Gilbert Meilaender is a theologian and bioethicist who holds the rank of professor at Valparaiso University and served on the President's Council on Bioethics. He contributed essays to The Weekly Standard exploring ethical questions surrounding stem cell research, embryo policy, and the intersection of bioethics and human dignity. His writing for the magazine reflected his broader scholarly engagement with moral theology and the work of thinkers like Paul Ramsey.
Let's start with stem cells. That may seem a strange place to begin thinking about torture, but many bioethical issues are at least as controversial and disputed as torture. Among the most controversial in recent years has been research that destroys embryos in order to procure stem cells for use…
AT THE END OF FEBRUARY, the White House announced changes in the membership of the President's Council on Bioethics. Anyone who followed the resulting controversy might be forgiven for supposing that the last smidgen of diversity of opinion in the Bush administration had been crushed beneath a…
IN OUR ONGOING NATIONAL DEBATE about the use of human embryonic stem cells for research, there is one compromise position that reappears with regularity and attracts relatively wide support. This position proscribes (at least for federal funding) any research on stem cells derived from embryos…
The Patient as Person Explorations in Medical Ethics by Paul Ramsey Yale University Press, 320 pp., $17.95 IN A TIME when war and cloning seem to dominate the news, it is worth recalling the writings of Paul Ramsey--for he spent a decade of his life thinking and writing about just-war theory, and…
Culture of Death