Wesley J. Smith

A Canadian woman with MS traveled to Switzerland with her husband for assisted suicide. The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition has demanded a legal investigation. I doubt that will happen, but I post this story because I want y’all to look at the way in which the reporter romanticized family . . . . Continue Reading »

Columnist Jeff Jacoby has written a very good column in the Boston Globe about the hue and cry among pro ESCR advocates in the wake of President Bush’s veto of expanded federal funding criteria. Jacobi, who inhabits the right of center political realm, disagrees with President Bush’s . . . . Continue Reading »

Get ready for the “manimals.” In Sunday’s Washington Post, Will Saletan describes how some scientists have cut themselves loose from the tether of self restraint and are busily planning the creation of human/animal chimeras with increasingly human attributes. From his column:So . . . . Continue Reading »

The Economist, which I consider the best newsweekly in the world (and no bylines!), published an article apparently bemoaning the increased rate of suicide around the world. And yet, although the article ostensibly urges governments to try and prevent suicides, it actually seems to back the notion . . . . Continue Reading »

I have decided to highlight stories like this because I have concluded that the bitter ethical controversies over ESCR and human cloning have distorted the true picture of what is happening in the exciting field of biotechnology. So much of the hopeful research that is moving into human trials is . . . . Continue Reading »

Babies for sale in a parking lot. Good . . . . Continue Reading »

With all of the traveling I have been doing lately, and with Jack Kevorkian being sprung from the hoosegow, I have been remiss in recording my Brave New Bioethics podcasts. I am back in the verbal saddle again with this edition, which discusses the chilling effect that the DEA appears to be placing . . . . Continue Reading »

I was on a radio program today, and the host played for my comment a shameless clip from an AP report depicting a Parkinson’s patient’s fury at President Bush for vetoing expanded federal funding for ESCR because he believes—because that is what he has been told—that . . . . Continue Reading »

According to the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.” Somebody had better tell the bioethicists, transhumanists, deep ecologists, philosophical . . . . Continue Reading »

This report confirms past research demonstrating that many people diagnosed as unconscious—aren’t, or at least, many who are unconscious eventually wake up.Around a quarter of patients in an acute vegetative state when they are first admitted to hospital have a good chance of recovering . . . . Continue Reading »