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Posts Tagged ‘ethics’

Maryland Bishops’ Statement on Religious Freedom

November 23rd, 2011 Comments off

The Catholic Bishops of Maryland have issued a statement, “The Most Sacred of All Property:  Religious Freedom and the People of Maryland.”

Despite its title, the principles it lays out and the examples it uses are applicable to the entire United States.  People of all faiths, not just Catholics, will find it a helpful defense when faced with marriage and family issues.

Read it here.

College Girls Looking for “Sugar Daddies” Abound

November 17th, 2011 Comments off

This used to be called prostitution–now it’s just debt reduction:

…There is a plethora of on-line dating sites, calling themselves arrangement sites, where young women looking to pay down college debt are matched to older, wealthy donors. What is not advertised, but is clearly understood by reading young women’s confessionals in a recent Huffington Post piece about “sugar daddies” and the financially beleaguered “sugar baby” girls, is that these arrangements are for paid sex, and the industry is booming. Read more…

Pepsi shareholders demand company stop using aborted fetal cell lines in flavor research

October 26th, 2011 Comments off

SO GROSS! A little cannibalism, anyone?

by John-Henry Westen

LARGO, FL, October 25, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The pro-life organization Children of God for Life announced today the filing of a shareholder resolution with the Securities and Exchange Commission and PepsiCo, protesting the use of aborted a fetal cell line for the research and development of flavor enhancers for their beverages. Read more…

Categories: Abortion, ethics Tags: ,

Traditional Family Values

October 18th, 2011 Comments off

Editor’s Note: Last week my daughter, Moriah Mosher, who is 18 years old, traveled to Rhodes, Greece, where she addressed the Rhodes Youth Forum on the subject of “Traditional Family Values.” The Forum is an annual meeting of young people from all over the world who are devoted to the search for the common good. My daughter told the group that the common good is to be found not in the discovery of new principles for living, but in the rediscovery of God-given truths about the importance of faith, life and family. She is right, of course.

Steven W. Mosher Read more…

Categories: ethics, family, Religion Tags: , , ,

Black Market Babies and the Church

September 26th, 2011 1 comment

by Mary Jo Anderson

The current battles over the fate of thousands of babies conceived via in vitro fertilization would confound even King Solomon.

Sensational news reports surrounding the $180,000 price tag for Ukrainian black-market babies shocked the determinedly secular segments of society, and few remain unmoved by the story of the FBI’s round-up of “baby-brokers.” Beyond the initial horror of children clinically conceived and sold as a commodity, investigators discovered that these babies have dozens of full and half siblings that were sold elsewhere. This opens the possibility that, in 25 years, a young man might unknowingly marry his sister. Read more…

Too much information?

August 23rd, 2011 Comments off

by Margaret Somerville

The PR department of a hospital thought so, but patients are entitled to consider all sides of an issue such as euthanasia.

The ethics of communication – whether over-communication or under-communication – have been in the news over the last few months. WikiLeaks , the Murdoch press affair in Britain, and in Canada the public’s right to be informed of the details of the health status of the leader of the federal opposition, Jack Layton, have all made headlines. A recent incident caused me to look at the ethics that should govern communications in a very everyday context, that of hospital patients’ committees communications to patients. Here’s the story. Read more…

Study: Men who buy sex commit more crimes

July 26th, 2011 4 comments

This doesn’t surprise me:

BOSTON (Reuters) – Men who pay for sex are more likely than men who do not pay for sex to commit a variety of offenses including violent crimes against women, according to research conducted in the Boston area. Read more…

Could Prenatal DNA Testing Open Pandora’s Box?

June 12th, 2011 Comments off

A follow-up to Betsy’s post on pre-natal DNA testing:

That knowledge has a flip side. “How much responsibility are we expecting people to take for the genetic makeup of any child they might have?” asks Josephine Johnston, a research scholar at the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank near New York City.

If a child is born with a condition that could have been detected, the presence of the test changes that outcome “from something that happened to you, to something that you participated in,” she says. Read more…

The congressman, the bishop and moral economics

June 6th, 2011 1 comment

by Sheila Liaugminas

I forget who said ‘not everything is political’, but it must have been a while ago because it seems now, everything is. But certainly, every issue is a moral issue, and somebody’s morals are going to prevail. When it comes to making law and setting social policy, it’s good to hear top political and religious leaders talking about what makes a just and virtuous society. Read more…

Categories: ethics, morality Tags: ,

Gallup poll: young Americans left behind on family values

June 6th, 2011 8 comments

by Carolyn Moynihan

A new Gallup poll about moral issues in the US shows that Americans are most in agreement about marital infidelity and polygamy, with 91 per cent of people polled considering an extra-marital affair morally wrong and 86 per cent saying polygamy is immoral. Only two other issues come near a national consensus — 84 per cent condemning the cloning of humans and 80 per cent suicide.

The agreement about suicide seems strange in view of the result that shows people are almost evenly divided on the issue of doctor-assisted suicide — 48 per cent think it’s wrong and 45 per cent that it is morally acceptable. Read more…

Categories: Abortion, ethics, Euthanasia Tags: ,

Deny conscience and redefine ethics

May 23rd, 2011 Comments off

by Sheila Liaugminas

And still call it health care?

Yes, in many places. Start with Sweden.

The Swedish parliament has overwhelmingly passed an order instructing Swedish politicians at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) to fight against the rights of doctors to refuse to participate in abortions. Read more…

Arizona Bans ‘Telemed’ Abortions

April 1st, 2011 Comments off

from LifeNews.com:
HB 2416 bans the practice of abortion via webcam, also known as telemedicine. Considering the well-documented dangers of abortion pills, women should be able to meet in person with a doctor before ingesting a dangerous chemical… Abortion-via-webcam is just another example of how Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry are concerned with their bottom line instead of women’s health & safety.

Keep reading

One More Reason To Be Wary Of ART

March 31st, 2011 Comments off

Yesterday there was a segment on NPR titled Taming The Twin Trend From Fertility Treatments. They talked about how various forms of ART have caused an increase in the incidence of twin pregnancies:

Twins, once a rarity to marvel over, are now a common part of American culture, thanks in large part to increased use of reproductive technology. Twins are conceived naturally just 2 percent of the time; for those who get pregnant with fertility treatments the rate is more than 40 percent.

They also discussed some of the health risks associated with twins: Read more…

Company Uses Cells From Abortions to Test Artificial Flavors

March 31st, 2011 Comments off

A pro-life group that monitors the use of cells from babies victimized by abortions is today highlighting a biotech company, Senomyx, which it says produces artificial flavor enhancers using aborted fetal cell lines to test their products.

How could this possibly be happening?!!!

I don’t even know what to say…

After Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ the Sky’s the Limit

March 31st, 2011 5 comments

LGBTweekly.com:
The Irish edition of tabloid news magazine The Sun recently covered the story of Penny Lawrence, a 28-year-old woman suffering from Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA) who is now pregnant with her father’s child.

If you seriously don’t think there are folks waiting in the wings for same-sex ‘marriage’ to set the legal precedent they need to make what is described above legal – along with absolutely anything else you could imagine – then check out a website called Full Marriage Equality. (They refer to this father and daughter’s relationship as “consanguinarmory”.)

Baby Joseph comes home

March 30th, 2011 1 comment

by Mariette Ulrich

Update on ‘Baby Joseph’

Joseph Maraachli, dubbed “Baby Joseph” by the media, is making a good recovery after receiving a tracheotomy at SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. (from eCanadaNow) Read more…

Don’t kill. And don’t make me help you die.

March 25th, 2011 Comments off

by Sheila Liaugminas

And don’t make me lie about knowing you’re killing yourself, either.

Since euthanasia laws are in place in some of our states now, and that movement is spreading like a cancer, some basic reminders are in order. Like the ones in this column. Read more…

“30 dead embryos are the price paid for one healthy child”

March 25th, 2011 Comments off

by Paul Miller

The German parliament is debating a ban on whether to legalise screening embryos for unwanted genetic traits.

Not every innovation is beneficial. The 1997 film Gattaca is a dark tale of what can happen when a society genetically engineers its offspring. The story is told through the eyes of a human who was conceived the natural way – without having been screened for genetic defects – and thus illegally. Read more…

Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics and… Planned ‘Parenthood’

March 10th, 2011 3 comments

JillStanek.com:
Julie Rovner, NPR health policy correspondent: Well, the conflict is really that PP keeps its statistics according to the percent of those services that are provided, not according to how many people get what… Sarah Stoesz from PP kind of misspoke when she said it was 3% of patients who come in get abortions.

It is actually a little bit closer to the 10% that [Susan B. Anthony List President] Marjorie Dannenfesler suggested, because there are about 3 million patients who come in. There are about 300,000 abortions provided…

Neal Conan, host: And the difference might be that the same woman who later received an abortion also got a pregnancy test and counseling and some other services.

Rovner: Absolutely. So many of those patients are getting more than one service and who – many of the patients who get an abortion are probably getting other services as well.

“A little bit closer”? 3 million divided by 300,000 is actually 10%. Furthermore, and the bigger point, as LiveAction.org pointed out, over 35% of PP’s income comes from abortion. NPR would be fair and balanced to report that statistic as well.

Actually, almost 37% of their health center income is from abortions, in fact… Read more…

Baby Joseph battles

March 5th, 2011 21 comments

Some further info on this situation. The baby is aptly named since St. Joseph is the patron saint of the dying. He’ll be in good hands when the time comes. With the help of our prayers, too, of course.

by Sheila Liaugminas

The hospital involved in this sad story is representing itself as allowing the family’s wishes to take their child home to die there instead of in the stark atmosphere of the medical facility. And some news stories have reported that the parents are getting their wish, after all. Not exactly true… Read more…