Wesley J. Smith

Last week I posted here at SHS about an opinion column in the Hastings Center Report urging that assisted suicide be made available to some mentally ill people. I expound on that issue in greater length and detail in this piece published today in the Daily Standard. I conclude:With the truth now . . . . Continue Reading »

I have a piece up today over at First Things about the latest attack on human exceptionalism—animal ensoulment—published, no less, in the science pages of the New York Times. I review some of the areas in which human exceptionalism is under assault and describe the NYT story. Here are a . . . . Continue Reading »

And I don’t just say that because it was written by my wife, nationally syndicated San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Debra J. Saunders. The problem of animal rights terrorism is real and of growing concern. So far, no one has been murdered—not for lack of advocacy for such an event by . . . . Continue Reading »

What a pleasant surprise: An opinion column in the New England Journal of Medicine opposes medical futility. Written by Harvard Medical School professor Robert D. Troug, M.D., it makes some very good points about the problem with even the best-intended futile care policies. Reacting to the Baby . . . . Continue Reading »

Tearing humans off the pedestal of exceptionalism is all the rage today among academics, philosophers, and other assorted members of the intelligentsia. The war against unique human worth¯of which many remain unaware¯is being mounted on many fronts: • "Personhood Theory" in . . . . Continue Reading »

Oops. Here we have been told that PGD, that is, removing one cell from an early embryo and testing to determine whether it is deemed worthy of implantation, does not harm embryos. Not so, perhaps. According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine:Preimplantation genetic screening . . . . Continue Reading »

This just in from Science (no link available):The fact that there is only a about a 1% difference between the genetic make-up of chimpanzees and human has been called “the most overly exposed factoid in modern science”. First established in a paper in 1975, it was confirmed a couple of . . . . Continue Reading »

Patents. You don’t hear too much about the issue in the ESCR debate, but patent some-would-say obstructionism, at least as much as those purportedly caused by President Bush’s funding policy, have allegedly impeded ESCR.Now, it appears that the iron grip of the Wisconsin Alumni Research . . . . Continue Reading »

When it is politically expedient to pretend that it isn’t yet human life:There is long discussion happening at a previous post (click here to check it out), that has evolved into a discussion, among other matters, of whether a one-week old human embryo, often called a blastocyst, is really an . . . . Continue Reading »

Humans are now being denigrated as “greedy” for taking the “lion’s share” of solar energy by converting more than our fair share of plant life to our own use. From the story:HUMANS are just one of the millions of species on Earth, but we use up almost a quarter of the . . . . Continue Reading »