Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 041: Making Truthful Choices of Conscience

Accepting or rejecting a temptation to serious wrongdoing like abortion involves our hearts in a far deeper way than many of the lesser decisions we have to make each day, so that in the end, it is our moral choices that define who we are and what we become.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationNovember 30, 2008Natural Law, Abortion, Conscience

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 040: Are Science and Religion Really Enemies?

Science and religion need each other and must work together... Yet many scientists seem to balk at the claim that scientific knowledge must be joined to a truthful conscience, or that the pursuit of science needs to attenuated through the filter of ethics.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationOctober 30, 2008Science and Religion

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 039: Voting to Make a Difference

One might prefer to refrain from voting altogether in these circumstances, considering that both candidates are supporting intrinsic evils in their platforms. We must exercise caution, however: abstaining from the voting booth can unintentionally lead to support for the more evil platform.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationSeptember 30, 2008Law and Ethics, Voting and Ethics

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 038: Sex and Little Pills: Viagra and Birth Control

Viagra and birth control serve two very different purposes, and each one has its own unique ethical considerations. Viagra, at a minimum, treats an actual dysfunction, while birth control does not. In fact, one might say that Viagra fixes a broken system, while birth control breaks a perfectly working system.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 037: "Safe Injection Sites" and Tackling IV Drug Abuse

...it would be false to conclude that an addict can't make choices. The only reason there is any hope left for an addict is because he still has a small space of freedom that he can act on, allowing him to decide whether or not to begin a new journey. He can choose to take the first step along the road leading away from addiction towards rehabilitation.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 036: Half Human, Half Animal?

…only the most cursory ethical reflection is needed to grasp the moral problem with creating human offspring in laboratories, using an admixture of cow components, in order to scientifically cannibalize them.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 035: Fire in the Clinic!

…embryos are unfamiliar to us, so that we may react differently to them than we would to a fully formed baby. But it should also serve to remind us how embryos are not supposed to be familiar to us, and are not supposed to be in freezers in the first place, but only within the safe harbor of their mother’s womb.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 034: Plastic Perfection? The Ethics of Breast Implants

The temptation to reduce feminine beauty to a kind of plastic and exterior measure is surely a failure to realize how a woman's physical beauty is meant to be but a gentle hint, a pointer towards an abiding beauty within.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 033: Do Embryos Have Souls?

…the precise timing of ensoulment/personhood of the human embryo is irrelevant to the question of whether we may ever destroy such embryos for research or other purposes.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationMarch 30, 2008Embryos, Ensoulment

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 032: When Ideology Corrupts Science and Medicine

Codes of medical ethics like the Hippocratic Oath, the Nuremberg Code, and the Declaration of Helsinki came into existence after various misguided ideologies gained a foothold, or after the medical establishment suffered a core meltdown, allowing doctors and researchers to participate in crimes against humanity.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 031: Feeding Our Loved Ones: The Modern Anathema of Living With Brain Damage

Our duty is to provide loving care and strong support to those whose “quality of life” may be less than perfect, including those who are sick or those who may be disabled like Terri Schiavo, rather than targeting them for an early demise through the withholding of food and water.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 030: The Holy Grail of Reprogramming: A New Era for Stem Cells?

Reprogramming provides patient-specific stem cells… but without using women’s eggs, without killing embryos, and without crossing moral lines.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationDecember 30, 2007Stem Cell Research, Embryos

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 029: Getting It Right “The Morning After”

When a woman arrives to an emergency room following a sexual assault, a simple urine test for leutinizing hormone (LH) can be used to gain information about whether she is ovulating.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationNovember 30, 2007Sexual Assault, Abortion

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 028: Soulless Clones and Spineless Men

Human cloning, in the final analysis, is ... a technique for making an identical twin of someone. While all of us have met various sets of identical twins over the years, none of us has ever met a pair where one of the twins lacked a soul. By similar reasoning, it is clear that the idea of a ‘soulless clone’ is little more than an urban legend.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationOctober 30, 2007Cloning

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 027: True Compassion in the Midst of Tragedy

The truly compassionate doctor will humbly recognize that even his most powerful tools and treatments will not be able to stave off death in every case. At certain times, he will have to step aside as the shadow of death draws near and the mortal existence of the person he has been caring for comes to its natural close.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 026: Ethical Blind Spots, Complacency & Nazism

There is a certain banality about evil. It doesn't necessarily present itself in a monstrous or dramatic way. It can take the shape of simple conformity to what everyone else is doing, to what the leadership says is right, to what the neighbors are doing...

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 025: Contraceptive Contradictions

... marital sexuality is all about loving someone totally and unreservedly, giving and receiving totally, and not holding back who we are for ourselves. It involves a unique language of total self-giving.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 024: Debating the Embryo’s Fate

As I watched him, the rhetorical thought flashed through my mind, patterned on the language of embryonic stem cell advocates: ‘…he’s so small, so insignificant: what if a cure for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes could be developed to benefit all of suffering mankind, by promoting scientific research that depended on killing just a single little boy like him.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 023: Acorns and Embryos

The key flaw in Dr. Sandel’s argument is the claim that acorns are potential oaks, when in fact, they are not potential oaks, but actual oaks (at an early stage).

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationMay 30, 2007Embryos

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 022: Recapturing the Soul of Bioethics

…women (and men) should never be paid for their eggs (or sperm), as we insist they not be paid for organ donations. This is done to prevent the human body from becoming “commodified” by powerful economic and market forces, and to stave off the prospect of trafficking in human parts.

“Making Sense of Bioethics” CMS