NCBC Bioethics Challenge

The National Catholic Bioethics Center, which is notable for its training programs in healthcare ethics and its fine quarterly publication, has an anonymous donor who has issued a matching grant (the 2007 Challenge Fund) as the Center works to pay off the mortgage on its new office in Philadelphia. Your donations count double if you mark off the box that says it’s for the challenge fund on the donation form.

I’ve been a member for two years, and they’ve impressed me as technically proficient thinkers who are rigorous with the science, philosophy and theological problems underlying bioethics. If you, like my wife or myself, watched House, MD and were angered by how he handled that pregnant rape victim, give your upset a productive vent by making a donation in House’s name to the NCBC. 🙂

6 thoughts on “NCBC Bioethics Challenge

  1. Andrea

    I actually wasn’t bothered that House himself said what he said… what irritated me was that when the woman “got better” the first thing she did was abort the baby, as if the writers wanted to imply that only a disturbed person would want to keep a rape baby and that House’s riddiculous claim that a woman in her late 20’s would be “throwing her life away” by having a baby had some validity.

    Funny that this episode aired on the same day my coworker came in to work to show off her new baby girl.

  2. Funky Dung

    I actually wasn’t bothered that House himself said what he said… what irritated me was that when the woman “got better” the first thing she did was abort the baby

    My sentiments exactly. House’s words and deeds were in keeping with his misanthropic and cynical atheist character. What the writers chose for the raped woman on the other hand…

  3. Jerry

    True. My gripe is ultimately with the writers, not House, but this is the case for any fictional character. I was hoping that my metaphysical conceit would be understood as such.

    Quibbles aside, I wanted to commend a good antidote to the tripe I had pushed on me last night.

  4. Emily

    I, too, was disappointed by the writers’ handling of the issue — the whole episode made it seem like only a crazy person would choose to keep a baby under such circumstances.

    I thought it was odd that House’s line was something like “We say we’ve made her better, but maybe all we’ve really done is make a girl cry” before he stormed out of the room.

    I wish that the writers had shown some more moral considerations throughout the show, rather than that final line. The episode could have been a fine examination of the moral consequences of certain actions. Instead, the writers threw in that one line at the end, as if 2 seconds of waffling redeems an entire storyline filled with death.

  5. Funky Dung

    Interesting. I didn’t interpretu that line to really be about the girl at all. It seems to me that House was using her as a proxy for his own emotions (re: how his father treated him as a child).

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *