Every first-year law student learns the adage that "hard cases make bad law." Occasionally, state judges and legislatures manage to do likewise. That is certainly the result of a recent Superior Court ruling in New Jersey that vastly expands the precedent of the already highly-misguided Baby M decision of 1988,...

At the opening of America's iconic (albeit controversial) romance epic, Gone With the Wind, 16-year-old Scarlett O'Hara fends off flirtatious propositions from the 19-year-old Tarleton twins -- a moment rendered indelible in the subsequent film by the gifted actors Fred Crane and George Reeves. I suspect few of the countless...

Ever since 1884, when Professor William Pencoast of Philadelphia's Jefferson Medical College requested a semen sample of his "best looking" medical student in order to impregnate the child-seeking wife of a sterile Quaker merchant, sperm donation has held out the promise of parenting to infertile spouses, choice mothers and lesbian...

The United States Constitution and the laws of most states permit the President and governors to issue pardons and commutations, a prerogative frequently exercised during the winter holiday season. Unfortunately, with a few laudable exceptions, our chief executives have displayed considerable stinginess--and even outright political cowardice--in exercising this remarkable power....

This week's New York Times Magazine draws attention to an article in The British Journal of Psychiatry that has been the talk of bioethical circles since May, when researchers at Japan's Oita University reported that communities with increased levels of lithium in their drinking water suffered a significantly lower incidence...

Stephanie Gray, a Canadian anti-abortion activist, has been touring American and Canadian college campuses with a rather chilling message: Legalized abortion isn't merely a grievous wrong, but a calculated genocide morally indistinguishable from the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust. During a sparsely-attended lecture delivered at Columbia University on November 16, and entitled, "Echoes...

Opponents of the right to die appeared to savor a public relations victory with the reported "rebirth" of car-crash victim Rom Houben, a forty-six year old Belgian man who is said to have spent twenty-three years trapped immobile in his own body. Dr. Steven Laureys, a leading neurologist and well-respected...

One of the most unsettling rites of passage of being a medical student or junior physician is one's first encounter with a patient who has no prognosis for recovery. A paradigmatic case has recently drawn media headlines in Great Britain: the tragedy of Baby RB, who survived thirteen months with...

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 Afghanistan to the waterboarding of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Ironically, as progress is finally being made...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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"...

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...