Bioethics

Unfinished business, or the Post-Dobbs Moment (III)

By any measure, the bygone days of the Biden administration were dark ones for the pro-life movement in America: no position seemed too radical, and no progressive agenda—from gender ideology to the criminalization of public, peaceful pro-life witness—was left behind. In a strange way, however, the very strides that this administration made towards the dystopian nightmare of left-wing ideology were what sealed [...]

2025-03-18T11:32:44-04:00March 18, 2025|Abortion, Bioethics, Politics|

Is humanity the sum of its information networks?

Sarah Stilton Review: Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari (Signal, $45, 492 pages) Yuval Noah Harari is something of a rock star public intellectual who burst onto the scene with his 2014 book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, originally published in Hebrew in 2011. Previously a military historian, the Oxford-trained [...]

2025-03-12T12:17:32-04:00March 12, 2025|Bioethics, Reviews, Society & Culture|

Musk predicts future of cashless society shared with humanoid robots

Paul Tuns: Presenting to the UAE World Governments Summit 2025 by video conference, the world’s richest man and President Donald Trump’s right-hand man Elon Musk envisioned a future in which humanoid robots directed by “deep intelligence” would produce a nearly infinite array of products and services that would render money meaningless. The answer came from a question at the United Arab Emirates [...]

2025-03-05T19:29:36-05:00March 5, 2025|Bioethics, Society & Culture|

An epistemological crisis

Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey I came across an Instagram reel of a massive centipede-like creature in the desert and the only reason I thought it was generated by artificial intelligence (AI) is because I have never—in my over 28 years on this planet—seen anything like it before, which made me wonder if, had I been younger, I would [...]

2025-02-27T12:51:12-05:00February 26, 2025|Abortion, Bioethics, Josie Luetke|

And then there was this, January 2025

By J.M. Glover: Billboards and the ‘culture of fear’ True North Centre reported that the mega-giant Pattison Outdoor billboard company has “cancelled a contract” with the Manitoba pro-life group, Life Culture, saying that the requested image “creates too much controversy” and that the company received “a lot of back-lash for similar designs in the past.” What is controversial about a picture of [...]

2025-02-06T10:15:13-05:00January 31, 2025|Abortion, Bioethics, Book Review|

Spain considers extending rights to apes

Mary Zwicker: The Spanish Ministry of Social Rights proposed a new law to extend human rights to apes (chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas) due to their “genetic closeness” to human beings. A European country has proposed to extend certain human rights to apes while the lives of unborn babies remain unprotected in their society. In Spain, where unborn children can be [...]

2024-11-13T11:00:15-05:00November 13, 2024|Bioethics|

The Occasional Human Sacrifice

The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No Carl Elliott (Norton, $39.99, 355 pages) Medical ethics professor Carl Elliott’s The Occasional Human Sacrifice is unlikely to engender greater trust in the medical profession as it explores six controversial cases in which medical researchers treated human beings as guinea pigs. Often the patients consented to the interventions, albeit without [...]

2024-10-31T11:39:28-04:00October 1, 2024|Bioethics, Reviews|

On Call Review

On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service Anthony Fauci, M.D. (Viking, $48, 464 pages) The autobiography of Anthony Fauci, the public face of both the Trump and Biden White House responses to COVID, provides plenty of fodder for both fans and critics of Fauci’s handling of the pandemic. The books’ errors of fact and evasion of controversies might be forgivable but [...]

2024-10-01T12:11:53-04:00October 1, 2024|Bioethics, Reviews|

Study finds ‘the quality of abortion science is weak’

Joanna Alphonso: Often claiming to be as essential as penicillin, the pro-abortion movement claims to be an evidence-based and medically necessary treatment. A US-based study published on June 30, 2024 in the Medical Research Archives by the European Society of Medicine revealed insufficient data in abortion-related studies, thereby calling into question the medical basis for pro-abortion policy. Researchers James Studnicki, ScD, and [...]

2024-09-30T11:56:24-04:00September 30, 2024|Abortion, Bioethics|

COVID jabs don’t deserve pro-life criticism

Rory Leishman: According to the latest, most reliable information on COVID 19 vaccines, are they ethical? Have they really been a safe and effective means of drastically reducing hospitalizations and deaths due to the COVID-19 virus? Consider, first, the ongoing controversy over the ethics of the Moderna and Pfizer-BionTech mRNA vaccines. Some well-meaning, but misguided, pro-lifers maintain that no one in good [...]

2024-09-30T11:21:32-04:00September 30, 2024|Abortion, Bioethics, Religion, Rory Leishman|

In vitro fumbled

Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey Houston, you have a problem. This past May, one of your own, “strongly pro-life” Texas senators Ted Cruz (R) co-sponsored a bill to protect access to IVF. Actually, Houston, we have a lot of problems, because Cruz is far from the only big “pro-life” name to come out in support of in [...]

2024-09-19T08:07:19-04:00September 19, 2024|Bioethics, Josie Luetke, Politics|

Montreal woman with spina bifida felt pushed toward euthanasia

Leire Douros: Tracy Polewczuk of Quebec was born with spina bifida, a birth defect that causes weak bones. Recently she told CTV that twice she was told of her eligibility to be euthanized despite not initiating the topic herself. Several years ago, Polewczuk suffered an accident which caused her leg to break. She hasn’t been able to heal properly which requires her [...]

2024-09-06T14:48:50-04:00September 6, 2024|Bioethics, Euthanasia|

And then there was this, July/August 2024

By J.M. Glover: Dermot Kearney: Pro-life hero Dr. Dermot Kearney, a British Catholic cardiologist who spoke at the National March for Life in May, has been honoured for his work on the medical abortion pill reversal (APR). (See The Interim, June 2024.) In April, he received the Anton Neuwirth Prize for the Protection of Life Award in Slovakia “for providing medical care [...]

2024-08-01T07:49:38-04:00July 31, 2024|Abortion, Bioethics, Demography, Euthanasia, Religion|

New video exposes creation of fetal cell lines used by medical industry

Paul Tuns: A short, animated video, “It’s OK,” created by Choice42 shows how preborn victims of abortion are used to create fetal cell lines used in the medical and cosmetics industries. The 4:39 video, which can be viewed for free at Choice42’s website or on YouTube, starts with doctors taking tissue from “Ellie” a baby killed through abortion more than 60 years [...]

2024-07-25T11:30:26-04:00July 25, 2024|Abortion, Bioethics|

Your cosmetics might be tainted by abortion

Joanna Alphonso: Treatments for anti-aging, psoriasis, and eczema may be tainted by the use of fetal tissue originating from aborted babies. Human Life International (HLI) produced Which Cosmetics Use Fetal Cells, a free e-book outlining the use of fetal cells in cosmetics. According to their United States-based research, they have not found any companies that use fetal cells in their products. They [...]

2024-07-25T11:29:48-04:00July 25, 2024|Abortion, Bioethics|
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