As I mentioned a week or so ago, there is an obscure mental disease in which victims become obsessed with becoming amputees. As I write in this Center for Bioethics and Culture newsletter, some are now calling for the right of doctors to fulfill the wishes of these “amputee wannabes” by cutting off healthy limbs. But isn’t acceding to mental illness a form of abandonment? Unfortunately, as I demonstrate, the currents of bioethics and jurisprudence could lead to doctors being able to legally maim people—all in the name of “choice.”
Notes on Anosmia
One morning several years ago, as my wife, Wendy, and I were having breakfast together, I had…
Empire of Unreality
Shiva Naipaul (1945–1985) was the author of three novels and two books of mordant dispatches from places…
The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist
It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation…