Archive

Archive for the ‘ethics’ Category

Why conservatives must embrace “Children’s Equality”

December 18th, 2014 Comments off
The new inequality: childrens' needs vs. adults' desires

The new inequality: childrens’ needs vs. adults’ desires

I was talking to Dr. Morse yesterday, and asked her to think back to when she was a young girl in school. “How many kids were from divorced families?” I asked her. She said she could think of one. The rest lived with their married biological parents. Before the Sexual Revolution, there used to be an important and unrecognized equality among children: nearly every child lived with his/her married parents.

Let’s think for a moment about what the Sexual Revolution has done to equality from the child’s point of view. In the name of adult sexual liberation, we now have a tremendous amount of family/structural inequality among children. Some kids live with their married parents, and many do not:

  • Nearly 40% of births are out of wedlock
  • A majority of teens don’t live in intact families
  • One in three children live in single parent homes

Read more…

I had Masha Gessen’s dream of five parents… and it sucked

June 25th, 2014 Comments off
Around March of 2013 I came across the words of a prominent LGBT activist named Masha Gessen:
I have three kids who have five parents, more or less, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t have five parents legally… I would like to live in a legal system that is capable of reflecting that reality, and I don’t think that’s compatible with the institution of marriage.

 

Imagine having five parents! Here’s what it means: it means going back and forth between all those households on a regular basis, never having a single place to call home during your most tender and vulnerable years. It means having divided Christmases, other holidays, and birthdays–you spend one with one parent, and another with the other parent, never spending a single holiday or birthday with both parents. Imagine having each of your parents completely ignore the other half of you, the other half of your family, as if it did not even exist. Meanwhile, imagine each parent pouring their energy into their new families and creating a unified home for their new children. These experiences give you the definite impression of being something leftover, something not quite part of them. You live like that on a daily basis for 18+ years.

Does this look like a fun way to spend your childhood?

As a child, would you choose a family structure advocated by Masha Gessen? Does this look fun?

 

I don’t have to imagine, because I had five parents. I had five parents because my mom and dad divorced when I was about three; my mom remarried once and my dad remarried twice. So I had a mom and two step-moms, and a dad and one step-dad. In this day and age children can already have five parents. That’s how badly marriage has deteriorated already. The main difference between what Gessen advocates and my experience is that my step parents were not legal parents; she advocates for all of the adults in her situation to be legal parents.

Read more…

If We Do Nothing, They Will Clone

May 19th, 2014 Comments off

by Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC

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 vote in 2005, each country in the world should “prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life.” Read more…

Categories: ethics Tags:

Losing our virtue

April 17th, 2014 Comments off
Sex is supposedly too trivial to require virtue, yet so significant that restraint is an affront. It can’t be both.

A sentinel watches upon the battlements. The air is raw and cold, and it seems to have penetrated to his knees and ankles and the shoulder upon which he rests his rifle. But he paces his rounds, hour after long hour. He peers into the little glooming light showing in the east. He turns again and faces the west, where the clouds are just beginning to reflect the slightest tinge of purple. Read more…

Stunning discovery creates ethical stem cells

January 31st, 2014 Comments off
Immersing cells in acid creates pluripotent stem cells? Who could believe that? But it could be the future.

Michael Cook

It’s the ultimate confirmation of the notion that stress is good for you. A team of researchers from Japan and Boston have discovered that subjecting ordinary cells to stress will make them revert to a state in which they can make any cell in the body. It is an astonishingly simple door to the promise of personalised medicine which has obsessed scientists for the last 15 years. Read more…

Belgium’s Culture of Death

November 20th, 2013 Comments off

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC

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. Read more…

Euthanizing the Unhappy: The Urgent Need for Love

November 9th, 2013 Comments off

by Jennifer Roback Morse

November 7th, 2013 http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/11/11113/

The case of a Belgian woman who committed physician-assisted suicide after a sex-change operation reveals that we must not only look more closely at the causes of gender dysphoria, we must also offer all people the love that they so deeply need. Read more…

Should ER Docs Not Save All Suicide Patients?

November 7th, 2013 Comments off

by Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC

This is what we are becoming. Five years ago in the UK, Kerry Wooltorton swallowed anti-freeze, called an ambulance, and then pinned a note to her shirt saying not to save her life. Accordingly, doctors let her die slowly over 24 hours — a decision later validated by the coroner’s inquest. Read more…

Putting a price on human organs

November 1st, 2013 Comments off
Is paying kidney donors consistent with human dignity?

Canadian broadcasting reports that University of Calgary researchers suggest paying kidney donors could be “less costly, more effective” and payments could boost donations. Is this a good idea and if not, why? Read more…

Categories: ethics Tags:

The dubious ethics of creating children with three genetic parents

July 25th, 2013 Comments off

by Margaret Somerville

Violating an international consensus, the British government has authorized scientists to tinker with the human genome.

The United Kingdom Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has been in the news for giving the go-ahead to creating three-genetic-parent human embryos. Read more…

Categories: Babies, ethics Tags: ,