Wesley J. Smith

The legislative process has become so overwhelming, that unless one hires a professional lobbying group to keep track, laws can pass quietly without any public attention at all.That seems to be the case in Idaho, where the Senate has passed a Texas-style futile care bill. The bill is so bad, it . . . . Continue Reading »

President Obama lifted the Bush ESCR restrictions—unleashing gushing hyperbole in the media and among “the scientists” about the technology that I frankly don’t have time to deconstruct. But Drudge is touting his promise of no cloning. From the story:President Barack Obama . . . . Continue Reading »

Terminal nonjudgmentalism and a refusal to do anything concrete lest one be thought mean or worse, conservative, is a problem that leads to a wide range cultural subversions—from the suicide counseling of the Final Exit Network to the new eugenics of destroying embryos that tests show will be . . . . Continue Reading »

The media—and I must say, the new Administration—continue to confuse and conflate policy differences with science. And the lifting of the Bush funding restrictions on ESCR is providing the excuse. From the story:The decision by President George W. Bush to restrict funding for stem cell . . . . Continue Reading »

Don’t get me wrong: I would object to assisted suicide even if it were ever going to be truly restricted to people with terminal illnesses. But of course, that isn’t the goal, and it sure isn’t the reality. The Final Exit Network illustrate this—although most of the obtuse or . . . . Continue Reading »

Is it ignorance, laziness, bias, or ineptitude, or all of the above? Not Dead Yet’s Stephen Drake exposes why so many people no longer trust so much of what media report: Journalists just can’t—or won’t—get the facts right, at least about cultural flash issues such as . . . . Continue Reading »

Bioethicist Jacob M. Appel, who has written that mentally ill people should not be denied the “opportunities” to commit assisted suicide, now pushes mandatory pre-implatation genetic testing in all IVF fertility treatments in order to weed out the unfit (my term) and for whom care would . . . . Continue Reading »

The remarkable advances of IPSCs are beginning to subsume ESCR, even among some within the science community. Thus the former head of the NIH and American Red Cross, Bernadine Healy, wrote in U.S News and World Report that IPSC and adult stem cell research successes have “diminished” the . . . . Continue Reading »

Relativism is the bane of our times, although it is still selectively applied. We tell teenagers to try not to have sexual intercourse, but if you do—which we know you will—then please use a condom. Yet, we still know how to be unequivocal in some areas: We tell kids, “Don’t smoke!,” not, . . . . Continue Reading »

Relativism is the bane of our times, although it is still selectively applied. We tell teenagers to try not to have sexual intercourse, but if you do—which we know you will—then please use a condom. Yet, we still know how to be unequivocal in some areas: We tell kids, “Don’t smoke,!”, not, . . . . Continue Reading »