Wesley J. Smith

The gene editors can’t be trusted to self-regulate.

Keep the ‘dead donor rule.’

PETA is no friend of STEM.

A court in Ontario, Canada, has ruled that a patient’s desire to be euthanized trumps a doctor’s conscientious objection. Doctors there now face the cruel choice between complicity in what they consider a grievous wrong—killing a sick or disabled patient—and the very real prospect of legal or…

As the Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare withered on the vine, the self-described socialist senator from Vermont rushed to fill the political vacuum. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All Act of 2017 is a single-payer proposal that shamelessly attempts to harness the popularity of…

Obamacare “repeal and replace” may have failed this year, but that doesn’t mean the Affordable Care Act can’t be significantly defanged. For example, there is still time to excise the Independent Payment Advisory Board from the law before it is up and running.

Obamacare “repeal and replace” may have failed this year, but that doesn’t mean the Affordable Care Act can’t be significantly defanged. For example, there is still time to excise the Independent Payment Advisory Board from the law before it is up and running.

When I was a small boy, polio terrified me. Each year, it would strike thousands of children like me—and you never knew when or where it would hit next. In the 1952 epidemic, a very bad year, there were nearly 60,000 reported cases in the United States and more than 3,000 deaths.

There was a day in the not-too-distant past when physicians were respected, even revered, as learned professionals. We understood that doctors followed a “higher calling." Indeed, physicians were expected to adhere to a code of conduct—epitomized by the Hippocratic Oath's venerable injunction, "do…

Ever since his unexpected victory, the media have been obsessing over what a Donald Trump presidency will mean for a range of important issues, such as the Paris Agreement on climate change, border enforcement, the judiciary, and Obamacare repeal. But one set of crucial concerns—those that go under…

Ever since his unexpected victory, the media have been obsessing over what a Donald Trump presidency will mean for a range of important issues, such as the Paris Agreement on climate change, border enforcement, the judiciary, and Obamacare repeal. But one set of crucial concerns—those that go under…

Should anyone outside the military be forced to kill? Most people would say no. But with the ubiquitous availability of abortion—and the push to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia—doctors may soon find themselves required to take lives or risk being booted from the medical profession.

The killing of Harambe the gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo last month was an unfortunate necessity, a lethal act required to save the life of an imminently endangered child. But listening to the public outpouring of grief and outrage—stoked by the media—one would think that the shooting of the animal…

The federal technocracy, like the old B-horror-movie monster The Blob, grows by sucking all surrounding life into its amoeba-like digestive system. There are never enough bureaucratic controls or government programs to “incentivize” us—in the jargon—to behave in ways the technocrats think best.

The media are cooing over the news that Medicare will reimburse doctors $86 for half-hour consultations about the kind of treatment patients would—or would not—want should they become incapacitated. Such coverage was slated to be part of Obamacare, but was dropped after it became controversial when…

Jeffrey Drazen, the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, recently penned a scathing editorial about Planned Parenthood’s harvesting of fetal tissues. No, Drazen and his two coauthors (one a volunteer for Planned Parenthood) didn’t criticize the abortionists for killing fetuses in a “less…

The country has been roiled in recent weeks by videos showing two Planned Parenthood executives chirpily telling pro-life undercover investigators that fetal organs could be had for a price. The executives—both themselves abortionists—explained that their techniques could be adapted to “crush”…

The United States is slowly becoming pro-suicide. No, not all suicides. No one favors troubled teens or healthy adults killing themselves. But our society can no longer be described as unequivocally antisuicide.

This month, the Canadian Supreme Court trampled democratic deliberation by unanimously conjuring a constitutional right to “termination of life” for anyone who has an “irremediable medical condition” and wants to die. Note the scope of the judicial fiat is not limited to the terminally ill: The…

Now that Republican Jeb Bush has made all the noises of a man running for president, expect the former governor of Florida to be attacked for trying to save the life of Terri Schiavo.

Assisted suicide exploded into the news again two months ago after Brittany Maynard, dying of brain cancer, announced she would take a lethal prescription as permitted under Oregon law. Maynard became an international celebrity, lauded as “courageous” in a cover story in People and featured in the…

Belgium is on the verge of executing its first murderer by lethal injection. Well, not exactly “executing.” The state isn’t going to kill convicted murderer/rapist Frank Van Den Bleeken for his crimes. Rather, it is helping him be euthanized. By a doctor. At a hospital. To which he was transferred…

Should the law compel nursing homes to starve certain Alzheimer’s patients to death? This is not an alarmist fantasy, but a real question, soon to be forced by advocates of ever-wider application of assisted euthanasia. The intellectual groundwork is already being laid for legislation or court…

That the New York Times is a subversive cultural force can readily be seen in its unremitting assault on human exceptionalism, the philosophical backbone of Western civilization. 

Advocates of assisted suicide tell two—no, three—lies that act as the honey to help the hemlock go down. The first is that assisted suicide/euthanasia is a strictly medical act. Second, they falsely assure us that medicalized killing is only for the terminally ill. Finally, they promise that strict…

"Tommy” and other chimpanzees are the subjects of several lawsuits in New York seeking writs of habeas corpus and “immediate release from illegal detention.” These lawsuits, the doing of the Nonhuman Rights Project, are not a surprise. As already noted in these pages (“Animal Desires,” April 9,…

Back when the mess that is Obamacare was working its way through the legislative sausage factory, warnings about “death panels” almost derailed the entire enterprise. There were two, somewhat related, areas of concern: (1) that Obamacare’s many cost/benefit bureaucratic boards would lead to…

Human cloning is finally here, and it is going to spark a political conflagration. First, some background.

If you want to know what’s going to go wrong in the culture, read the professional journals. A case in point: An article in the April 10 New England Journal of Medicine called for the creation of a commodities market for “made-to-order” human embryos.

The Obama administration pulled another fast one last week, announcing its much-anticipated “compromise” on the free-birth-control rule as it affects religious employers opposed to contraception. There was hope in some quarters that the administration would back off its narrow religious exemption.…

To paraphrase Freud: Liberals, what do they really want? Not the communism or socialism of the right’s fever dreams. They know that didn’t work. Today’s liberal agenda is more akin to the corporatist vision of the 1920s and ’30s​—​an economy in which the state directs the activities of the private…

A recent federal trial court ruling has warmed the hearts of social conservatives and civil libertarians alike. A judge in Colorado on July 27 protected a Catholic-owned small business against the “free birth control rule”—which requires companies subject to the Affordable Care Act to offer their…

Is there no end to the technocratic impulse? Just when you thought that our government overlords couldn’t find any new way to intrude into our lives, they hatch a plan to multiply bureaucrats. Now cooking on the Obama stove: criteria to measure our “happiness.”

When People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sought a court ruling declaring SeaWorld’s killer whales “slaves” under the 13th Amendment, the nation got a badly needed chuckle. PETA argued that because the amendment doesn’t specify that its terms apply only to human beings—“Neither…

For years, the media touted the promise of embryonic stem cells. Year after year, Geron Corporation announced that its embryonic stem cell treatment for acute spinal cord injury would receive FDA approval “next year” for human testing. And year after year, the media dutifully informed readers and…

Obesity is the new global warming, and the battle plan for the crusade against it was published in the August issue of the journal Lancet. Funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and coauthored…

In 1992, my friend Frances committed suicide on her 76th birthday. Frances was not terminally ill. She had been diagnosed with treatable leukemia and needed a hip replacement. Mostly, though, she was depressed by family issues and profoundly disappointed at where her life had taken her.

Environmentalism is growing increasingly antihuman. Having left Teddy Roosevelt-style conservation and Earth Day consciousness-raising behind, the cutting edge of the movement is pursuing utopian “save the planet” agendas while angrily castigating mankind for supposedly sucking the life out of…

The case of Terri Schiavo--who died five years ago next March, deprived for nearly two weeks of food and water, even the balm of ice chips--continues to prick consciences. That may be one reason the case of Rom Houben, a Belgian man who was misdiagnosed for 23 years as being in a persistent…

On July 4, 1995, Myrna Lebov, age 52, committed suicide in her Manhattan apartment. The case generated national headlines when her husband, George Delury, announced that he had assisted Lebov's suicide at her request because she was suffering the debilitations of progressive multiple sclerosis.

Imagine you are a cattle rancher looking for liability insurance. You meet with your broker, who, as expected, asks a series of questions to gauge your suitability for coverage:

President Obama has often claimed that his administration will pursue policies designed to breach the cultural and political divides that rend our country. He has also promised to bring "transparency" to the principal actions of his administration. Unfortunately, the president violated both of…

On December 5, Montana District judge Dorothy McCarter ruled in Baxter v. Montana that the state law banning assisted suicide violates not only the right to privacy guaranteed in the Montana constitution but also the constitutional clause that reads, "The dignity of the human being is inviolable."…

Rights, properly understood, are moral entitlements embodied in law to protect all people. They are not earned: Rights come as part of the package of being a member of the human race. This principle was most eloquently enunciated in the Declaration of Independence's assertion that we are all…

THERE IS A CONCERTED advocacy campaign underway across several disciplines aimed at knocking human beings off our pedestal of moral exceptionalism and redefining us as merely another animal in the forest. Toward this end, elements of the natural world are being personalized by public intellectuals,…

"I am an ape," declared Pedro Pozas, a Spanish animal rights activist, in 2006. The Spanish parliament, which apparently has come to see things Pozas's way, is now poised to endorse the Great Ape Project, granting chimps, bonobos, apes, and orangutans some of the same rights that Jefferson once…

THERE IS A SURE-FIRE WAY to make the news these days: Just issue a press release beginning with the words, "New scientific study shows," and have it assert a conclusion that the MSM fervently want to believe--especially if the resulting story would serve to debunk or refute a Bush administration…

You just knew it was coming: At the request of the Swiss government, an ethics panel has weighed in on the "dignity" of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong. This is no hoax. The concept of what could be called "plant rights" is being seriously debated.

It is a bitter irony that even as we are enlarging our commitment to human equality in many areas, we are turning our backs on it in others. In particular, we may be about to eliminate from our society people with Down syndrome (DS) and other genetically caused disabilities.

On October 19, only months after being nearly dehydrated to death when his feeding tube was removed, Jesse Ramirez walked out of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix on his own two legs. Ramirez is lucky to be alive. Early last June, a mere one week after a serious auto accident left him…

Are you happy "merely" being human? Or do you wish your life could somehow be made into something . . . more? If you discovered a risky drug that would grant you a superhuman power--such as the capacity to heal the sick, kill enemies, or become invisible--would you take the shot? And if you…

SHOULD LAWS AGAINST assisted suicide be rescinded as "paternalistic?" Should assisted suicide be transformed from what is now a crime (in most places) into a sacred "right to die"? Should assisted suicide be redefined from a form of homicide into a legitimate "medical treatment" readily available…

What do cicadas have in common with Jack Kevorkian? They share a cacophonous anniversary. In June, after 17 years, cicadas are expected to crawl from underground across the Midwest. These grim insects produce such a din that just one can overpower other sounds. Also in June, exactly 17 years after…

SENATORS DIANNE FEINSTEIN and Orrin Hatch have just introduced Senate Bill 812, which explicitly legalizes human cloning and--since a shortage of human eggs is currently impeding human cloning research (one egg is needed for each attempt at cloning)--the bill also authorizes researchers to pay…

The American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine has just released a position statement on the issue of physician-assisted suicide, in which it abdicates its core professional responsibility. On the impropriety of permitting doctors to help kill their patients, the association has assumed a…

The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) recently announced its "Guidelines for the Conduct of Embryonic Stem Cell Research." The results are not encouraging.

Can anything good come out of the United Nations? Actually, yes. Little noted in December, the General Assembly adopted a "Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities." If ratified by most member nations, the convention could strengthen protections for many people with disabilities.

JACK KEVORKIAN will soon be out of jail on parole: Let the media races begin.

SCIENTISTS SHOULD BE UP IN ARMS against "science advocates" who undermine the reputation of science by engaging in deception, obfuscation, spin, and hype to win the political debate over embryonic stem-cell and human cloning research. The latest such low blow comes from the Houston-based Alliance…

DID YOU SEE THE SIZE OF THOSE HEADLINES? "Stem Cells Used to Create Artificial Liver," the New York Times screamed on its front page. "Breakthrough! Stem Cells to One Day Create Organ for Liver Transplant," was how the Washington Post put it. "Stem Cell Breakthrough Demonstrates Viability of New…

WHEN CRITICS BEMOAN the politicization of science, they usually point a bitter finger at the Bush administration. Their condemnation should actually be aimed in the opposite direction. Increasingly, it is the scientists themselves--or better stated the leaders of the science sector--who are…

IT HAS BEEN ABOUT two weeks since the international media excitedly declared to the world that Robert Lanza, head scientist at Massachusetts biotechnology firm Advanced Cell Technology, had derived human embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos. The story sparked a media feeding frenzy, with…

"NEW STEM CELL METHOD avoids destroying em-bryos," the New York Times headline blared. "Stem cell breakthrough may end political logjam," chimed in the Los Angeles Times. "Embryos spared in stem cell creation," affirmed USA Today. Reporting the same supposed scientific achievement by Advanced Cell…

IT HAS BEEN REPEATED so often that it is now a mantra: "Embryonic stem cells offer the most promise for finding cures" for degenerative diseases and conditions such as Parkinson's disease and spinal cord injury. But saying something ten thousand times doesn't make it true. Indeed, the embryonic…

The Party of Death

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW what it feels like to wander into a Salvador Dali painting, try attending a conference of transhumanists. Case in point: the symposium "Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights" hosted May 26-28 by the Stanford Law School.

TERRORISM TAKES MANY FORMS. Recently, animal-rights terrorists have unleashed an organized campaign of violence and intimidation against animal industries and their service companies--such as banks, auditing companies, and insurance brokers.

THERE IS A PRETENSE in contemporary assisted suicide advocacy that goes something like this: "Aid in dying" (as it is euphemistically called) is merely to be a safety valve, a last resort only available to imminently dying patients for whom nothing else can be done to alleviate suffering.

AT LAST A HIGH GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL in Europe got up the nerve to chastise the Dutch government for preparing to legalize infant euthanasia. Italy's Parliamentary Affairs minister, Carlo Giovanardi, said during a radio debate: "Nazi legislation and Hitler's ideas are reemerging in Europe via Dutch…

THREE YEARS AGO, Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack signed a law banning all human cloning (both for research and for reproduction). But he has just shifted his position 180 degrees, calling upon the state's legislature to legalize human cloning for biomedical research. But rather than just admit he was…

IAN WILMUT, the creator of Dolly the sheep and newly appointed director of Edinburgh University's Centre for Regenerative Medicine, wants to experiment on dying people with embryonic stem cells--even though he admits that such potential treatments "have not been properly tested."

In February 2004, Woo--Suk Hwang made world headlines when he claimed to have cloned human embryos using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, and then to have derived a line of stem cells from the embryos that could be used for medical research. Enthusiasm for this first "successful"…

FOUR MILLION BABIES ARE BORN in this country every year, bearing gifts of inestimable value. Foremost among these, of course, is the love they bring into the world and elicit from it. More practically, however, these infants bring with them something that we are learning has great potential to…

MUCH OF THE CURRENT DEBATE over what is generally known as therapeutic cloning--that is, somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) cloning conducted for research purposes rather than reproduction--centers on the nature of the thing that is created by the cloning process. Until recently, this issue…

LIFE IS TOUGH for the stalwart pioneers on biotechnology's cutting edge. "U.S. scientists studying human embryonic stem cells face unprecedented political, regulatory, and financial barriers," Dr. Susan Okie, M.D. complained last week in the New England Journal of Medicine. The "national debate…

THE FURY OF RADICAL ANIMAL liberationists is growing, leading them to acts of brazen lawlessness and flagrant vigilantism. In the United Kingdom, a farm family that raised guinea pigs for medical testing was subjected to years of personal threats and property vandalism by animal liberationists. The…

LEON KASS HAS STEPPED DOWN as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics. On one level, I am happy for Kass. For four years he has broiled in the pressure cooker of Washington politics, subjected to vituperation and vicious calumny from the bioethics and science establishments for his…

WE HAVE HEARD IT STATED SO OFTEN it has become a media mantra: Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) offer the greatest hope for cures; adult and umbilical cord blood stem cells have far less potential; the Bush administration's embryonic stem cell funding restrictions have caused America to fall behind in…

A WASHINGTON MAN died recently from internal injuries he sustained while having sex with a horse. After his body was dropped off at a hospital, police discovered that out-of-towners had rented a rural farm and then made local animals available for use in bestiality. Yes, video taping was involved.

RALPH NADER once mused to me about what a terrible thing it was that Jack Kevorkian was (at the time) the world's most famous doctor. He was right. That distinct honor should have belonged to Dame Cecily Saunders, the founder of the modern hospice movement who died last week at age 87 in London at…

FORMER NEW YORK GOVERNOR Mario Cuomo is one slick fella. Like all effective propagandists, he's smooth, articulate, eloquent--and he doesn't let the facts get in his way. Take for example his most recent polemic in the debate over embryonic stem cell research (ESCR). In "Not on Faith Alone,"…

London

IF THERE WERE EVER any doubts that the National Academy of Sciences is pursuing an "anything" goes approach to biotechnological research, they were erased by the organization's recently published tome, Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research. The purported purpose of Guidelines is to…

HERE'S AN EASY POP QUIZ: What's the name of the first cloned mammal? If you answered, "Dolly," that would be . . . wrong.

TERRI SCHIAVO IS DEAD. But her death by dehydration last week need not be in vain. Great good can still come from the harsh, two week ordeal she--and to a lesser extent, we--were forced to undergo by court order.

THE ARGUMENTS OVER THE FATE of Terri Schiavo have sowed distrust among the courts and the political branches of government, and forced a state legislature, a popular governor, both houses of Congress, and the president of the United States into tight, uncomfortable political corners. The pending…

YOU PROBABLY DIDN'T HEAR ABOUT IT, since it received such little media coverage, but last week, by a nearly 3-1 vote, the United Nations General Assembly urged the world to "prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life."

IF ACADEMY AWARDS were given for the greatest lost opportunity, Million Dollar Baby would have won them, too.

IAN WILMUT, the co-creator of Dolly the Sheep, now intends to clone human life. This is quite a shift for Wilmut. When he and Keith Campbell entered the science pantheon with their announcement of the birth of Dolly, they forced the world to grapple with the question of whether it is moral to clone…

BIOTECHNOLOGY is becoming dangerously close to raging out of control. Scientists are engaging in ever increasingly macabre experiments that threaten to mutate nature and the human condition at the molecular level. Worse, many scientists have made it clear that society has no right to apply the…

IT NEVER FAILS. If an embryonic stem cell researcher issues a press release touting a purported research advance, the media trip over each other to give the story full dramatic fanfare. But if an even better adult or umbilical cord blood stem cell advance comes to light--even when the experiments…

EVER SINCE President Bush limited federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research to existing cell lines, the mainstream media has obsessed about the perpetual political campaign to overturn his policy. But this is a mere dustup, a tempest in a teapot compared to the far more consequential story…

THE PASSAGE OF PROPOSITION 71 in California (the Stem Cell Research and Cures Act) was an acute case of electoral folly. As Californians plunged headlong into a $6 billion quagmire of debt in a quixotic quest for "miracle cures" from human cloning and embryonic stem cells, they simultaneously…

CALIFORNIA IS FLAT BROKE, its budget a fiscal train wreck. Expenses have so far exceeded state revenues that this spring citizens of the Golden State were forced to pass a bond measure borrowing $15 billion (not including interest) just to keep the state afloat. And now, the Piper must be paid to…

DOES THE FIRST AMENDMENT guarantee the right to conduct research into human cloning?

FIRST, Dutch euthanasia advocates said that patient killing will be limited to the competent, terminally ill who ask for it. Then, when doctors began euthanizing patients who clearly were not terminally ill, sweat not, they soothed: medicalized killing will be limited to competent people with…

MY STATE of California now has three United States senators. No, we weren't granted increased representation because we are the biggest state. Rather, New Jersey Democratic senator Jon Corzine just tried to boost California's biotech sector by personally donating $100,000 to help pass Proposition…

ASSISTED SUICIDE/EUTHANASIA activists are sure a restless bunch. They never seem able to settle on the right terminology to convince people to support legalizing mercy killing. First, it was euthanasia, a perfectly fine word that had a meaning generally akin to today's concept of hospice before…

Preaching Eugenics

JOHN KERRY has a well-deserved reputation for waffling and attempting to get on every side of every issue. Now, he's done it again by signing up as a co-sponsor (along with Senators Orin Hatch and Dianne Feinstein) of what could be called the Human Cloning Legalization and Legitimization Act of…

"PEOPLE NEED A FAIRY TALE," Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, told Washington Post reporter Rick Weiss, explaining why scientists have allowed society to believe wrongly that stem cells are likely to effectively treat…

A PAPER PRESENTED at last week's American Psychiatric Association meeting demonstrates once again that the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in Oregon was one of the great public policy con jobs of all time. Earnest euthanasia advocates--generally abetted by a compliant media--spun the…

WHAT LITTLE Terri Schiavo has left in this life, is being cruelly stripped away. Not only has a judge ordered her to die slowly by dehydration via having her tube-supplied food and water removed, but now, her (estranged) husband and legal guardian Michael Schiavo has completely isolated her from…

A LITTLE NOTICED LITIGATION in the United Kingdom could be a harbinger of medical woes to come here in the United States. Leslie Burke, age 44, is suing for the right to stay alive. Yes, you read right: Burke, who has a terminal neurological disease, is deathly afraid that doctors will refuse to…

BioEvolution

ONE OF THE MORE DISTURBING hallmarks of the cloning debate has been the inaccurate and unscientific language used by cloning proponents to describe human cloning for biomedical research. There is a reason for this disingenuous approach to cloning advocacy. When cloning is accurately described as…

"THE DAMNDEST THING JUST HAPPENED," an early morning caller who is close to the Schiavo case enthused on my voice mail. "The Second District Court of Appeal actually decided to start applying the law." That would be big news. One of the most outrageous aspects of the Terri Schiavo debacle has been…

THE "RULE OF TERRI'S CASE" has struck again. The term was coined by Pat Anderson, attorney for Terri Schiavo's parents Bob and Mary Schindler, who complained: "If following a legal procedure will likely result in Terri dying, it will be adhered to. But if a procedure could make that outcome more…

IT IS THE CALM before the storm in the Terri Schiavo case. The Florida woman, who was in the throes of a court-ordered death by dehydration last October when Florida's legislature and Governor Jeb Bush intervened, continues to receive tube-supplied food and water. But this good news may not last.…

CLONING ADVOCATES are playing a shell game with the American people. At the federal level, they advocate the legalization of human cloning but assert that cloned embryos should be destroyed after 14 days of development and never implanted in wombs (the Hatch / Feinstein Bill). But this is a…

USING "embryonic stem cell research" (ESCR) as a Trojan Horse, the authors of New Jersey Assembly Bill 2840 are trying to sneak one of the most radical human cloning legalization schemes ever proposed into law. How radical is A-2840? If the bill passes, it will be legal in New Jersey to implant…

THERE IS A BULL ELEPHANT in the living room of the Terri Schiavo case that many adamantly refuse to see. Terri's husband Michael Schiavo has fallen in love with another woman. He has lived with his "fiancé" now for many years. The couple has been blessed with two children together. By any…

MEDIA BIAS is alive and well and busily promoting the brave new world. I personally experienced the phenomenon recently when I participated in an educational symposium in Frankfort, Kentucky (along with Drs. David Prentice and John Hubert). Our purpose was to provide empirical and moral support for…

MANY WHO SUPPORT Terri Schiavo's threatened dehydration assert that removing a feeding tube from a profoundly cognitively disabled person results in a painless and gentle ending. But is this really true? After all, it would be agonizing if you or I were locked in a room for two weeks and deprived…

THE TERRI SCHIAVO CASE continues to take dramatic twists and turns. Even as Michael Schiavo attempts to have Terri's Law declared unconstitutional, pursuant to the law's requirements, a judge has appointed a guardian ad litem--Professor Jay Wolfson, of the College of Public Health at the University…

FOR MONTHS, as the Terri Schiavo case roiled much of the country, the establishment media all but ignored the story. But then, in the midst of her dying by dehydration, the Florida Legislature passed "Terri's Law," authorizing Governor Jeb Bush to place a moratorium on the dehydration deaths of…

MICHAEL SCHIAVO, Terri Schiavo's husband, finally went on national television last night to tell the world his side of the story. Appearing on "Larry King Live," he strived mightily to play the loving husband. Until more than half way through the interview, when King got around to tentatively…

ONE EVENING, during the second term of President Ronald Reagan, Terri Schiavo and her husband Michael decided to watch a television movie about Karen Ann Quinlan. Quinlan, as most readers know, had a tragic life. After overdosing on a combination of drugs and alcohol, she fell into unconsciousness…

OCTOBER 21, 2003 may have been the most important day in 39-year-old Terri Schiavo's life. She had been without any food or water for six days, per the order of Judge George Greer of the Sixth Judicial Circuit Court in Clearwater, Florida. Terri's family believed she was holding up well. But her…

WHEN TERRI SCHIAVO collapsed in 1990, causes unknown, she could have had no idea that 13 years later people the world over would know her name and care very much about whether she lived or died. Yet what began as a private tragedy--a vivacious young woman stricken in the very prime of her life with…

AT 2:00 P.M. on October 15, 2003, Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is to be removed, after which she will slowly dehydrate to death. This is to be done at the request of her husband, Michael Schiavo, and at the order of Judge George W. Greer of the Sixth Judicial Circuit, in Clearwater, Florida. If the…

POLLS SHOW that most Americans want to ban all human cloning. President Bush is eager to sign such a measure into law. The House has twice enacted a strong legal prohibition with wide, bipartisan votes. But cloning advocates have so far blocked passage of a ban in the Senate (Brownback/Landrieu) by…

Enough

WHAT'S NOT IN A NAME is the question du jour at single-issue advocacy groups. First the venerable National Abortion Rights Action League (or National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League in recent years) officially dropped abortion from its name and became "NARAL Pro-Choice America." Now,…

IT IS BECOMING INCREASINGLY clear that the bio-anarchists leading the charge to Brave New World want a virtually unlimited license to engage in human cloning. The proof is in the legislation they keep trying to pass.

PEOPLE for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has finally and unequivocally come off the rails. Attempting to convince us to become vegetarians, the anti-human advocacy group has mounted a new public relations campaign asserting that the eating of meat is the equivalent of the torture and slaughter…

SO THE RAELIANS, who maintain that human life was the product of cloning by space aliens, now claim that their for-profit corporation, Clonaid, has cloned the first human baby, a healthy female named Eve. There is no proof of any kind to verify this, and most of the world is highly skeptical. It…

Dominion The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy by Matthew Scully St. Martin's, 434 pp., $27.95 AMERICANS LOVE ANIMALS. We coo over and coddle our cats and dogs as if they were children. We paste "Save the Whales" bumper stickers on our cars. We groan in empathetic…

SOMETHING DISTURBING is happening in the Florida elections this fall. No, not the chance that Janet Reno will be the Democratic candidate for governor. A state initiative has qualified for the ballot letting voters decide whether to grant constitutional rights to pregnant pigs.

WHAT'S LESS BAD: enacting a ban on so-called "reproductive" human cloning that explicitly authorizes cloning for research purposes, or passing no law at all prohibiting cloning in 2002? That is the seeming conundrum facing cloning opponents, since neither side in the great cloning debate apparently…

THE SENATE will shortly take up one of the most pressing moral, ethical, and scientific issues of our time: the Brownback proposal to outlaw human cloning. Two alternative proposals would ban only "reproductive cloning," which would mean explicitly legalizing human cloning but not the implantation…

The Case Against Assisted Suicide For the Right to End-Of-Life Care edited by Kathleen M. Foley and Herbert Hendin Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 392 pp., $49.95 Supporters of legalizing assisted suicide often claim religious belief is the only reason to oppose killing as an acceptable answer to human…

A GREAT DEFICIENCY in the media's reporting of debates about public policy is their tendency to reduce messy democratic discourse to a sterile, never-ending face-off between "The Left" and "The Right." One year, The Right launches an offensive and advances a half-mile. The next year, The Left…

LAST WEEK the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) made headlines when it issued a broadside that would, if followed by Congress, grant an open-ended license for biotech researchers to clone human life. True, the NAS recommended that Congress ban "reproductive" cloning, that is, the use of a cloned…

THE BRAVE NEW WORLD ORDER is hurtling toward us at Mach speed. With the announcement by Advanced Cell Technology that it has created the first human clones and developed them into six-cell embryos, the country finds itself at an ethical point of no return. Either Congress will ban human cloning, or…

WHEN OREGON VOTERS legalized assisted suicide in 1994, state regulators had a problem. They wanted to authorize doctors to prescribe barbiturates as killing agents. But the federal government regulates the use of these drugs under the Controlled Substances Act, and federal law did not permit their…

WHEN JOHN CAMPBELL’S TEENAGE SON CHRISTOPHER became comatose after a car accident in 1994, the last problem Campbell expected was obtaining proper medical treatment for his son. Campbell, a corporate executive, had excellent health insurance and was convinced Christopher would receive the best of…

Support for organ donation in this country is, as the clich has it, a mile wide and an inch deep. This is understandable. Most people favor the concept of giving "the gift of life" in the abstract. But when it comes to permitting their own loved ones' body parts to be "harvested" for…

STEM CELLS are undifferentiated "master cells" in the body that can develop into differentiated tissues, such as bone, muscle, nerve, or skin. Stem cell research may lead to exponential improvements in the treatment of many terminal and debilitating conditions, from cancer to Parkinson's to…

MAINE VOTERS' REJECTION on November 7 of an initiative to legalize physician-assisted suicide was only the latest in a string of defeats for the American euthanasia movement. Granted, the margin was narrow -- 51.5 percent to 48.5 percent. And with the Netherlands finally in the process of formally…

ALAS, POOR MARY. She's the conjoined twin in England, united at the chest with her stronger sister Jodie, and she's been called a parasite, a tumor, a bloodsucker: someone whose "primitive" brain makes her life unworthy of protecting. And all that by two British courts, which have wrenched away…

ON THE FACE OF IT, representative Tom Coburn and New York assemblywoman Nettie Mayersohn are mirror opposites: He's a staunch Republican, she's a fiery Democrat; he's pro-life, she's pro-choice; he's socially conservative, she's a booster of gay rights; he's a fundamentalist Christian, she's…

WHEN OREGON legalized assisted suicide in 1994, Ron Wyden claimed to oppose allowing doctors to prescribe drugs for terminally ill patients to use in suicide. Now a Democratic senator from Oregon, Wyden has a chance to prove he meant what he said by supporting the Pain Relief Promotion Act,…

The case of James H. Armstrong, M.D. v. The State of Montana should have been merely a skirmish in the never-ending national struggle over abortion. Instead, relying on the reasoning of certain "experts" in the moral choices surrounding health care, the Montana Supreme Court issued in October 1999…

The Definition of Death, Contemporary Controversies, edited by Stuart J. Youngner, Robert, M. Arnold, and Renie Schapiro. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 346 pp., $ 54

LAST WEEK, Congress took up the issues of pain control and physician-assisted suicide, with the House voting 271-156 to pass the Pain Relief Promotion Act. The legislation, if passed, would improve pain control while deterring physician-assisted suicide. Doctors who prescribe lethal drugs for the…

Sacramento, California

IT SEEMS AS IF HE HAS ALWAYS been part of the American cultural landscape, leaving dead bodies at hospital emergency-room doors, wearing Founding Father costumes to court, accusing his opponents of conducting a modern-day Inquisition. But only nine years ago, no one had heard of Jack Kevorkian,…

In Freedom to Die, suicide guru Derek Humphry, co-founder of the Hemlock Society, and Mary Clement, a pro-euthanasia attorney, describe the assisted-suicide movement as "a pure flame of revolution," rising from the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. It is an era they proclaim to be of greater…

WHEN JACK KEVORKIAN APPEARED on 60 Minutes the Sunday before Thanksgiving to explain his killing of Thomas Youk, a man with Lou Gehrig's disease, Kevorkian justified his crime to Mike Wallace by claiming Youk was scared to death of choking on his own saliva. Wallace, a vocal euthanasia supporter,…

THE BODY OF HOMICIDE VICTIM Joseph Tushkowski underwent "a bizarre mutilation," proclaimed Oakland County (Mich.) medical examiner L.J. Dragovic in mid-June. According to the autopsy findings, the mutilator, after killing Tushkowski with a lethal injection, crudely ripped out his kidneys. He didn't…

People who are elderly, disabled, prematurely born, or seriously ill have much to fear from the medical intelligentsia -- those bioethicists and moral philosophers who have in recent years transformed medical ethics.

WHEN EUTHANASIA ENTHUSIASTS urged Oregon voters to legalize assisted suicide, they promised an open, rational, and carefully regulated system in which physician-hastened death would be a "last resort." Voters were also assured that life termination would be conducted under the watchful and…