What a mess. What a God-awful mess the new reproductive technologies in general—and commercial surrogacy, in particular—are making of family life. What a legal, emotional, and moral mess. Case in point: A commercial surrogacy contract was litigated in Tennessee all the way to the state’s Supreme Court—which was forced to sort out the chaos that […]
Human cloning is here. After years of effort, scientists manufactured human life using the same process that created Dolly the sheep. There is no way around it: The age of human cloning is here—unless we act now to prevent it. Why outlaw human cloning? As the United Nations General Assembly decided in a nearly 3-1 […]
My taskmasters at the CBC never allow me to rest on my laurels. Fresh off several years of stellar prognosticating, I am now forced to answer the question: “But what have you predicted, lately?” Okay, let’s take a look. Oh! Oh my. Please remember, the following predictions are what I see happening. They do not […]
Can you believe a year has come and gone since I last told you what would happen, before it happened, in bioethics? Maybe it’s my increasing age, but time is passing too fast! So, how did I do? Not as well as in years past, but still an A-. Let’s take a look: The Affordable […]
If you want to see what happens when a society enthusiastically swallows the euthanasia poison, look at Belgium. Perhaps influenced by its neighbor the Netherlands — which pioneered euthanasia permissiveness — Belgium legalized euthanasia in 2002. The country has since leaped head-first off a vertical moral cliff. As usual, when the law was being debated, […]
The UK rubber stamp Embryo Authority has approved the manufacture of three-parent human embryos. The process is done by removing the nucleus from the egg of one woman, putting it into the enucleated egg of another, and then fertilizing with sperm. Voila, three biological parents. The approach is supposed to enable women with mitochondrial disease—who […]
Good science fiction tells a morality tale about the dangerous directions in which contemporary society is heading. For example, Brave New World—perhaps the most prescient novel ever written—warned against the dystopian impact that using biotechnology to perfect the human race would have on society. Similarly, the Dune novels—which feature a breeding device known as an […]
