June 2012

UMass Stem Cell Bank Closes

Ah, the heady days of trying to overcome the evil BUSH!’s minor embryonic stem cell funding restrictions. You know, the ones that resulted in hundreds of millions spent in human embryonic stem cell research. Back in those days when hype and lies ruled the biotech discourse, states were tripping over each other in an Oklahoma […]

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German Judge Outlaws Circumcision

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC Religious freedom is supposed to be a touchstone of liberty. But many secularists so disdain faith that they refuse to abide by the principle — or more commonly, attempt to shrink its parameters to a very limited “freedom of worship.” Now, in the aftermath of […]

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Shrugging at Hard Euthanasia Truths

I have been fighting euthanasia since 1993. During that time, I have been startled at what resonates emotionally with people about doctor-prescribed/administered death, and those matters which are generally shrugged off as of little concern. If a sick person wants to die, that resonates. Look at the Kevorkian debacle. If a sick person is pushed […]

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Peter Singer’s Views Deserve Scorn, Not Awards

It is a disturbing sign of the times that Princeton’s notorious bioethicist Peter Singer has been awarded Australia’s highest civic award “for eminent service to philosophy and bioethics as a leader of public debate and communicator of ideas in the areas of global poverty, animal welfare and the human condition.” This is a disgrace. Would […]

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Treating Infanticide Respectfully Makes it Respectable

Infanticide — for which doctors were hanged at Nuremberg — is becoming an increasingly commonplace issue of debate. Indeed, it seems to me that the notion of killing babies is now precisely where abortion was in the 1960s. And we know what happened then. But back to the point at hand. The Journal of Medical […]

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Altruistic Surrogacy Ban for Gays, Singles Wrongly Discriminates

When IVF began, we were told it was only to permit infertile married couples have children. It has since expanded geometrically to become an industry that also includes eugenic options, commercialization of gametes and uteruses, and facilitation of what were once called alternative lifestyles. It has resulted in treating nascent life as a natural resource […]

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Failure of Cigarette Tax Bad Sign for California Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Proposition 29 was strikingly similar in concept to Proposition 71, which created the benighted California Institute for Regenerative Medicine in 2004. Proposition 29 would tax cigarettes. Proposition 71 borrowed money. Both were designed to use the money thereby obtained to establish a quasi state agency to fund special research projects, 29 against cancer and 71 […]

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Finding the Consciousness in “Unconscious” People Worth the Cost?

Patients diagnosed as persistently unconscious may be the most scorned people on earth. I mean, who else could be called a turnip or carrot with impunity? It is within the context of this “unrepentent bigotry” that I analyze a hopeful story about increasing efforts to find the consciousness within the diagnosed unconscious. We have discussed […]

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Send Eggsploitation to Italy

Thumbnail image for Send Eggsploitation to Italy

Friends,   Over the past year the CBC team has been working to have our award-winning documentary film Eggsploitation translated into Italian. Our translators, Gianfranco Amato and Josephine Quintavalle, are sending me a DVD, and we can’t wait to see it.   Translating the film was a key part of responding to an invitation to […]

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Egg Freezing Not “Medical”

Science writer Ronald Bailey took to the pages of Reason last month to extol egg freezing as a splendid technology to promote female equality. Here’s the meme: Since men can father children even into old age, it is “discriminatory” (bad Darwin!) that women’s biological clocks stop ticking. Thus, by extracting eggs and freezing them — […]

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A Tale of Eggsploitation

This fall NBC brings us a tale of eggsploitation, The New Normal: A Post-Modern Family (She’s Having Their Baby). From the preview trailer, embedded below: Click through our egg donor file, find your match, and then implant it in a surrogate. She’s just like an easy bake oven, except with no legal rights to the […]

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Is There a “Right to Death?”

The right to life is morphing before our very eyes into a right to death. Witness the recent Canadian judge who ruled, in essence, that there is a right to suicide because it isn’t a crime to kill oneself. In the UK, in the meanwhile, Tony Nicklinson — whose lawsuit seeking the right to be […]

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Peter Singer Attacks Religious Liberty

Peter Singer, the crass infanticide and “speciesism” promoter is an atheist. Bully for him, and who cares? But his antipathy toward faith may explain his hostility to, and utter confusion about, religious liberty. Singer has written that Obamacare’s “Free Birth Control Rule” doesn’t violate religious liberty because Catholic hospitals and universities can simply turn over […]

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Switzerland Welcomes Dr. Suicide Into Nursing Homes

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC Switzerland, which already permits suicide purveyors to make a lot of money out of suicide tourism, is now bringing self termination into nursing homes and hospitals. From the Swiss Info story: Vaud is set to become the first Swiss canton to introduce a law explicitly […]

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Canada: BC Judge Creates “Right” to Suicide

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC We knew this was coming, because the fix was in: The BC Supreme Court Chief Justice has ruled that the law against assisted suicide is unconstitutional. From the CBC story: In her judgment, Smith speaks directly to the situation faced by Gloria Taylor, a B.C. […]

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Human Exceptionalism and Equality Must Be Defended On All Fronts

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC Here is my contribution to the Human Exceptionalism Symposium at the Human Life Review. First, I get into why the issue is so fundamental. From, “The Struggle For Human Equality: It Must Be Defended on All Fronts:” Human exceptionalism, as I wrote in the original […]

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Hippocrates Was a Human Exceptionalist

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC Jennifer Lahl, head of the Center for Bioethics and Culture (for which I consult), weighed in on human exceptionalism at the Human Life Review symposium, which debates whether religion is necessary to the defense of HE. No, she says. From, “Thank God Hippocrates Was a […]

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British Medical Association (Again) Urges Doctors To Abdicate Their Professional Duty

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC This is the second time that the swells who lead the British Medical Association have tried to move organized medicine out of the way of opposing the legalization of assisted suicide. Last time, in 2005, the attempt was overturned by a revolt by the rank […]

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