Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism, and consults for the Patients Rights Council.

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Peter Singer Supports Eugenics

From First Thoughts

We shouldn’t be surprised that Princeton’s bioethics professor Peter Singer supports genetic engineering of progeny—as he does in this article. After all, Singer rejects the idea that human life has intrinsic value and supports infanticide of babies up to one year of age based on . . . . Continue Reading »

A "Harvestable" Child Harvestable No More

From First Thoughts

We hear continually from the elites of bioethics about how people diagnosed as permanently unconscious (persistent vegetative state, or PVS), are no longer persons, and thus, they can be treated as if they were not fully human. That is abhorrent in any event, but the PVS diagnosis is often wrong, as . . . . Continue Reading »

THE SCIENTIST Defends Bush on Science

From First Thoughts

The Scientist (no link available) has written a courageous article—for this day and age—claiming that the Bush Administration aren’t just a bunch of anti-science Luddites, after all. It is not my purpose here at Secondhand Smoke to boost President Bush. But as I wrote last week in . . . . Continue Reading »

Early Push for Reproductive Cloning

From First Thoughts

We are always assured by “the scientists” that they don’t support “reproductive cloning,” but only want a license to clone so that the asexually created embryos (for now, leading to fetuses later) can be researched upon. To some degree, that is true—but not . . . . Continue Reading »

PVS Patients: The New Human Guinea Pigs

From First Thoughts

First, utilitarian bioethicists wanted to redefine people with PVS as dead so they could be treated as so many organ farms ripe for the harvest. Now, several articles published in the misnamed Journal of Medical Ethics urge that patients diagnosed with PVS be used to as guinea pigs to see whether . . . . Continue Reading »