmental. An incident at Florida Gulf Coast University shows what you can get by winning the race to have the greenest campus—a lawsuit. “A Florida Gulf Coast University student who was chased down by a wild boar on campus is suing the school for more than $15,000,” Juan Ogles reported in the Fort Meyers News-Press on August 15th. “Donna Rodriguez, 52, filed a lawsuit in circuit court Monday that claims the school knew wild boars...

'Animal-rights' promoter asserts actual birth makes no difference An internationally known Princeton "bioethicist" and animal-rights activist says he'd kill disabled babies if it were in the "best interests" of the family, because he sees no distinction in the child's life whether it is born or not, and the world already allows abortion. The comments come from Peter Singer, a controversial bioethics professor, who responded to a series of questions in the UK Independent this week. Earlier, WND reported that Singer believes the next few decades will see a massive upheaval in the concept of life and rights, with only "a...

Princeton University philosophy professor Peter Singer came under international condemnation when he announced he favors killing disabled babies via infanticide. Though he was blasted from both sides of the political spectrum, the so-called ethicist still holds to the position. In an interview with The Independent newspaper in England, Singer said he would definitely kill a disabled newborn baby. He indicated he would do so "if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole." Singer said he found it surprising that abortion advocates would disagree with his views. "Many people find this shocking,...

PRINCETON, September 12, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In a question and answer article published in the UK's Independent today, controversial Princeton University Professor Peter Singer repeats his notorious stand on the killing of disabled newborns.  Asked, "Would you kill a disabled baby?", Singer responded, "Yes, if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole."People who oppose Singer's position have maintained that Singer is the logical extension of the culture of death and that society will eventually embrace his stance if there is no shift to the culture of life.  Alex Scadenberg, Executive...

<p>VINALHAVEN, Maine - Idyllic here, with long lazy days by the sea. Sophia, 6, and Lila, 4, splash in the plastic pool in front of the house. Their parents are going for a row. I am the presiding grandmother in this faraway place of peace and beauty, so protected from the gathering storm of world events.</p>

Commentators at the Chicago Tribune and NPR have pointedly questioned why President Bush signed into law S. 3504, the “Fetus Farming Prohibition Act of 2006,” saying that the law deals only with a hypothetical situation because “scientists say [it] is not happening.” Unfortunately, fetal farming, a la artificial wombs, is already underway in Tokyo and in the U.S. Furthermore, the press has failed to expound upon the problem scientists are having experimenting on one- or two-week-old embryos. These embryos fail to develop properly and become useful for embryonic stem cell therapies.Of course, this isn’t the only instance where language...

Philosophers of all stripes agree that the essence of ethics is that they are universal. For example, the Golden Rule grants other people the same ethical status that you give yourself. Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative is similar. In 'Practical Ethics' Peter Singer claims that his version of utilitarianism does a better job of capturing the universal nature of ethics than these other approaches. His reasoning begins with the observation that ethics demands considering more than one's own self-interest. Therefore a truly universal system of ethics demands that we give equal consideration to everyone's interests. This principle of equal consideration of...