Wesley J. Smith

The new Obama Administration is going to push full speed ahead pouring money into ESCR—and I worry, human cloning research. This concern is heightened by the appointment of Alta Charo to the transition team. I know Alta, and we get along fine personally. But we clash. (She once called me a . . . . Continue Reading »

Alex Schedenberg, the head of Canada’s Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, has a very good piece about the passage of I 1000 in today’s Calgary Herald. He points out the truth the media generally refuse to report, that Oregon’s guidelines are often violated and that most assisted . . . . Continue Reading »

Comment Visions, an international on-line debate forum, asked my view on the following question: Biotechnology has been hailed as the wonder industry of the 21st Century, but are we capable of controlling it?Here is my reply:Biotechnology offers tremendous promise and peril. The peril arises, in my . . . . Continue Reading »

The National Kidney Foundation is apparently considering supporting a market in organs. This is a very bad idea. It is taking a public survey. If you wish to weigh in, here’s the . . . . Continue Reading »

Sickening. Just sickening. A public official in the UK who is “Labour’s czar for the elderly,” posits a duty to die by having society refuse to medically support demented patients, and denigrates them with the V-Epithet to boot. From the story: Dame Joan Bakewell says she does not . . . . Continue Reading »

Expounding further on a theme I began yesterday: Western culture is profoundly—and I think on several important bioethical issues. implacably—split about what is right and what is wrong. These issues range from abortion, to euthanasia, to embryonic stem cell research, to removing feeding . . . . Continue Reading »

The case of M.B., the 12-year-old boy whose Orthodox Jewish parents sought to have his life support continued after he was declared dead by neurological criteria, is over. From the story: The boy had already been declared brain dead, but some adherents of Jewish religious law say death occurs only . . . . Continue Reading »

The abandoning ethic of assisted suicide is demonstrated by studies showing depression in many patients requesting hastened death. This point is commented upon in a letter to the editor in the British Medical Journal by Thomas Koch, a Canadian professor at the University of British Columbia. There . . . . Continue Reading »

There was a column in yesterday’s SF Chronicle that dealt with the mortgage crisis. That issue is way beyond our scope here, but one point made by the writer hit my SHS nerve endings. From the column, “Are You an Idiot to Keep Paying Your Mortgage?”:But what about the moral . . . . Continue Reading »

China is a true tyranny. And now, it has ordered a Muslim woman to abort her viable fetus or face the loss of her home. From the story: Chinese authorities have ordered Arzigul Tursun, who is 26 weeks pregnant, to abort her unborn child because she has two other children. She is under watch at the . . . . Continue Reading »