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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...