Tag Archives: ethics

In Defense of Million Dollar Baby

11 Replies

[I haven't seen Million Dollar Baby. The venom it generated from Christian critics has thus far been enough to keep me from forking over $8. A good friend of mine and occasional guest blogger, Jerry Nora, recently saw it and came away with a much different impression than the vast majority of those critics it seems. Jerry is a faithful, orthodox, and well-read Catholic. He's also a MD/PhD student who has a knack for bioethics. I don't take his opinions on such matters lightly. I give you his defense of Million Dollar Baby for your consideration. When preparing to comment, bear in mind that he gave up reading blogs for Lent and won't be able to respond in a timely fashion. If you'd like to respond directly to him, email him. – Funky]

Millon Dollar Baby did a solid job of sweeping up the Oscars last night, including Best Picture and Director, and all over the objections of many within pro-life life and conservative Christian circles for evidently being in favor of euthanasia or assisted suicide. Those objections nearly made me avoid the film, but I saw it last week, and was glad I made that decision. My conscience is clear because while suicide is in the movie, the movie does not glorify or abet suicide. The film is a modern-day tragedy, and it does not offer an easy out or proverbial "Hollywood Ending", which is why I think so many people misinterpreted it. Here is my brief take on the film.

Continue reading →

Womanhood in Europe

3 Replies

I’m so glad Europe is so much more enlightened than the U.S. *rolls eyes*

‘If you don’t take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits’

“Under Germany’s welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job — including in the sex industry — or lose her unemployment benefit.”

The welfare system in this country may be screwed up, but it’s not that bad.

Frankenstein’s Intellectual Progeny

3 Replies

A Consumer's Guide to A Brave New World

A CONSUMER’S GUIDE TO A BRAVE NEW WORLD
By Wesley J. Smith

"Will the cost of biotechnology’s alleviation of human suffering be our acceptance of a ‘Brave New World,’ where scientists wield godlike power to refashion our biological nature’ If so, we will not get there in one giant leap. Rather, we will descend into the darkness in small steps, all but unaware that the shadows are lengthening."

Welcome to Our Brave New World: An Interview with Wesley J. Smith
By John Zmirak

"Wesley Smith has exposed corporate corruption with Ralph Nader, and warned against the eugenic implications of the ‘right to die’ movement. In his new book, ‘A Consumer’s Guide to a Brave New World,’ he tells how the Biotech industry’s push for stem cell research and human cloning threatens the rights of the poor, the sick, and the unborn."

Seeing Red

4 Replies

Hundreds of thousands of people are dead or dying in the wake of the recent tsunamis.
Why then is the richest and most powerful nation in the world spending
$40 million to celebrate Bush’s second inauguration and buzzing
Iranian airspace? Our resources are already spread too thinly. Should we really
be partying or contemplating another costly war?

New Embryonic Stem Cell Sources

Leave a reply

The Washington Post reports that there are two new ways to isolate embryonic stem cells. The first involves recovering useable cells from hopelessly damaged embryos that were frozen in IVF clinics. The researchers at Columbia compare this to taking organs from brain-dead patients. Of course, if one considers IVF inherently wrong, this still doesn’t get you off the hook.

The second type is trickier: there is a method of cloning called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), where the nucleus of a non-genital region of one’s body (usually a gut cell, but it can be anything other than an ovum or sperm cell) is transferred to an egg cell whose own nucleus was destroyed. The trick to getting stem cells in the second method is to somehow interfere with this procedure so that the new hybrid cell does not become an embryo, but can in fact still produce some totipotent embryonic stem cells.

I am skeptical of the second method. One, somatic cell transfer has a lot of problems. It took 227 tries to clone a sheep before Dolly was born, and she became a medical mess afterwards. Now we are supposed to take SCNT, interfere with it somehow so it doesn’t make an embryo, and think that maybe this’ll create something that we can cure things with? Secondly, the scientists claim that no embryo is made, but scientists and physicians have been retroactively redefining human life for about 30 years now in order to make abortion and destructive human research convenient. E.g., they invented the term "preembryo" so that they could make embryonic stem cell research legit because they weren’t really killing a true human being. I have yet to track down the literature on this second method, so I am still unsure of whether a complete organism (embryonic or otherwise) is in fact never created and killed by this method. Stay tuned.