Bioethics

Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced he had produced the first gene-edited human babies nearly two years ago. The scientific world has reeled ever since, looking for ways to provide oversight for this controversial sector of science. Researchers have not perfected techniques to edit the... Read more

Once a society accepts the noxious notion that killing is an acceptable answer to human suffering, the definition of “suffering” never stops expanding. The history of euthanasia in the Netherlands proves that maxim. The Dutch have allowed doctors to kill sick patients since the ’70s,... Read more

On Monday, October, 13, Dutch Health Minister Hugo de Jonge announced that the Dutch government will amend its euthanasia law to permit child euthanasia — an announcement that came only three days after the news that the issue of child euthanasia had divided the Netherlands coalition... Read more

The Dutch government is preparing to legalize euthanasia for children between the ages of one and twelve.Last year, the Dutch Ministry of Health commissioned a report from the NVK (Dutch Society of Pediatrics), which recommended the government permit euthanasia for terminally ill children of... Read more

Thanks to a new technology in development called in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), in the near future any combination of donor parents—one woman, or two men, or three women and three men—may be able to have a child.  IVG would allow scientists to take the genetic matter of one or more... Read more

While the Australian state of Tasmania is debating a bill that would legalize assisted suicide, the state of Victoria reported more than ten times the anticipated number of deaths from assisted suicide and euthanasia in its first legal year. Victoria’s Voluntary Assisted Dying Review Board... Read more

The current president of the Association for the Right to Die with Dignity in Mexico, Amparo Espinosa Rugarcía, has recently made public her testimony in which she states that she has gone from being a defender of euthanasia to rejecting it and proposing palliative care as an alternative... Read more

A new federal ethics advisory board for fetal tissue research has convened to consider future federally-funded research proposals that involve tissue from aborted babies. The Human Fetal Tissue Research Ethics Advisory Board of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) met for the first... Read more

Good grief. We are told that euthanasia is “compassion.” But how compassionate is it when last year in Canada, hundreds of sick people were euthanized because of loneliness? The country’s 2019 MAID [medical assistance in dying] Annual Report found that 13.7 percent of the 5,631... Read more

I have written before about Marinou Arends, the Dutch doctor who euthanized a woman with dementia struggling to stay alive. Readers may recall the doctor first drugged her patient’s coffee and then, when the woman awakened and fought against being killed, had the family hold the patient down... Read more