Bioethics

Perinatal palliative care providers in Canada

Home Hospice Association prenatal and perinatal hospice with services available in cities including Cambridge, Guelph, Hamilton-Halton, Kitchener, Niagara, Ottawa, Toronto. Alberta Calgary: Alberta Children's Hospital Children’s Hospice and Palliative Care Service, also accepting referrals for perinatal hospice. Contact: Clinical nurse specialist Kathryn da Silva, (403) 955-5460. Calgary Family Physician Navigator program, accepting referrals (from physicians or self-referrals) for family physician support to [...]

admin2024-07-22T10:57:04-04:00July 19, 2024|Bioethics|

Perinatal palliative care for newborns

Joanna Alphonso: If choosing death for one’s child is health care, choosing life for that same child must also be health care. But how accessible is the health care choice for life for women when facing a prenatal diagnosis of severe illness and likely death shortly after birth? Palliative care, according to SickKids Hospital in Toronto, expands beyond end-of-life care, as many [...]

admin2024-07-19T11:28:40-04:00July 19, 2024|Bioethics|

And then there was this, June 2024

By J.M. Glover: Brain Death: a moral dilemma The National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC) located near Philadelphia, is warning about changing the concept of brain death. In 2023, it raised the alarm that a redefinition of brain death could allow for the death of a person still partially alive: “a whole brain death standard has appeared to be compatible with Catholic teaching.” [...]

admin2024-07-13T11:10:28-04:00June 30, 2024|Bioethics|

Nova Scotia bill to educate people on Down syndrome

Paul Tuns: Liberal MLA Keith Irving (Kings South) introduced Bill 440, which, if passed, would provide evidence-based data about Down syndrome to parents informed of a prenatal diagnosis of the chromosomal anomaly. A law respecting Down syndrome, or so-called Harvey’s Law, would require medical staff to provide up-to-date and evidence-based information on Down Syndrome, including data about life expectancy, education and psychosocial [...]

admin2024-07-13T11:05:40-04:00June 30, 2024|Bioethics, Politics, Society & Culture|

Federal pharmacare plan to cost taxpayers $2 billion over five years

Paul Tuns: According to an analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO), the federal pharmacare plan that will cover diabetes care and contraception is estimated to cost $5.7 billion while recouping $3.8 billion from public and private drug plans, for a total cost to taxpayers of $1.9 billion over the next half-decade. Health Minister Mark Holland tabled legislation delivering the first phase [...]

admin2024-06-17T08:57:33-04:00June 17, 2024|Bioethics, Politics|

Contracepting the future

Some rhythms and patterns are so regular that their interruption is all but almost impossible to imagine—the sun rises in the east, the seasons change, and life unfolds against a settled horizon of expectations. Indeed, the deep grooves of these established pattens are the very contours that constitute “normal life,” and their cessation has the character of a cataclysm. When sudden emergencies—like [...]

admin2024-06-14T06:59:19-04:00June 14, 2024|Abortion, Bioethics, Marriage and Family, Society & Culture|

Quebec man gets healthy finger amputated

Paul Tuns: A 20-year-old Quebec man was reported to have two fingers on his left hand amputated to deal with his “body integrity dysphoria” (BID). The National Post reported April 5 on the highly unusual circumstance of BID, which sometimes goes by the clinical assessment Body Image Identity Disorder, for a man who had “incessant” and unwanted thoughts since he was a [...]

admin2024-05-15T08:39:49-04:00May 15, 2024|Bioethics|

Motherhood in the age of abortion & IVF

Mother’s Day should be an occasion for the celebration of our mothers, a day to venerate the office of motherhood with all the tenderness and reverence that this high calling inspires. But in 2024, this annual feast now raises an inevitable question: what is a mother? Such a question, of course, only imposes itself because of the depravity of our age. When [...]

admin2024-05-13T13:05:48-04:00May 13, 2024|Abortion, Bioethics, Marriage and Family|

Global surrogacy debate continues in Rome

Joanna Alphonso: Experts from around the world gathered in Rome’s LUMSA University (Libera Universita Maria SS. Assunta—a private Catholic university) April 5-6, 2024, to discuss the issues surrounding surrogacy. This major discussion started on March 3, 2023 with the Casablanca Declaration. More than 100 experts gathered from 75 countries in Casablanca, Morocco, to form a document calling for a global abolishment of [...]

admin2024-05-03T10:36:55-04:00May 3, 2024|Bioethics, Marriage and Family, Religion|

Courts rule what a child is

Rory Leishman: On Feb. 16, the Supreme Court of Alabama touched off an international uproar, by holding that the state’s 1872 Wrongful Death of a Minor Act applies no less to frozen embryos than to all other children. Abortion zealots were outraged: They contended that a frozen embryo is not a child and has no right to life. This dispute came before [...]

admin2024-04-29T11:37:41-04:00April 29, 2024|Abortion, Bioethics, Rory Leishman|

Transgender medicine exposed a medical malpractice

Paul Tuns: Leaked files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) show that medical professionals routinely practice medical malpractice in providing sex-trait modification procedures such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex-reassignment surgery. WPATH is treated by many journalists and politicians as disinterested experts in so-called gender medicine. Investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger was provided with the internal text messages from [...]

admin2024-04-22T11:21:18-04:00April 22, 2024|Bioethics, Society & Culture|

Contraception is priority for national pharmacare program

Paul Tuns: On Feb. 29, federal Health Minister Mark Holland introduced Bill C-64, “An Act respecting pharmacare,” fulfilling the 2022 promise from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in exchange for the NDP’s support propping up the Liberal minority government. The deadline for delivering the policy was March 2025. Holland revealed that far from a comprehensive pharmacare program, Bill C-64 would only establish Ottawa [...]

admin2024-04-10T11:35:21-04:00April 10, 2024|Abortion, Bioethics, Politics|

Alabama court rules frozen embryos qualify as ‘children’ under law

Oswald Clark: On Feb. 17, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, embryonic human beings frozen as part of the process of in vitro fertilization are legally “children” deserving of protection. Two “wrongful death” lawsuits were launched by three IVF patients against the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Mobile Infirmary Medical Center fertility clinics in [...]

admin2024-03-04T09:55:27-05:00March 4, 2024|Bioethics|

State-sanctioned sterility

As many provinces celebrate Family Day, there is a movement afoot, in both Ontario and Manitoba, to follow the example of British Columbia in providing universal coverage for contraception; in that fact, of course, there is no little irony. Just as the holiday points to the indisputable facts of the family—and every citizen’s origin therein—there is a push for the pharmaceutical suppression [...]

admin2024-02-16T12:32:40-05:00February 16, 2024|Bioethics, Marriage and Family, Politics, Society & Culture|

Pope Francis calls for ban on surrogacy

Paul Tuns: During his annual address to diplomats in January, Pope Francis called surrogacy “a grave violation of the dignity of the women and the child” as he called for global ban on the practice of surrogacy. Pope Francis said a child’s life should not be “suppressed or turned into an object of trafficking" and called on the global community “to prohibit [...]

admin2024-02-05T13:20:55-05:00February 5, 2024|Bioethics, Marriage and Family, Religion|

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