Wesley J. Smith

Do pigs go to heaven?Secondhand Smokette thought this was funny—and relevant. I can’t figure out why. Perhaps a little background . . . . Continue Reading »

Good grief.  A bill in South Dakota that could have made a killing to stop an abortion a justifiable homicide has been defeated. From the story:Lawmakers in the South Dakota House of Representatives voted on Thursday to delay further action on a controversial bill that supporters say would . . . . Continue Reading »

Abby Johnson used to be a Planned Parenthood clinic director who, having had two abortions, deeply believed in the PP mission of providing abortions and health care to women at the clinical setting. Then she watched an abortion guided by ultrasound, and saw the fetus as it was destroyed. That moment . . . . Continue Reading »

The New England Journal of Medicine has been a stalwart supporter of Obamacare.  But even its editors seem to see the handwriting on the wall about the individual purchase mandate, evidence by its hand-wringing editorial penned by Jonathan Oberlander, Ph.D..  From “”Under . . . . Continue Reading »

Stanford University’s William Hurlbut and I are great friends.  Bill is best known for his service on the President’s Council on Bioethics, and his proposal to circumvent the ethics/science discord over human cloning and ESCR with “altered nuclear transfer,” which I . . . . Continue Reading »

We’ve all heard of the placebo effect, that is some people will seem to experience benefit from a “drug” they think they are taking, even when they are not.  But a new study on pain found that even when pain controlling drugs are being administered, if the subject believes . . . . Continue Reading »

I was asked several months ago by Human Life Review to react to Peter Singer’s presentation at Princeton University’s conference on abortion, in which pro life and pro choice advocates exchanged views and respectfully debated. I wrote about that here at SHS (also here), but the HLR . . . . Continue Reading »

Policy advocates hurt their own cause when they easily pull out the Nazi analogy.  Unless it is actually apt, calling your opponents “like the Nazis” is rightly seen by readers or listeners as a lazy slur.  Alas, that’s what James Delingpole, the Telegraph’s warming . . . . Continue Reading »

The Leftist bias in major universities can’t be denied.  With regard to issues dealt with here, can you imagine a pro lifer with the credentials of Peter Singer—who doesn’t even have a Ph.D—given one of the most prestigious chairs in bioethics in the world, as Singer was . . . . Continue Reading »

The NHS is a single payer system, albeit unlike in the USA and many other nations, fully socialized. To put it mildly: It. Is. A. Mess.When economics strain single payer systems, the marginalized and most expensive for which to care are the ones who usually suffer the most. We see that paradigm . . . . Continue Reading »