June 1, 2007
Detroit Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson opines that Kevorkian was just a man ahead of his time. Imagine the “reality show” television potential, he writes, if Kevorkian were working today: How differently things might have turned out if the nation’s … Read More
June 1, 2007
This Reuters sugar piece on Kevorkian leaves out some of the most pertinent parts of his story. Here are five other facts that would seem to be more relevant than Kevorkian teaching himself Japanese: 1. The majority of his assisted … Read More
June 1, 2007
Dutch scientists are trying to create meat in the lab. If they succeed, the hope is that people can eat pork–and presumably other meats–without the need to raise and butcher food animals, which is seen as more humane and environmentally … Read More
June 1, 2007
This is my last planned installment on the release of Jack Kevorkian from prison. The article could have been called “Kevorkian in His Own Words,” for I present his motives for engaging in his assisted suicide campaign, as he stated … Read More
May 31, 2007
The nation’s leading hospice professional organization, the NHPCO, has reiterated its opposition to the legalization of assisted suicide. Good. Assisted suicide is directly contrary to the hospice philosophy. Indeed, as the statement notes, it constitutes (often unintentional) abandonment. For the … Read More
May 31, 2007
A lot can be made of a new Gallop Poll about assisted suicide and euthanasia. When asked if assisted suicide is morally acceptable, 48% say yes and 44% say no. That is very close to the AP poll I posted … Read More
May 30, 2007
As promised, here is the Weekly Standard article I co-authored with Rita Marker, which points up the similarities between Jack Kevorkian’s illegal assisted suicide campaign and the legal assisted suicide regimen currently regent in Oregon. Here are a few excerpts: … Read More
May 30, 2007
When I wrote the other day about the Dutch “reality” television show in which a terminally ill woman will interview “contestants” vying to receive her kidney for transplant, I assumed that the donation would be after she had died. Apparently … Read More
May 29, 2007
USA Today has named Terri Schiavo one of the top 25 people who “moved us” in the last 25 years. Hmmm. I know her family would rather she hadn’t made such an impact, that instead, she were still alive and … Read More
May 29, 2007
We often hear that more than 60% of Americans favor assisted suicide. I have never believed it because the polls that count–elections–mostly show narrow disapproval of legalization (except Michigan where an assisted suicide legalization bill lost 71-29% in 1998, hardly … Read More
May 29, 2007
Methinks A.B. 374, the bill to legalize assisted suicide in California, may be in some trouble. The authors have–sort of–amended the bill to require a three months left to live rather than a six months left to live standard, before … Read More
May 29, 2007
The Dutch continue to stun with their fall off a vertical bioethical cliff: In this installment, a television show will soon air in which three ill contestants vie for the right to the kidney of a terminally ill woman. From … Read More
May 29, 2007
The Swiss suicide rate is apparently quite high and a matter of great concern. The Swiss have vowed to fight it, but they have a problem: Opposing “suicide” while legally permitting assisted suicide sends a decidedly mixed message that would … Read More
May 28, 2007
Our media love the outlaw, as demonstrated in this “Kevorkian time line” that omits information about his victims. They are the truly forgotten ones in this travesty of egotism and sensationalism. Along the Kevorkian front, Rita Marker and I have … Read More
May 25, 2007
I am not happy: But my ire was raised before the ultimate failure of the bill to outlaw futile care theory in Texas. The “good” bill, which would have required hospitals to maintain treatment pending a transfer to another hospital … Read More
May 23, 2007
It has been more than ten years since Dolly was cloned. Yet, for all of the animal cloning that has gone on, apparently the science of somatic cell nuclear transfer has not progressed very far. An article in Science by … Read More
May 22, 2007
When Kevorkian wanted out of prison, his lawyer repeatedly pleaded for mercy because, he said, Kevorkian’s was so ill with hepatitis and other ailments that he was on the verge of death’s door. For example, in this Court TV report … Read More
May 21, 2007
I have long maintained that assisted suicide legalization is not intended to be permanently limited to the “terminally ill for whom nothing else can be done to alleviate suffering,” (which is, in itself, a false premise). After all, as we … Read More
May 21, 2007
In this excellent column published in the Washington Post, disability rights activists Andrew J. Imparato and Anne C. Sommers warn of the emerging new eugenics. Some key quotes: Though society may be inclined to regard [Oliver Wendel] Holmes’s detestable opinion … Read More
May 21, 2007
While I was in Europe, Baby Emilio Gonzales died. The case stimulated much discussion of Futile Care Theory, in which Texas law allows ethics committees to refuse wanted life-sustaining treatment–not because the treatment won’t extend life but because it will. … Read More
May 8, 2007
Ashley is the little profoundly disabled girl who was subjected to non therapeutic interventions, including a hysterectomy and a mastectomy, in addition to hormone therapies to keep her “small.” At the time, I wrote here at SHS that, at the … Read More
May 7, 2007
Well, we have fallen along way off the moral cliff in a very short time; from tossing away embryos with genetic defects for serious illness in infancy, to tossing them away because they are the wrong sex, to destroying those … Read More
May 7, 2007
“Embryonic Stem Cells Can Repair Eyes,” is the headline. But the Reuters story, byline Maggie Fox, about an experiment announced by Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), doesn’t actually demonstrate this. From the story: Writing in the journal Nature Methods, [Robert]Lanza’s team … Read More
May 6, 2007
The American Physiological Society, founded in 1887, which describes itself as “a nonprofit devoted to fostering education, scientific research, and dissemination of information in the physiological sciences,” has awarded my friend David Prentice its 2007 Walter C. Randall Award in … Read More
May 5, 2007
I have mentioned before that scientists with heterodox views in the areas of cloning/ESCR (as well as in other contentious areas beyond the subjects dealt with here at SHS) are bullied, attacked, ridiculed, threatened with loss of job, or if … Read More
