Thanks to Brendan P. Foht, over at The Corner, for showing that it was misleading to claim that SCNT human cloning could not lead to a human pregnancy because there have been no successful cloned monkey pregnancies. But there have been cloned monkey pregnancies, with one embryo developing to the fetal stage with a heartbeat! From the 2010 article in the International Journal of Biological Development:

At present, the production of live primate offspring following SCNT has yet to be accomplished (Mitalipov et al., 2002; Simerly et al., 2003). We summarize here our recent unpublished efforts in embryo transfer using rhesus blastocysts produced by SCNT with adult monkey skin cells expressing GFP (Table 3). A total of 5 pregnancies were established following transfer of 67 embryos into 10 recipients (Tables 3 and 4). Only one pregnancy resulted in a live fetus that possessed a fetal heartbeat, detected by ultrasonographic scans, while other pregnancies contained sacs without a fetus (Fig. 2). Unfortunately, this pregnancy failed to go to term and was aborted at day 81 of gestation.

The same early difficulties were experienced by researchers in cloning other mammals. But starting with Dolly, difficulties bringing a cloned fetus to birth were eventually overcome.

Bottom line: Monkeys have been impregnated successfully with cloned embryos, resulting in some gestational success. The rest is simply a matter of technique. Eventually, a cloned monkey infant will almost certainly be born. The very research now being conducted in human cloning is a required step toward attaining that same potential end with us. 

The LA Times has waded in to the junk biology game, assuring us that no embryos are threatened in human cloning–WHEN THE WHOLE POINT OF HUMAN CLONING IS TO CREATE AN EMBRYO!  From the editorial, “The Specter of Human Cloning:”

The team at OHSU, which disclosed its work in a paper published online by Cell, created embryonic stem cells by replacing the nucleus in an unfertilized human egg with the nucleus from a skin cell, then harvesting the resulting stem cells. This long-sought technique may eventually let doctors create replacement cells for a wide variety of tissues from bits of a patient’s own skin. One advantage to this approach is that, unlike much of the initial work on stem cells, it doesn’t require the destruction of human embryos. That practice drew fierce opposition from some religious leaders and right-to-life groups, although their criticism has faded as researchers switched to adult stem cells and, more recently, regular cells reprogrammed into stem cells through genetic engineering.

Some critics continue to argue that it’s unethical to manipulate the genetic makeup of human eggs even if they’re unfertilized, and others warn about potential harm to egg donors. The biggest ethical issue for the OHSU team, though, is that it artificially created a human embryo, albeit one that was missing the components needed for implantation and development as a fetus.

So it isn’t an embryo, but it is?

Pay close attention: Dolly came from an “unfertilized egg” and became a sheep. Before that, she was a sheep embryo and a sheep fetus. The act of cloning does not get the egg to create stem cells, it produces an embryo.  After that, the cloning is over and the question becomes what to do with the embryo, NOT WHAT TO DO WITH THE UNFERTILIZED EGG!

As to the question of reproductive cloning: The researchers haven’t tried to bring a human baby to birth. They note that they have also not been able yet to bring a cloned monkey embryo to birth. That doesn’t mean they won’t. It’s all just a matter of technology now. Indeed,  until lately, you couldn’t make human cloned embryos. Now scientists can.

The Times argues in favor of a ban on reproductive cloning, but permitting research cloning to proceed:

Still, the federal government needs to set rules that would stop researchers in this country from crossing the line between generating stem cells and trying to bring a cloned embryo to life. Adding a clear prohibition would help assure the public that stem cell research should be embraced, not feared.

AAUGH! The cloned embryo is already alive! 

Here’s the strategy: Big Biotech is always willing to prohibit that which they cannot yet do. But they want authority to conduct the research they can do, which will eventually lead to being able to do what they can’t, at which point the prohibition is revoked because now “society is ready.”

Bottom line: If you want to prevent the eventual birth of a cloned human baby, the only way to do that is prohibit human SCNT. 

I now see that the old dishonest game is well afoot: Biotech types and media pretending that human cloning isn’t really human cloning unless a baby is born. The cloning breakthrough is instead being spun as skin cells into stem cells!  As if it were induced pluripotent stem cells, which really do turn skin into stem cells.

But back to the mendacity. A story in News.Com.Au–which runs stories from several Australian newspapers celebrates the cloning breakthrough because it means no embryos are used in the process!  From the story, “Embryonic Stem Cell Made From Skin:”

US researchers have reported a breakthrough in stem cell research, describing how they have turned human skin cells into embryonic stem cells for the first time. The method described on Wednesday by Oregon State University scientists in the journal Cell, would not likely be able to create human clones, said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, senior scientist at the Oregon National Primate Research Center. But it is an important step in research because it doesn’t require the use of embryos in creating the type of stem cell capable of transforming into any other type of cell in the body.

Doesn’t require the use of embryos? IT MAKES EMBRYOS TO BE USED! From the paper:

Most embryos…formed one or two pronuclei at the time of removal from TSA, whereas a slightly higher portion of embryos cleaved…suggesting that some SCNT embryos did not exhibit visible pronuclei at the time of examination… Most cleaved embryos developed to the eight-cell stage…but few progressed to compact morula…and blastocyst..stages. Activation of embryonic genes and transcription from the transplanted somatic cell nucleus are required for development of SCNT embryos beyond the eight-cell stage…Therefore, these results are consistent with the premise that our modified SCNT protocol supports reprogramming of human somatic cells to the embryonic state.

Repeat after me: Human SCNT creates a human embryo through asexual means. It doesn’t create stem cells. The cloning is completed when the SCNT is accomplished. After that, there is no more cloning. The only question is what you do with the living human embryo you have manufactured. 

The junk biology is flying in the media’s descriptions of the now accomplished human cloning. This next example comes from the Wall Street Journal’s Gautam Naik. From the ridiculously titled, “Experiment Brings Human Cloning One Step Closer:”

Scientists have used cloning technology to transform human skin cells into embryonic stem cells, an experiment that may revive the controversy over human cloning. The researchers stopped well short of creating a human clone. But they showed, for the first time, that it is possible to create cloned embryonic stem cells that are genetically identical to the person from whom they are derived.

NO. THEY EXPLICITLY CREATED A HUMAN CLONE! That’s what SCNT cloning does; creates a cloned embryo. A cloned embryo–like a natural embryo–is an individual organism, a member of its (in this case, human) species.

Once the SCNT is done, the cloning is over. After that, the question becomes not whether to clone, but what to do with the embryo that was created through the cloning process. These scientists destroyed the embryos and derived stem cell lines. 

In fact, don’t take my word for it. Let’s have the authors of the paper describe it. From the Cell paper:

Most embryos…formed one or two pronuclei at the time of removal from TSA, whereas a slightly higher portion of embryos cleaved…suggesting that some SCNT embryos did not exhibit visible pronuclei at the time of examination… Most cleaved embryos developed to the eight-cell stage…but few progressed to compact morula…and blastocyst..stages. Activation of embryonic genes and transcription from the transplanted somatic cell nucleus are required for development of SCNT embryos beyond the eight-cell stage…Therefore, these results are consistent with the premise that our modified SCNT protocol supports reprogramming of human somatic cells to the embryonic state.

Media: Get it right, or don’t get it at all!

Now that human cloning is upon us, look for many scientists and their camp followers (or ignorant reporters) to mislead about what the technology entails. Human SCNT creates human embryos through asexual means. It does not create stem cells. To obtain cloned stem cells, the embryos have to be nurtured and maintained in a dish for about 10 days, destroyed, and the stem cell lines derived.

But don’t look for the embryo part to make many stories. Early case in point, a story by Loren Grush on FNC:

In a major medical breakthrough, researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) have for the first time ever successfully converted human skin cells into embryonic stem cells–via a technique called nuclear transfer. The research has major implications for the future of medical treatments, as many believe embryonic stem cells are the key to treating damaged cells lost through injury or illness.  According to various medical researchers, stem cell therapy has the potential to treat anything from heart disease and spinal cord injuries to major neurological diseases, like Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis.

Through a common laboratory method known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), ONPRC scientists, along with researchers at Oregon Health & Science University, essentially swapped the genetic codes of an unfertilized egg and a human skin cell to create their new embryonic stem cells…The combination of the egg’s cytoplasm and the skin cell’s nucleus eventually grows and develops into the embryonic stem cell.

False! Repeat after me: The unfertilized egg is not turned into stem cells. Rather, in the same cloning process as resulted in Dolly the sheep, it becomes an embryo, which is destroyed to obtain the cells. Moreover, the process is hardly common. In fact, this is the first time SCNT has worked in humans. That’s why it’ a big story!

The human cloning issue is going go be a Mt. Everest of ethical contention. If we are going to discuss this rationally, we need accurate information from the scientists and the media. I plan to hold both to account in this regard going forward.

The world just changed. An international consortium of scientists have announced that they have successfully cloned human beings using the process that led to Dolly the sheep. They were able to develop four cloned embryos in a dish to the ”blastocyst” stage,  the point in time when an embryo can be implanted in a uterus or destroyed for stem cells. The scientists here did the latter. 

This is huge news–reproduction as replication. The door is now open to the development of Brave New World technologies such as genetic engineering and the birth of cloned babies. As I wrote in my book on these issues, Consumer’s Guide to a Brave New World:

We can pursue biotechnology to treat disease and improve the human condition, while retaining sufficient humility and self-restraint to keep ourselves from endangering the intrinsic value of human life.  Or, we can hubristically rush onto the very anti-human path warned against by Aldous Huxley, driven by our thirst for knowledge, vast profits, and obsession with control and vastly expanded life spans.  

These issues are too important to be “left to the scientists.”  Nor can we afford to allow the marketplace to determine what is right and what is wrong.  The stakes are too high, the potential impact on each and every one of us too profound, to remain passive and indifferent to the decisions that are to be made.  It is our duty to participate in the crucial cultural and democratic debates over biotechnology.  The human future, quite literally, depends on it. 

I will write more extensively about this shortly. In the meantime, hold on to your hats–the culture wars just got more intense and divisive.

How often we are told by “the scientists” that those outside the field have no business telling them what to–and more particularly, what not–to do. And yet, again and again and again, we learn that some scientists refuse to restrain themselves.

A new story in Slate about scientists making human/animal hybrids is a case in point. From, “Manimal Rights,” by Daniel Engber:

But the regulations try to draw the line at full hybrids–where animal eggs are fertilized with human sperm or vice-versa. And they also ban the use of chimeric animals with human brains. These aren’t right-wing talking points so much as common ethical intuitions. It’s OK to mess with a creature’s “simple” parts–the plumbing in its gut, let’s say–but we’re risking moral crisis when we start to humanize its neural tissue. Nonpartisan expert commissions have reached the same conclusion. After two years studying the issue, the British Academy of Medical Sciences released a report in 2011 that found people would be uneasy over interspecies mergers that looked or acted human or had a human-like brain.

Yes, restraint is so “right wing.” But here’s the punch line: Some scientists don’t give a fig:

Yet experiments like these are going forward just the same. In just the past few months, scientists at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Rochester have published data on their human-animal neural chimeras. For the Wisconsin study, researchers injected mice with an immunotoxin to destroy a part of their brains–the hippocampus–that’s associated with learning, memory, and spatial reasoning. Then the researchers replaced those damaged cells with cells derived from human embryos. The cells proliferated and the lab chimeras recovered their ability to navigate a water maze.

For the Rochester study, researchers implanted newborn mice with nascent human glial cells, which help support and nourish neurons in the brain. Six months later, the human parts had elbowed out the mouse equivalents, and the animals had enhanced ability to solve a simple maze ;and learn conditioned cues.  These protocols might run afoul of the anti-hybrid laws, and perhaps they should arouse some questions. These chimeric mice may not be human, or even really human, but they’re certainly one step further down the path to Algernon. It may not be so long before we’re faced with some hairy bioethics: What rights should we assign to mice with human brains?

None. But let’s not get into that now. The real question is when are we going to enforce the regulations with sharp teeth? Do we need to criminalize these experiments to get scientists to stop? Because when we say, “ban ” certain kinds of experiments, we are pejoratively labeled as “anti science,” and that we should trust “the scientists” not to stray too far afield.

Talk is cheap. The truth is, I think many scientists oppose any permanent and meaningful restraints–on themselves and each other. If I am right, society will have to forcefully take matters into its own hands.

Alas. Today, the Vermont Legislature passed a bill that legalizes assisted suicide in the state. The governor has promised to sign it into law and it will take effect immediately. In three years, the protective guidelines will sunset and VT will have essentially no rules assisted suicide. 

This is very bad news disguised as compassion. Nor, in the long run, will the death agenda be limited to the terminally ill. Eventually, Vermont will end up off the same vertical moral cliff as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

There is growing advocacy among the intelligentsia that denies free will–one of the morally relevant traits in our natures that make us exceptional–claiming instead that our behavior is predetermined by evolutionary forces acting on human behavior down the ages, and more particularly, on our individual genetic makeup. If we can’t help ourselves, concepts of “right” and “wrong” will have to be replaced by forced non judgmentalism toward all personal behaviors and the medicalization of society’s responses to what are now considered criminal behaviors.

Along this line, the Guardian has published a long article about research by Adrian Raine, by which he seeks too demonstrate that violent behaviors may be products of the perpetrators’ brain structures. Raine has taken brain scans of violent criminals and believes that he has found organic commonalities, leading him to propose that the time has come to stop punishing violent behavior as a crime, but instead, to treat murderers as if they are medical patients. From, “How to Spot a Murderer’s Brain:”

Raine’s account of the most recent research into these reactions, it still seems to me quite new and surprising that environmental factors change the physical structure of the brain. We tend to talk about a child’s development in terms of more esoteric ideas of mind rather than material brain structures, but the more you look at the data the clearer the evidence that abuse or neglect or poor nutrition or prenatal smoking and drinking have a real effect on whether or not those healthy neural connections–which lead to behaviour associated with maturity, self-control and empathy–are made. The science of this is called epigenetics, the way our environment regulates the expression of our innate genetic code.

There is no doubt that epigenetics is real. But is gene expression really a puppet master?

One result of epigenetics might be, Raine suggests, that “social scientists can actually win from this. I mean, if a child experiences a murder in his or her neighbourhood, we have found that their test scores on a range of measures go down. There is something happening in the brain as a result of that experience of violence to affect cognition. So social scientists can have their cake and eat it. They can say look, we can prove that these environmental social factors are causing brain impairment, which leads to some real, measurable problems.”

Of course emotional upset can impact performance. But that doesn’t mean brain structures are altered to the point that people cease to be personally responsible. For example, abused children are more likely to be abusers. But not all abused children abuse and not all abusers were abused children.  

But Raine apparently believes the criminal doesn’t make free will choices, and hence, we should medicalize society’s response to what are now deemed “criminal” actions:

But if neural scanning becomes more routine, and neuroscience more precise, will there not come a point where most violent behaviour–that of the Boston bombers, say, or the Newtown killer–is argued away in court as an illness, rather than a crime?

Raine believes that there might well be. He even likens such a shift to our change in perception of cancer, until fairly recently often deemed the “fault” of the sufferer because of some repressive character trait. “If we buy into the argument that for some people factors beyond their control, factors in their biology, greatly raise the risk of them becoming offenders, can we justly turn a blind eye to that?” Raine asks. “Is it really the fault of the innocent baby whose mother smoked heavily in pregnancy that he went on to commit crimes? Or if he was battered from pillar to post, or even if he was born with a, abnormally low resting heart rate, how harshly should we punish him? How much should we say he is responsible? There is, and increasingly will be, an argument that he is not fully responsible and therefore, when we come to think of punishment, should we be thinking of more benign institutions than prison?”

As I said, this is an attack on free will and moral responsibility.

But I want to focus on the idea that ”social scientists can actually win” from destroying personal responsibility. That reinforces an idea I have been pondering lately. So let’s take a look at this from a different–and I must say, provocative angle: It seems to me that the political and cultural left tend to be most receptive to theories and research of this kind. Why? The contemporary left (generally) rejects the traditional concept of liberty because it assumes a generally accepted moral order to which most adhere willingly, requires personal responsibility, and expects self-restraint as a concomitant duty to enjoying the fruits of freedom.

But the left sees that as oppressive and wants to “liberate” us all from those burdens so that we may fully explore and actualize our own personal identities–and that requires allowing behavioral license, doing away with moral judgments and fixed concepts of right and wrong, and payment by society for the costs and consequences associated with living as truly ourselves.

Of course, such radical self-actualization can lead to moral chaos. Ah, but that’s where the technocracy comes in.  The left wants society to be ruled by scientific ”experts,” managed by bureaucrats, with dysfunctional (to be judgmental) ”clients”( if you will) served and protected by hosts of social and government workers doling out welfare state benefits and services. Stripping personal responsibility from what is now considered “criminal” behavior is consistent with that meme. We shouldn’t punish criminals, but instead protect us from them by empathetically treating and serving them as victims of their own anatomy. 

I received a form letter the other day from Kathryn Tucker, of the euphemistically named “Compassion and Choices,” which came into being as part of a merger with the honestly named Hemlock Society. The letter referenced a law review article I wrote way back in 2007, which she claimed to have “enjoyed reading.”  But she had a concern. You see, in the article I used the accurate and descriptive term, “assisted suicide” for the action of a doctor intentionally providing an overdose to a patient for use in suicide. Tucker helpfully suggested that I seriously consider using the term, “aid in dying” in the future, as being somehow more “accurate.” She even included a letter from another well know assisted suicide advocate thanking C & C for bringing the correct “aid in dying” terminology to his attention. What. A. Crock.

I know Kathryn. We testified at the same time some years ago at a U.S. Senate committee hearing on assisted suicide. In 2007, we were invited to publicly debate the issue at the Houston Holocaust Museum, after which we had dinner together with our host. At the dinner, she couldn’t stop herself from talking “shop,” as it were–even though we had agreed to leave it at the museum. No question, she is a true believer. 

I was tempted to write back to her, essentially stating, “Not on a bet! Aid-in-dying  is a focus group-tested euphemism, intended to promote suicide as an acceptable answer to the difficulties associated with serious illness.” But she knows that–after all, she is one of the architects of the advocacy tactic–so why waste her time and mine?  

I bring this up because the latest push in the UK to legalize assisted suicide is using a similar euphemism; “assisted dying.” But an opponent is having none of it. From the Telegraph story:

Lord Falconer’s Bill will go before the Lords on Wednesday. Based on the conclusions of an informal commission on assisted dying he chaired last year, the Bill would introduce a system whereby doctors can provide terminally ill patients with a fatal dose of drugs. “It is termed ‘assisted dying’ rather than ‘assisted suicide’ as it would be limited to people who are terminally ill with a prognosis of six months or less to live.

But Lord Carlile branded the distinction “nonsense. “In law, as in the English language, if you take your own life, whatever your state of health, that is suicide; and a doctor, or anyone else, who supplies you with the means to do so is assisting suicide,” he wrote. “Sound law-making demands clarity. It cannot be based on euphemisms, verbal evasions or Orwellian spin.”

Precisely. This issue is too important for crooked talk. The agenda is pro (some) suicides. Pretending otherwise is intellectually dishonest.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: When a social and political movement feels the need to hide its true agenda behind obfuscating gooey euphemisms, it is a good bet that there is something seriously wrong with its agenda.

Radical environmentalists want to criminalize the development of the land and resources as a “crime against peace,” they call “ecocide.” The ecocide drive is distinctly anti-human in that it would make the crime equivalent under international law to true evils such as genocide and ethnic cleansing. Moreover, it makes an explicit moral equivalency between the imporance of flora/fauna and people. If ever adopted, it would shut down Western economies, throwing us into worse shape than we are in now–while keeping the destitute mired in their misery by preventing developing nations from creating wealth through activities like mining, timber harvesting, and large scale farming. 

I keep warming about this movement, and most people are still rolling their eyes with the old mistaken idea that it could never happen. (Anyone with that mindset is Rip van Winkle.) Now, the Irish Green Party has explicitly endorsed criminalizing ecocide. From the Green Party News story:

A motion to end ecocide (the extensive destruction of ecosystems) was passed unanimously at the 2013 Green Party Annual Convention in Galway on 13 April 2013. The motion was presented by Cathy Fitzgerald, Carlow/Kilkenny Green Party and Forestry policy spokesperson.

Commenting on the decision to pass the motion, Cathy Fitzgerald said: “I am delighted with the unanimous support from our Party to call for an end to Ecocide. There is growing international legal realisation that current environmental laws and regulations ‘permits’ environmental destruction rather than preventing it. The Law of Ecocide seeks to address environmental degradation from a new perspective and has significant implications to assign legal responsibility to heads of state, corporations and others that cause long-term environmental destruction. This would apply to environmental problems like fracking pollution of ground water, land and air pollution, etc.

Except, ecocide would not just punish pollution, but also development. From my piece, “Ecocide, A Crime Against Peace?:”

But what is ecocide, precisely? Practically any business activity that environmentalists loathe, from large scale resource development to nonrenewable energy generation, along with any accidental ecological disaster would potentially qualify as a crime against peace. As envisioned by ecocide’s rising star, Polly Higgins, who recently addressed the United Nations promoting a Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights, the This Is Ecocide website states:

Ecocide is the extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished.

Note that “peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants” is a very broad term, intended to include everything from grass, fish, and insects to mice, snakes, and people. And diminishment of “peaceful enjoyment” would not require actual pollution, but could mean a declining supply of forage or a loss of foliage caused by almost any use of the land, perhaps even simple urban growth. 

Ecocide campaigners held a mock trial in the chambers of the English Supreme Court and found fictional CEOs of Alberta Tar Sand oil developing companies guilty of felonies. That is where this is aimed; squelching human thriving and prosperity in order to “save” Gaia. Attention needs to be paid and serious educational and political pushback commenced before this misanthropic madness grows.

Euthanasia activists keep trying to stretch the envelope. In New South Wales, Australia, a bill has been introduced that would not only permit active euthanasia but would be allow a very broad array of ill and disabled patients to be killed upon request. From, “The Rights of the Terminally Ill Bill 2013:

In this Act: assist or assistance, in relation to the death or proposed death of a patient, includes: (a) the prescribing and preparation of a substance for the patient, and
the giving of a substance to the patient, for self-administration, and (b) the administration of a substance to the patient, if the patient is physically incapable of self-administering the substance.

That includes active and direct killing by doctors, baby!

There are also no time limits for a “terminal illness,” even if a treatment might be available to cure or extend life, but the patient doesn’t want it:

Terminal illness, in relation to a patient, means an illness which in reasonable medical judgment will, in the normal course, result in the death of the patient…

A primary medical practitioner may assist a patient to end the patient’s life only if all of the following conditions are met:…(iii) in reasonable medical judgment, there is no medical measure acceptable to the patient that can reasonably be undertaken in the hope of effecting a cure…

Someone with diabetes could qualify under that loose definition, even if currently sustained with insulin, if daily injections were “no longer acceptable to the patient.” Ditto, other conditions like HIV infection if asymptomatic and the patient doesn’t want to take the drugs to stave off AIDS. Any of us could name a whole host of illnesses and disabilities that could be considered “terminal” under these very loose criteria.

There’s more of the usual stuff, but I am so sick of the spiking fever of death obession that I am not up to discussing it any more tonight. If this keeps up, medical schools will have to hire veterinarians to teach future doctors how to put people down. 

Many bioethicists want to destroy what remains of the sanctity/equality of human life ethic. Two areas of current push in this regard are the drive to permit infanticide and to harvest organs from living cognitively devastated patients.

But there’s an impediment: If human beings have equal moral value simply because they are human, we can’t treat them in such a crass and objectifying manner. But if our moral value is entirely subjective–depending on our capacities moment, by moment, by moment–why harvesting, killing, and experimenting on humans become defensible and doable against those denigrated as being members of a lower value caste. Arguments around infanticide are intended, in part, to attaining consensus on how to define the caste of lesser humans.

I bring this up (again) because the Journal of Medical Ethics has an issue out dedicated to debating the pros and cons of permitting infanticide. (I have already discussed one article here that went after yours truly. The entire issue is temporarily available for reading here.) I want to focus today on the “editor’s choice” article. Most of it deals with the role of philosophy in these kinds of discussions. But the article also proposes a concept for subjectively defining a “person” that I had not seen before and uses an advocacy technique toward getting us to accept that end that I think worth highlighting. 

Like many others of his ilk, University of Philosopher professor Michael Tooley claims that full protection comes from attaining the moral status of being a “neo-Lockean person,” essentially derived from being a the ability to think. From, “Philosophy, critical thinking and ‘after-birth abortion: why should the baby live?’”:

The serious view here is this: Only neo-Lockean persons have a right to continued existence. What is a neo-Lockean person? The answer is that a neo-Lockean person is an entity that has conscious states at different times, and that are psychologically connected by such things as memories, desires and intentions.

That being so, the key question is the present mental capacity of the individual being judged–whether human or otherwise:

But what could the more general principle be that underlies both the principle concerning the right to life of members of our own biological species, and the principle concerning the right to life of members of the ET [extra terrestrial] biological species? Presumably, it will have to focus on something that would be common to members of the two species, but that is not shared, for instance, by carrots, and that is also a morally relevant property. What could such a property be? The answer, surely, must involve some sort of reference to the type of mental life that both Homo sapiens and members of the ET species, are capable of.

Note the persuasive technique Tooley employs: “The answer, surely, must involve some sort of referent to the type of mental life…” That stacks the deck and precludes other relevant issues from the discussion, doesn’t it?

But present mental capacity should be irrelevant as it relates to the value of a human being. I would instead compare the differing inherent natures of the organisms or entities being judged. Humans, and only we in the known universe are–by nature–moral beings (among other moral attributes, such as our rational and creative capacities that also undergird human exceptionalism). That is, whether we are embryos, fetuses, babies, children, or old people dying of Alzheimer’s, we all have the natures of moral agents–unless inhibited from expressing those attributes due to immaturity or injury. But the current ability to fully express our human nature isn’t the point. Rather, the nature of the life in question is what should matter. Otherwise, none of us is safe–since our respective moral value depends absolutely on our capacities of the moment–and universal human rights becomes impossible to sustain intellectually. Person today, harvestable tomorrow.

Tooley argues that since fetuses and newborns can’t think, they essentially have a lower moral status than a “normal adult human being:”

The crucial issue here, it seems to me, is at what point a developing human acquires the capacity for thought, and many years ago I attempted to survey the relevant scientific literature, including studies of the growth of neurons, studies of electrical activity in the developing brain, and studies of the behaviour exhibited by humans at various points. The results are set out in chapter 11 of my 1983 book, on pages 347-412, and my conclusion at that time was that it was likely that a capacity for thought episodes emerged only some time after birth.

Until the baby could actually think–he or she would be killable. (He says more research into mental capacities of newborns is needed. But his principle of personhood is the problem, not the place the line is drawn.)

Please understand, this kind of discussion isn’t aimed at being deemed clever or scoring debating points. It seeks directly to change the morality of society and the public policies that flow therefrom. That’s what happened with eugenics, abortion, and license to dehydrate the cognitively impaired.  If we are to prevent this next step–infanticide, and treating so-called human “non-persons” as natural resources–notice must be taken. Resistance is not futile!

Vermont seems poised to enact assisted suicide into state law. For the first three years, it will be a law with even fewer “protective guidelines” than the ephemeral Oregon rules. Then, the guidelines sunset and doctors would seem to be able do pretty much as they please. From the Burlington Free Press story:

The alternative grants doctors immunity from prosecution for providing a lethal dose of medication if they follow a list of rules, including making sure the patient is terminally ill and making a voluntary, informed decision. The list includes some, but not all, the rules Oregon requires in its 15-year-old law. In 2016, that list of rules expires, with the idea that doctors will have established their own protocol.

Please notice the trajectory: As the doctor-prescribed death movement advances, its proffered restrictions get progressively weaker. That’s happening in slower motion in the USA than in euthanasia havens like the Netherlands and Belgium because there is still resistance to the culture of death here–as Massachusetts voters showed by defeating a legalization referendum in November. But whether here or overseas, the death-on-demand ultimate destination is the same.

Next step: A campaign to persuade Vermont doctors to refuse all participation in doctor-prescribed suicide and for hospitals and nursing homes to keep the suicicde agenda outside their doors! How about signs that say, “This is an assisted suicide free zone.”

I have always marveled at the antagonism many show toward anything that would appear moralistic in the fight against the AIDS scourge. And now Nature has editorialized against a U.S. law that requires recipients of funds to denounce prostitution and sex trafficking. From, “The Right to Remain Silent:”

For all its virtues, the law that established PEPFAR contains the troubling stipulation that none of its funding may go to “any group or organization that does not have a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking.” What is more, it states that any group receiving its funds must refrain from speech that the government judges “inconsistent with” that anti-prostitution policy. The prohibition pertains to all activities by the recipient group, even those funded with private money

Troubling? It’s our money. If these organizations don’t like the rules, don’t take the cash. Morevoer, prostitution and sex trafficking are major conveyors of HIV infection. 

It’s not as if they have a right to no-strings-attached funding–or do they? It would seem that with regard to messaging the organization’s do. At least that is the strong implication of the editorial:

It is not clear how the high court will rule. If it sides with the government, the immediate result would be sobering. Many private organizations receiving PEPFAR funding would face a choice. They could give up that funding. Or they could stop publishing papers, speaking at conferences or preparing training materials about how, for example, to improve sex worker’s access to HIV testing or condoms–unless, of course, those speeches or materials explicitly denounce prostitution. Never mind that such proclamations are likely to compromise efforts to educate and deliver health care to sex workers.

The use of the term “sex worker” is very telling. It seeks to suck all moral judgment out of commercial sex.

So why do it? Because Nature is not just a science journal, but also one with specific ideological predilections. 

Sometimes amorality is immorality–as when we are told to remain blithely nonjudgmental about criminal and immoral activities that degrade women and children, destroy families, and in the case of human trafficking, brutality that is akin to slavery.

James Taranto has fun with vegan activists harassing animal agriculture students and calling people who eat meat, “carcass crunchers.” I am always amused that vegans act as if their diets don’t involve the slaughter of millions of animals.

I wrote about this once, and thought an encore would be worthwhile.  From my NRO piece, “Veganism is Murder:”

Plant agriculture results each year in the mass slaughter of countless animals, including rabbits, gophers, mice, birds, snakes, and other field creatures. These animals are killed during harvesting, and in the various mechanized farming processes that produce wheat, corn, rice, soybeans, and other staples of vegan diets. And that doesn’t include the countless rats and mice poisoned in grain elevators, or the animals that die from loss of habitat cleared for agricultural use. 

Animal-rights activists certainly don’t mention this inconvenient fact in their advocacy materials. But if the matter comes up in debate, they have a problem: They believe it is “speciesist” to grant some sentient animals – including humans – greater value than others; as PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk so famously put it, “a rat, is a fish, is a dog, is a boy.” Thus, they cannot contend that it is more wrong to kill a pig than a rabbit. Nor can they argue that field animals experience less-agonizing deaths from plant agriculture than food animals do from food-animal slaughtering. Field animals may flee in panic as the great rumbling harvest combines approach, only to be shredded to bits within their merciless blades; they may be burned to death when field leavings are burned; they may be poisoned by pesticides; they may die from predation when their plant cover has been removed. 

No question: The animal-rights forces hold a weak intellectual hand. 

No matter your diet, animals die that you might live. And they die more painful deaths than meat animals. Imagine being a mouse mowed to death by a combine or poisoned in a silo.

Vegans pretend that because they don’t intend to kill the animals, it doesn’t matter that animals are killed to support their diets of grain, fruit, etc.. But they know it will happen, which is little different. In human terms, reckless disregard to the likelihood of causing death can lead to murder charges.

Like I wrote before, animal rightists hold a weak intellectual hand. But then, their movement is almost pure emotionalism.

Suicide is in the air. Our culture–particularly exemplified by the media–is becoming increasingly pro suicide. Perhaps better stated, many are now pro some suicides. Indeed, if a suicidal person is sick, disabled, even mentally ill, many believe it is perfectly fine for a doctor to facilitate death through intentional overdose, and many families now support their loved one’s self-killing. 

In mental health journals, some writers distinguish between “rational” and “irrational” suicides, with only the latter being something to be deeply regretted and prevented. Movies extol suicides and euthanasia, as in Million Dollar Baby. Jack Kevorkian has been transformed by blatant revisionism from the real-life ghoul he was–driven by the obsession to experiment on living people he was killing–into a compassionate Muppet-like character. Suicide prevention still exists, to be sure, but it receives ever less emphasis in our increasingly nihilistic society.

So, why should we be surprised that there has been a sharp increase in suicide rates in the USA generally, with an even higher spike at Assisted Suicide Central, e.g., Oregon? From the Oregonian story:

New figures showing a sharp increase in suicides across the nation among middle-aged Americans show an even bigger increase in Oregon. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report shows Oregon saw a 49.3 percent increase in suicides among men and women aged 35-64 from 1999-2010, compared to 28 percent nationally. A 2012 report on suicide trends and risk factors for the Oregon Health Authority found the state’s overall suicide rate was 41 percent higher than the national rate, that rural counties have higher rates of suicide than urban ones, and that white men lead other demographic groups.

It should be noted here that the OHA doesn’t include legal assisted suicides in its suicide rates. So, the actual rate is worse than reported.

When we approve of some suicides, the existentially suffering don’t necessarily distinguish between those that are deemed OK and those that aren’t.  There are many other factors at work, of course. But I believe that assisted suicide advocacy helps drive the meme that suicide is an acceptable answer to serious difficulties, weakening the societal bulwarks that sometimes prevent people from bringing their desire to be dead to completion. 

Oh good grief. It appears that the Chinese tyranny is allowing the nephew of anti-forced abortion human rights activist Chen Guangcheng to die of appendicitis. And Secretary of State John Kerry calls, but just can’t get through? From the official State Department transcript of a press briefing:

QUESTION: You suggested during the briefing yesterday–or you said that you believed that the Secretary was going to call the Chinese leadership to raise the case of Chen Guangcheng’s nephew.

MR. VENTRELL: Chen Kegui.

QUESTION: Chen Kegui. Thank you again. Did he make such a call? And if so, to whom and when, and what did he say?

MR. VENTRELL: The Secretary did reach out to his counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang, yesterday. He was unable to reach him and the Secretary will follow up. So he has placed a call and has not yet been able to connect with the Foreign Minister, who we understand is on travel.

QUESTION: Do you know if he attempted to reach him after you announced from the podium that he was going to call?

MR. VENTRELL: No, we discussed in the morning that he was going to make the call during the day.

QUESTION: Well–right, I know. But was it–did he try to do it after you had said that he was going to?

MR. VENTRELL: Matt, I don’t know at exactly what hour the –

QUESTION: I’m just curious if you think that the Chinese Foreign Minister might have been ducking the phone call because he knew that he was going to get yelled at about this.

MR. VENTRELL: I don’t know at what time the Operations Center was putting forward the call, but the Secretary did reach out to the Chinese and will follow up.

So let me get this straight: Wang forwarded his calls to voice mail and Secretary Kerry left a message? Talk about no respect, as in the Chinese apparently have none for, the Chens, the USA, or this administration. If the nephew’s appendix bursts and he dies, what then?

Female genital mutilation is an awful human rights abuse in which girls are cut in ways mostly intended to deprive them of sexual feeling. The point is to keep women subservient. “Taming”  sexuality is perceived as a way of keeping women docile and obedient, which in turn, is perceived to promote a stable society.

FGM generally is practiced in very traditional cultures, often (but not exclusively) with a strong Muslim component. That is why I think that a campaign to “celebrate the clitoris” as a means of fighting against the practice and convincing women to seek medical help to remediate having been cut, is not a smart or wise approach. From the CBS Las Vegas story:

A group formed to protest and combat female genital mutilation declared the time between May 6 and May 12 of this year to be the first-ever International Clitoris Awareness Week. The organization, Clitoraid, released a statement Friday about the awareness campaign. “Our first six years of humanitarian work have been dedicated to surgically repairing clitorises for female genital mutilation…victims, and on October 8 we’ll open the world’s first Clitoral Restoration Hospital,” Clitoraid spokesperson Nadine Gary said. “This year, we’ll celebrate the sexual pleasure of all women, since all can benefit from more sexual appreciation.”

According to the release, Clitoraid is encouraging other women to host events–however formal or informal–that further the organization’s objectives and garner more attention for their initiative–and the larger problem it attempts to address.   “[The clitoris has] been ignored, vilified, made taboo, and considered sinful and shameful for centuries because of patriarchal religious values,” Gary said. “It’s time to give this beautiful organ the attention it deserves. It’s the only human organ with an exclusive sexual pleasure function!”

Yea, just what those who practice FGM want to hear! That is why the girls are cut. How is this going to be in any way effective?

The cause of ending FGM is more than just. But  making the fight against this terrible oppression sound like Yale Sex Week isn’t going to play well in traditional societies threatened by what they perceive as the decadence and licentiousness of the West. Indeed, such attitudes are precisely what they are trying to prevent from influencing their girls and women! It might, I suppose, raise a few bucks here and there. But to make an important human rights issue sound like an early feminst bra burning protest is both sophomoric and counter-productive to achieving the goal of actually ending this awful practice where it happens.

Update: Reader Chris informs me that Clitoraid is a Raelian project. So, I did a little digging. Sure enough.

The Raelians are a science cult that fooled the media several years ago with the hoax that its company, Clonaid, had brought a cloned baby into the world. I debated one of their head honchos, and she had brought grieving parents to the meeting to try and convince them Clonaid could clone their dead children! What a dispicable crew for raising money off the bodies of mutilated women. 

To The Source asked me to reflect on the Kermit Gosnell abomination. I note that there have been other examples of babies born alive from an abortion and killed or allowed to die. I also recall to mind the corruption in Kansas that had one doctor rubber stamping late term abortion second opinions for the (late) late term abortionist George Tiller. It was so blatant she lost her license to practice.

Recall also that a Planned Parenthood of Florida representative recently said that the lives of babies born alive from an abortion should depend on the mother and abortionist’s decision–before PP pulled it back. (Pardon me for disbelieving the organization’s sincerity.) No wonder our president is such an enthusiast of the organization since he once expressed a similar opinion. I also discuss the pro-late term abortionist film, After Tiller, that received cheers at the Sundance Film Festival–as did the “doctors” who kill well gestated fetuses for a living.

Late term abortion can’t be separated from the growing advocacy for permitting active infanticide in the bioethics discourse, which, in turn, is relevant to the Gosnell atrocities. From, “Gosnell is Not an Aberration:

This raises a cogent question: How is what happened in Philadelphia morally different from what Peter Singer’s “ethical” supposedly “human values” would allow? At a 2010 Princeton conference Singer explicitly said, “The position that allows [late term] abortion also allows infanticide under some circumstances. If we accept abortion, we do need to rethink some of those more fundamental attitudes about human life.” 

So, to answer my own question, other than technical issues of clinical procedures and sanitary methods, and absent the jars of trophy body parts found at the Gosnell clinic, I can’t think of a single reason why Singer’s values would not permit a “professionally” operated abortion/infanticide.

I discuss the actual infanticide occurring regularly in the Netherlands, with the bureaucratic check-list to determine which babies can be murdered (Groningen Protocol), which–demonstrating how respectable this is getting–was even published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

So this is where we are: Late term terminations are part of abortion practice in the United States. Many prominent voices believe that legal abortion amounts to a right to a dead fetus–no matter how late in the pregnancy. Late term abortions, in turn, sometimes result in the killing or lethal neglect of born babies, e.g., infanticide. And infanticide is actively promoted as ethical among some of the most prominent bioethicists and in medical journals in the world, and practiced in the Netherlands without meaningful consequence.

We face a true moral crisis in the West. Our future as a free and ethical society hangs in the balance. 

Last year, the Journal of Medical Ethics–a reliable fount of radicalism–published an article promoting “after-birth” abortion, e.g., infanticide–as an ethical action. It sparked a firestorm, and I was one of the match lighters, along with the clearing house of bioethical articles and news, Bioedge. 

Now, Udo Schüklenk, the editor of Bioethics, has bitterly criticized the public criticism of the article in general–and me, specifically, for calling attention to it–in a just released “special edition” of the Journal of Medical Ethics devoted to debating infanticide and the public’s reaction to the after-birth abortion article. Please excuse this extended reply, but the record needs to be kept straight.

Typical of these oh, so intellectual academics, Schüklenk’s complaint is long on polemics and innuendo, and short on actual facts. From, “In defence of academic freedom: bioethics journals under siege” (subscription needed):

He [yours truly] has tried for a long time to establish a secular basis for human exceptionalism, with respect for human dignity flowing from that idea. Both his attempts at academic contributions and his internet based outputs are, ironically, published pretty much exclusively in religious outlets. Peer-reviewed journal outputs (the bread-and-butter activities of mainstream academics) in your average bioethics journal are not on his agenda.

Poppycock. I have published several times in the American Journal of Bioethics (secular), as well as the pro life Human Life Review, which isn’t a religious journal. I have also published in law reviews (secular). 

Schüklenk is correct that my main approach is not academic. I don’t really care about being published in bioethics journals, although I am always happy to write for them when asked. I am trying to alert the general public to the dangerous agendas that mainstream bioethics discourse promotes–whether infanticide, harvesting organs from cognitively devastated people, euthanasia, human cloning, etc.–advocacy in favor of which is ubiquitous in these journals. Also, once ideas are deemed legitimately “debatable,” by definition they become “respectable.” Whenever I help impede that process, I consider it a successful day.

Again, I am not a religious writer nor do I publish in that sector. Rather, I mostly appear in secular popular media outlets--like this one, National Review. I also frequently publish in the Weekly Standard (secular), the Daily Caller (secular) and newspapers, ranging from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Daily Telegraph. I do write for First Things, which is religious, but also cultural, which is my beat. With very rare exceptions, I don’t write about religion or promote my views based on religious precepts.

Schüklenk doesn’t actually dispute what I write, or quote me much beyond the title of one article. Nor does he point out anything I have written that was erroneous. Instead, he accuses me, essentially, of being a pen for hire:

However, so the argument might continue, as with us writers in bioethics, the strength of their stances will live or die by the persuasiveness of their arguments. What differences are there then, really? I should like to think that there are several relevant differences between them and us. The Discovery Institute employee is paid by his creationist lobby group employer to campaign on the types of issues his organisation espouses. The same cannot be said for academics working in secular universities. Protected by academic freedom we do not have to sing to our employers’ tune to pay our bills.

Again, not true. I am not an “employee” of the Discovery Institute, nor is it a “creationist lobbying group.” The managers of the DI don’t direct me in any way. I am a senior fellow, which means the DI helps support my scholarship and work, for which I am deeply appreciative. But it is a no-strings-attached deal. I don’t write what I do because they support me, they support me because they apparently like what I write.

I would also point out, that in many secular universites, one generally doesn’t receive tenure–the protector of academic freedom–unless one remains within accepted liberal ideological lines. I mean, how many of you think that Schüklenk’s philosophy department at Queens University in Canada would ever hire an open and notorious pro lifer–no matter how excellent his or her academic credentials? Yet, Peter Singer, the world’s most prominent advocate for infanticide, was given an endowed and tenured chair at Princeton without a Ph.D.! I submit that wasn’t in spite of his views, but because of them. 

Schüklenk really just resents the light I am trying to bring to the debate because it leads to intense public controversy: 

Academic journals finding themselves under sustained attacks from lobby groups do find themselves in a difficult situation. While political activism is legitimate—in fact, desirable—it can become so intense and well-orchestrated that it begins to threaten academic freedom.

Boo, hoo. Nobody’s academic freedom is jeopardized. However, the intellectual hegemony that these “experts” have enjoyed is in jeopardy, which is precisely the point. 

Here is the context, and why this discussion is so important: Bioethics isn’t a monolith. But it also isn’t just about debating radical ideas over a lager at the pub. As prominent bioethicists I quoted in Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America, my award-winning expose of bioethics, have acknowledged:

Once bioethics moved away from ivory tower rumination and to actively influence public policy and medical protocols, by definition the field became goal oriented.  Indeed, University of Southern California Professor of Law and Medicine, Alexander M. Capron, notes that from its inception, “bioethical analysis has been linked to action.” If dialogue is linked to action, at the very least, that implies an intended direction if not a desired destination.  Even bioethics historian Albert R. Jonsen, a bioethicist himself, calls bioethics a “social movement.” Has there been any social movement that was not predicated, at least to some degree, in ideology?  Moreover, the bioethics pioneer, Daniel Callahan, co-founder of the bioethics think tank, The Hastings Center, has admitted that “the final factor of great importance” in bioethics gaining societal respect, was the “emergence ideologically of a form of bioethics that dovetailed nicely with the reigning political liberalism of the educated classes in America.” Thus, mainstream bioethics is explicitly ideological, reflecting the values and beliefs of the cultural elite.

This is why it is urgent to expose what the bioethical elite are discussing in the journals and at symposia: As happened with eugenics, abortion legalization, and the now routine dehydration of the cognitively impaired, policies that are enacted in the field start with the discourse. Journal articles are then used to justify legislation and regulation, as a basis for court rulings, and to support political activism toward achieving those ends.  

Schüklenk then goes back to moaning about the (nonexistent) threat to academic freedom:

When all is said and done, this is an academic freedom issue. It has to do with ensuring both that we are able to ask difficult questions, and that we are able to defend conclusions that most people will disagree with…

Academics have always challenged assumptions taken for granted by the mainstream. That is how progress is possible. Some of the challenges succeed and lead to societal change, some fail after significant societal controversy, the majority probably sink without a trace altogether.

That is why I will continue to expose odious articles that are published in the bioethics, medical, and science journals in the popular media. Alerting people to the dangers that this way come is the best way to ensure that “the majority” of these ideas and proposals do indeed ”sink without a trace.” 

The Guardian is reporting that Chen Kegui, the nephew of anti-forced abortion activist Chen Guangcheng, has appendicitis and is being denied surgery. From the story:

Chen Kegui, whose activist uncle fled house arrest last year, is said to need life-saving appendicitis operation. Supporters and relatives fear for the life of the Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng’s jailed nephew after officials refused him medical parole for surgery. Chen Kegui was diagnosed with appendicitis last week and is receiving antibiotics from prison authorities, but his father said his appendix was suppurating and fears it will rupture if not removed. Prison officials have said they will arrange help but have given no details. The jail in Linyi, in eastern Shandong province, does not have the medical facilities for an operation.

If true, that is beyond cruel. It is a flagrant violation of human rights as a way of punishing Chen Guangcheng, and a warning to other would-be dissenters. Hello President Obama and Secretary Kerry? Are you paying attention?

Click here for my interview with law professor Martin Flaherty, an expert on the Chen situations. 

This is still experimental, but the little girl who had a new windpipe built from her bone marrow cells won’t care. From the AP story:

A 2-year-old girl born without a windpipe now has a new one grown from her own stem cells, the youngest patient in the world to benefit from the experimental treatment. Hannah Warren has been unable to breathe, eat, drink or swallow on her own since she was born in South Korea in 2010. Until the operation at a central Illinois hospital, she had spent her entire life in a hospital in Seoul. Doctors there told her parents there was no hope and they expected her to die.

The stem cells came from Hannah’s bone marrow, extracted from her hip bone. They were seeded in a lab onto a plastic scaffold, where it took less than a week for them to grow into the new windpipe. About the size of a 3-inch tube of penne pasta, it was implanted on April 9 in a nine-hour procedure. Early signs indicate the windpipe is working, Hannah’s doctors announced yesterday, although she is still on a ventilator. They believe she will eventually be able to live at home and lead a normal life.

There’s a word for that: Wow!

Here is another cogent warning about the dangers of centralized health care. The people of the UK have apparently lost so much trust in the NHS, that it is driving support for legalizing assisted suicide. From the Telegraph story:

Fears about standards care for terminally ill people in the NHS are fueling support for the legalisation of assisted suicide, a study suggests. More than a third of those who said they support a change in the law cited a belief that dying people cannot expect to receive “decent” care at the end of their lives among their reasons.

Note that the poll isn’t about physician-assisted suicide, but friend or family-assisted suicide. Talk about a real vote of total no confidence in the NHS!. 

There’s a terrible irony at work here. Dame Cecily Saunders founded the modern hospice movement in the UK–showing that people need not receive poor care at the end of life. That so many in Britain are so worried about poor care at the end of life that it propels support for assisted suicide is a telling indictment against the technocracy that controls UK health care. 

The media shares some of the blame. I remember appearing on the BBC about assisted suicide. The interviewer demanded to know why I would want people with ALS to die by choking. I get so sick of that canard. I asked her whether she had called the medical director of St. Christopher’s Hospice, which I estimated to be about 10 miles from the studio. “Well, if you had,” I forcefully told her, “you would know that with proper care, people with motor neurone disease don’t die choking. Indeed, Cecily Saunders told me that she had treated thousands of such patients without one choking death!”  Needless to say, the presenter continued on as if I had never spoken those words.

The answer is to fix the medical system and let people see the changes, not make matters worse by surrendering to failure by legalizing assisted suicide.

Despite decades of calling sex with a condom “safe sex,” or even worse, “safer sex,” there are still 50,000 new infections in the USA each year. And now, a federal panel is calling for HIV testing to be offered to all adolescents and adults to the age of 65. From the LA Times story:

The recommendation from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force seeks to address one of the key challenges in the fight against HIV/AIDS: The window during which patients respond best to treatment is also the time when symptoms of the disease are least noticeable. “HIV is a critical public health problem, and there are still 50,000 new infections per year,” said Dr. Doug Owens, a task force member and professor of medicine at Stanford University. “There’s very good evidence that treatment is effective when given earlier, at a time when people are often asymptomatic. So the only way they would know that they had HIV, or that they needed treatment, is to be screened.”

Based on a review of more recent data–including evidence that as many as 25% of people who carry HIV in the U.S. have no idea they are infected–task force members concluded that early detection would “result in substantial public health benefits” that outweighed any risks of widespread screening.

Based on what was reported, it would appear that the Task Force did not issue a clarion call for restricting one’s sexual behavior. That’s par for the course. I saw a story recently of a vaccine trial with some 2,000 volunteers that was stopped because more people got HIV with the vaccine than without it. That certainly implied that at least some of the subjects were willing to risk infection by engaging in risky behaviors. 

This is truth: The only actual “safe sex” is that between mutually monogamous, uninfected partners. Anything else is risk. Sex with condoms is properly called “less safe,” since it provides some but not absolute protection. And sex with no protection at all is ”unsafe.” That isn’t moralism. It is basic health science. 

Victoria, Australia has an oppressive abortion law that requires all doctors to either perform one when asked, or if opposed, find a doctor who will. In other words, the cost of being a licensed doctor is being complicit in the taking of human life.

Now, a doctor who refused to refer for a sex selection abortion may face stiff sanctions in Melbourne. From the Herald Sun story:

A Melbourne doctor who refused to refer a couple for an abortion because they wanted only a boy has admitted he could face tough sanctions. Dr Mark Hobart fears he could be punished for refusing to give the Melbourne couple a referral after discovering they were seeking an abortion because they didn’t want to have a girl. Obstetricians have proposed parents be banned from knowing the sex of unborn babies until it is too late to terminate, to prevent gender-based abortions.

By refusing to provide a referral for a patient on moral grounds or refer the matter to another doctor, Dr Hobart admits he has broken the law and could face suspension, conditions on his ability to practice or even be deregistered But he was willing to risk punishment in pursuit of principles. He said he did not believe any doctor in Victoria would have helped a couple have an abortion just because they wanted a boy.

Abortion, apparently, is the only “right” that is without limits. It trumps all.

Here’s the bottom line: The culture of death permits no dissent–even from something as odious as killing a gestating baby because of her sex. And it won’t stop with abortion. The Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) has a similar ethics opinion surrounding euthanasia. Meanwhile, many medical organizations in the USA oppose medical conscience rights–except for futile care theory and the purported right of doctors to pull plugs even when the patient want’s the plug in the outlet! 

And whatever you do, do not speak ill of abortion in Victoria!

Another doctor who was brought before the Medical Board in January for airing his views against abortion was cautioned and warned he could be deregistered if it happened again.

Can we spell a.u.t.h.o.r.i.t.a.r.i.a.n?

Astonishing and a warning to us all of the consequences that flow from rejecting human exceptionalism in the medical context.

HT: Lydia McGrew

I first heard of Body Integrity Identity Disorder at a transhumanist convention. BIID, also known as “amputee wannabe,” is a terrible mental illness in which sufferers obsesses and truly anguish about becoming an amputee–which they perceive as their true identities. 

At the conference, the transhumanist speaker argued that sufferers should be able to have healthy limbs amputated. On one hand, I couldn’t believe my ears. On the other, I wasn’t surprised. These days, we often don’t treat mental illnesses, but instead, tend toward acceding to and normalizing them. The speaker also argued, that since we have long permitted sex change surgeries, why not amputations? Truth to be told, there is logic there.

It isn’t just transhumanists. I have reported previously of some bioethical journals publishing articles in favor of amputation as a treatment for BIID. And now, a rogue doctor in Asia is apparently doing just that. From the Matter story:

In Patrick’s house, I saw a decorative skeleton hanging off a chandelier and didn’t think much of it. “Look more closely,”  he urged. Only then did I notice that it, like Patrick, was missing part of a leg and part of one finger. Then there was a statue of Michelangelo’s David on the mantelpiece. It too was missing part of a leg. The family had acknowledged Patrick’s suffering and was celebrating his freedom from BIID. Patrick now seemed genuinely comfortable with his body.

You can see where this is going–normalizing of a terrible mental illness. And indeed, according to the story the afflicted would rather be amputated than cured medically:

A YEAR OR SO before Patrick’s operation, a psychologist asked him if he would take a pill to make his BIID go away, should such a treatment exist. It took a moment for him to reflect and answer: maybe when he had been a lot younger, but not anymore. “This has become the core of who and what I am,” he said. This is who I am. Everyone with BIID that I have interviewed or heard about uses some variation on those words to describe their condition. When they envision themselves whole and complete, that image does not include parts of their limbs. “It seems like my body stops mid-thigh of my right leg,” Furth told the makers of a 2000 BBC documentary, Complete Obsession. “The rest is not me.

One can see why transhumanists look to treating BIID with amputation because their holy grail is to use medical, biotech, cybertech, and every other kind of tech to remake their bodies in their own image. But should society go down that path too?

I fear the worst. Radical individualism is now the avatar with powerful forces urging that self identity become the be all and end all–no judgment allowed–perhaps even to the point that one day it will mean permission to chop off healthy limbs and other body parts. If we follow this path to its logical conclusion, it will mean using the medical system to surrender to serious mental illnesses.

Individualism of the kind to which I am referring is already expensive. San Francisco’s city health insurance plan pays for sex change surgeries and a bill has been introduced in CA that would literally define all gay people as infertile and mandate group health insurance to pay for “infertility” treatments. Meanwhile, some terminal cancer patients are being denied life-extending chemotherapy under rationing schemes in Oregon, the UK, and elsewhere.

If we don’t hold the line on BIID by rejecting amputation as a legitimate treatment, when the next terrible obsession arises that is beyond the new ephemeral line drawn in the sand, what will happen? I think we all know the answer.

I have a long article out in the current (May 2013) First Things magazine detailing the never-ending expansion of euthanasia in Europe, to the point that there are few medicalized killings that are not allowed. I get into Belgian organ harvesting after euthansia, the growth of psychiatric euthanasia in the Netherlands, and suicide tourism in Switzerland–far too much to detail here. And I come to some conclusions. From, “Medicinal Murder:”

First, once assisted suicide or euthanasia is legalized, it will not long remain a limited enterprise. This is not a “slippery slope” alarmist projection but a conclusion abundantly demonstrated by facts on the ground in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland…

Second, legalizing euthanasia changes culture. Not only do the categories of people eligible for euthanasia expand, but the rest of society generally ceases to think that it matters. This desensitizing, in turn, affects how people perceive the moral value of the seriously ill, disabled, and elderly–and perhaps how they view themselves.

Third, euthanasia corrupts medical ethics by mutating the role of doctors into purveyors of death rather than consistent enablers of life…

Fourth, once a person is deemed the member of a killable caste, it becomes easier to reduce his worth to that of a mere natural resource that can be exploited for the benefit of society.

Finally, I think widespread popular acceptance of euthanasia in Europe… is a symptom of cultural nihilism….Clearly, more is going on than just a desire to eliminate suffering.

The stakes in the debate are very high:

We all age. We fall ill. We grow weak. We become disabled. Life can get very hard. Euthanasia raises the fundamental question of whether our culture will retain the moral capacity to sustain a culture of care for those who have entered life’s most difficult stages. On that question, it seems to me, hangs the moral future of Western civilization.

The collapse of morality in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland around issues of euthanasia and suicide–abundantly detailed in the article (subscription needed–is a clarion warning to other countries to turn away from the “death with dignity” agenda before it is too late. 

Remember when they said “only” excess embryos would be used in research? It was always bunk, and now an article in the New England Journal of Medicine has called for allowing embryos to be made to order and sold like a corn crop.

What would justify this form of nascent human trafficking? From, ”Made to Order Embryos for Sale–A Brave New World?”, by I. Glenn Cohen, J.D., and Eli Y. Adashi, M.D:

It is not clear how the sale of made-to-order embryos differs from the sale of oocytes for the manufacture of embryos by somatic-cell nuclear transfer for stem-cell derivation, as is presently sanctioned by New York State. Indeed, one might think that this practice–creating embryos for the purpose of destroying them to derive stem cells–is more ethically challenging than the notion of creating embryos for the purpose of alleviating infertility.

Well, for one thing, an embryo is an organism, a nascent human being. A gamete (sperm or egg) is just a cell.  

And note how the game is played: NY unethically permits egg buying for use in biotechnology–and that wrong then becomes the justification for the further objectification of human life and the manufacture and selling of embryos. Talk about rank bootstrapping! 

The proper answer is to repeal the NY law, not create an embryo commodities market. Such sophistry has always been the anything goes in biotech crowd’s primary tool. 

Here’s the the conclusion:

It is readily apparent why the prospect of made-to-order embryos for sale may give rise to apprehension. However, viewed through a legal and ethical lens, the concerns raised by this potentiality appear to be similar to those associated with widely accepted and more common reproductive technologies, such as the sale of gametes. What is new and unique here is the lack of clear legal guidance as to the parentage of the embryos in question. Joint efforts by state legislatures and professional organizations will be required to forge appropriate legislation if made-to-order embryos for sale are to become a practicable reality.

Make no mistake: This means human cloning is coming closer, as selling embryos for use in IVF is just the front for selling cloned embryos for use in research. I’ll be getting into a more detailed analysis of all this when time allows.

Oh brother. Nature has editorialized against exaggerating adult stem cell potentials for medical cures, which it claims occurred at a Vatican stem cell conference. From, “Smoke and Mirrors:”

Many scientists around the world were appalled by the events in Rome, and rightly so. It is wrong to exploit the desperation of the disabled and the terminally ill and to raise false hopes of quick fixes, as some at the Vatican meeting tried to do. It is also wrong to try to use such patients as experimental animals by bypassing regulatory agencies, as the Italian parliament seems to want to do.

What hypocrisy! During the Bush years, extravagant claims of pending CURES! CURES! CURES! that were (perpetually) just around the corner from embryonic stem cell research permeated the popular and scientific media. Surely you all remember the ceaseless and ever more extravagant claims. And yet, I didn’t see Nature archly editorializing against such politicized science and the flagrant abuse of the ill and their families for political gain. Indeed, it still happens, such as in an article published just last year in Fortune:

MDs and Ph.D.s are making the paralyzed walk and the impotent virile. A stem cell therapy for two types of macular degeneration recently restored the vision of two women. Once they were blind. Now they see! Some experts assert that AMD could be eradicated within a decade. Other scientists are heralding a drug-free fix for HIV/AIDS. Various forms of cancer, Parkinson’s, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and ALS have already been eradicated in mice. If such work translates to humans, it will represent the type of platform advancement that comes along in medicine only once in a lifetime or two.

But, Wesley, some will say, Fortune isn’t a scientific publication. Okay, how about this old bromide from the Alliance for Medical Research put out in a video in 2006, that pushed both ESCR and human cloning research:

Now with this revolutionary breakthrough of regenerative medicine doctors will actually be able to cure diseases, not just treat them with pills and shots. Insulin-producing cells will be injected into the diabetic child to cure diabetes. Retinal cells will be injected to make the blind see. Nerve cells will be used to make the quadriplegic walk again. Stem-cell research has the potential to cure over 130 million Americans plagued by chronic degenerative diseases and conditions. This is the potential that stem-cell research holds for us.

Recounting all the embryonic stem cell hype over the last decade could fill a very long book.

I agree these things should not be exaggerated, whether embryonic, adult, induced pluripotent stem cells, or any other emerging medical technology. But please. Nature’s righteous anger rings very selective.