Jacob M. Appel is a bioethcist and medical historian. He has taught most recently at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was honored with the Undergraduate Council of Students Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2003, and at New York University. His essays on matters at the nexus of law, medicine and philosophy have appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Providence Journal, The Tuscon Citizen, and many regional newspapers. He also contributes to the Journal of Medical Ethics, the Journal of Clinical Ethics, the Hastings Center Report, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and numerous other academic publications. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a member of the bar in New York State and Rhode Island.

Blog Entries by Jacob M. Appel

Beyond Guantanamo: Torture Thrives in Connecticut

Posted November 16, 2009 | 10:48 PM (EST)


Opponents of torture have spent the past seven years advocating for a halt to the brutal excesses of the "War on Terror" from the Bush Administration's rejection of the Geneva Conventions for detainees in Afghanastan to the waterboarding of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Ironically, as progress is finally being made...

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Health "Insurance": A Criminal Enterprise

51 Comments | Posted November 1, 2009 | 12:06 PM (EST)


Federal lawmakers have squandered much of the autumn debating how best to provide private health insurance to approximately fifty million uninsured Americans. Guaranteeing healthcare for these individuals is certainly a moral imperative. However, relying on private insurers to serve these individuals is about as prudent as hiring a band of...

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Abortion: A Healthy Choice

136 Comments | Posted October 11, 2009 | 03:33 PM (EST)


Some opponents of reproductive choice, unable to deter women from electing to terminate unwanted pregnancies through moral suasion, have increasingly attempted to scare women away from abortion with specious claims that the procedure is unsafe. In Texas, the Orwellian-named "Woman's Right to Know Act" requires abortion providers to give patients...

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Hate the Husband? Sue the Mistress!

49 Comments | Posted October 6, 2009 | 03:30 PM (EST)


Earlier this summer, after news broke of former Mississippi Congressman Chip Pickering's alleged affair with college sweetheart Elizabeth Creekmore Byrd, Pickering's wife transformed a personal tragedy into a public farce by suing her husband's purported lover under Mississippi's antiquated "alienation of affection" law.

Now North Carolina has proven that...

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Dr. Coburn's Peculiar Privilege

34 Comments | Posted October 2, 2009 | 03:07 PM (EST)


I will be the first to confess that medical ethics is not the world's raciest profession. However, now that Senator John Ensign's extramarital love life and his efforts to cover up his affair with staffer Cynthia Hampton have once again become front page news, any future investigation into this romantic...

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Alabama's Bad Vibrations

20 Comments | Posted September 25, 2009 | 05:51 PM (EST)


Alabama's ban on sex toys is no laughing matter.

Ever since that state approved the Anti-Obscenity Enforcement Act in 1998, which prohibited the sale of "any device designed or marketed as useful for the stimulation of human genital organs," humorists have mocked the statute while many Alabamans with common sense...

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"Mercy Killing": When Love & Law Conflict

6 Comments | Posted September 25, 2009 | 09:58 AM (EST)


I'd sooner be dead than live in a nursing home.

I've chosen to emphasize that point now, when I am relatively young and in good health, to show solidarity with two brave men who have recently found themselves at the center of the public debate over assisted suicide. One is...

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When Infanticide Isn't Murder

15 Comments | Posted September 8, 2009 | 03:30 PM (EST)


Jessica Farrar may be the bravest politician in America.

In the wake of a series of highly-publicized killings of young children by Texas mothers suffering from post-partum mental disorders--most notably Andrea Yates, Dena Schlosser and Otty Sanchez--Farrar, a state representative from Houston, has introduced long overdue legislation that...

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Big Sky Dilemma: Must Doctors Help Their Patients Die?

6 Comments | Posted September 2, 2009 | 10:24 AM (EST)


Both supporters and opponents of physician-assisted dying anticipated that Judge Dorothy McCarter's ground-breaking ruling that the Montana constitution guaranteed terminally-ill, mentally-competent adults the right to end their own lives would be appealed to the that state's highest court. In her ruling, handed down on December 5, 2008, McCarter wrote...

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Anticipating the Incapacitated Justice

6 Comments | Posted August 22, 2009 | 05:36 PM (EST)


President Obama's recent announcement that he and the First Lady have living wills was hailed by professional bioethicists, myself included, as welcome publicity in the ongoing campaign to educate the public about advance directives. At the same time, by recording his personal wishes regarding end-of-life care, the President has helped...

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The Ultimate Prescription: Make Us Decide How We Want To Die

3 Comments | Posted July 30, 2009 | 10:48 AM (EST)


At a recent AARP tele-town hall on healthcare, President Obama fielded a provocative question from a North Carolinian caller named Mary. Mary asked the President whether proposed reform legislation would include a requirement that every person of Medicare age "be visited and told to decide how they wish to die"...

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A Culture of Liberty

Posted July 21, 2009 | 07:15 PM (EST)


The Catholic Church and American religious conservatives have advanced a so-called "culture of life" ever since Pope John Paul II coined the term on his 1993 visit to Denver. The Church's 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, defined this ideology quite precisely, condemning condoms and capital punishment as well as abortion and...

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Next: Assisted Suicide for Healthy People

42 Comments | Posted July 16, 2009 | 06:21 PM (EST)


Advocates for physician-assisted suicide have in recent years focused upon the rights of the terminally ill and severely disabled to control their own destinies. Oregon's Death With Dignity Act of 1994 and Washington's Initiative 1000 of 2008 both limit medical providers to prescribing life-ending drugs to situations in which patients...

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Motherhood: Is It Ever Too Late?

26 Comments | Posted July 15, 2009 | 03:26 PM (EST)


The recent death of Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara, the world's oldest confirmed mother, is likely to generate debate surrounding the ethics of offering in vitro fertilization to women in their sixties and seventies. The retired Spanish department-store employee gained international attention in 2006, when, at the age of...

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A "Supreme Court" for Bioethics?

11 Comments | Posted July 9, 2009 | 04:32 PM (EST)


The recent decision by President Obama to disband his predecessor's Council on Bioethics raises important questions regarding the role of professional bioethicists in contemporary society. We live, after all, in an age of moral and medical transformation. Advances in technology are occurring at such a rapid clip that scientific...

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The Case for an Anti-Abortion Violence Registry

6 Comments | Posted June 29, 2009 | 04:15 PM (EST)


Over the past fifteen years, federal legislation has required state governments to track convicted sex offenders and -- for better or for worse -- many states have followed up with restrictions on the places where these offenders may live and work. In light of the epidemic of anti-abortion violence that...

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The Coming Ethical Crisis: Oxygen Rationing

7 Comments | Posted June 27, 2009 | 01:36 PM (EST)


The ongoing H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic has proven rather mild. However, the rapid rate at which an estimated one million Americans have already contracted this illness should have our political and medical leaders urgently examining how they will eventually handle a more severe form of the influenza virus. One of...

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Should We Really Fear Reproductive Human Cloning?

Posted April 5, 2009 | 05:10 PM (EST)


In his remarks lifting the ban on the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research last month, President Obama took pains to distinguish research cloning from reproductive cloning. According to the President, "the use of cloning for human reproduction" is "dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our...

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Do We Need A Pro-Choice Litmus Test for Obstetricians?

Posted March 24, 2009 | 10:29 AM (EST)


Defenders of abortion rights in the United States have faced a demographic paradox over the past decade: although a majority of Americans continue to favor a woman's right to choose, and strong support for this right among young people suggest that public attitudes toward abortion will continue to liberalize,...

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Are We Ready for a Market in Fetal Organs?

Posted March 17, 2009 | 03:15 PM (EST)


Professor Richard Gardner of Oxford University, a renowned expert on human reproduction and an advisor to Britain's Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, recently raised the prospect of using organs from aborted fetuses for transplantation into adults. This possibility offers the potential to save or improve the lives of the hundreds...

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