'commentary' Category
New Graduate Program in Bioethics!
Cedarville University is launching a new Graduate Certificate in Bioethics. The Graduate Certificate is for healthcare professionals (e.g., physicians, nurses, physician assistants, pharmacists), who are daily confronted with challenges to ethical and compassionate practice. Pastors, hospital chaplains, and social workers also need such training, as they often serve on the ethics committees of community hospitals, [...]
Organ Transplantation – Can Technology Help Solve an Ethical Problem?
Organ transplantation has always been laced with ethical issues. The current demand far exceeds supply, and this leads to issues of justice, and to questions about who should receive available organs. Many potential donors do not have a living will or a signed donor card, leaving the decision of whether their organs should be donated [...]
A Prayer for the New Year
From an ethics perspective, 2012 was a difficult year. Our national rhetoric about issues that matter has taken a particularly nasty tone. It seems that on all sides in the culture wars: left, right, and center, people are in the habit of questioning the moral integrity of one another, simply for holding a different opinion [...]
Health Care and Rights of Conscience
In America, those who ethically and morally oppose war are not forced to violate their deeply held beliefs. Our nation has a long-standing tradition of respect for the principles of conscientious objectors.1 In fact, soldiers whose battlefield experiences have led them to oppose war may be honorably discharged from the military or re-classified as a [...]
Keeping the Drive Alive
When I was a kid in school, I’d inhale my lunch, so I could go outside and play touch football. At the small Christian school that my parents started, kids from grade school through high school would play touch football in all kinds of weather. There were a couple of important rules we played by: [...]
Abortion Really Hurts Women
A woman is more than the sum of her reproductive parts. But the narrative coming from politicians and the media these days seems to contradict this fact. Those who desire to protect innocent human persons in the womb are often portrayed as anti-woman. Nothing could be further from the truth. I celebrate the rights that [...]
A Duty to Design Your Baby?
A prominent ethicist, writing in the pages of Reader’s Digest, no less, Julian Savulescu is the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at Oxford University, UK. In an upcoming edition of RD, he claims it is not only permissible, but a moral obligation, for parents to genetically design their children. After all, claims Savulescu, we wouldn’t [...]
Bizarre Episode Raises Questions About Research Ethics
Two prominent neurosurgeons at UC Davis Medical Center reportedly performed a bizarre experiment on three terminally ill patients last fall. According to an ABC News article from July 27, 2012 (cited below), Dr. J. Paul Muizelaar and Dr. Rudolph J. Schrot injected live bacteria into the head wounds of three patients. Each was suffering from glioblastoma, [...]
Assisted Suicide – Legal in Hawaii?
In Hawaii, a group of five doctors is pushing the envelope on medically-assisted death. Led by retired general practitioner Dr. Robert “Nate” Nathanson, the physicians plan to prescribe lethal drugs to help terminally ill patients end their lives. This is despite the opinion issued by the state’s attorney general, who said he would bring manslaughter [...]
Does IVF Cause Birth Defects?
In fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), embryos created in a Petri dish are implanted into a woman’s uterus after 3-5 days of incubation. Until recently, it was assumed that such embryos have a normal development if they successfully implant. A disturbing recent report reveals a higher risk after IVF: 8% of babies [...]
