Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 118: Pondering the Implications of 3 Parent Embryos

It should be obvious how any approach that weakens or casts into question the integral connection between parents and their offspring will raise grave ethical concerns.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 117: Undoing a Chemical Abortion

… women were able to carry their pregnancies to term after receiving an intramuscular injection of progesterone. Since 2012, dozens of other women have successfully reversed their chemical abortions.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationMarch 30, 2015RU-486, Abortion

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 116: Medical Assistance with the Battle of the Bulge

Some patients may have tried diligently for years to lose weight, while others may have made only cursory, poorly-supported efforts. The need for support is also likely to continue following bariatric surgery or after the implantation of a stomach pacemaker.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 115: Esteeming Our Elders

Compassionately attending to the needs of the elderly draws generations together and builds solidarity.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 114: Are Womb Transplants Immoral?

…the specific circumstances of both the donor and recipient are crucial in discerning the ethical appropriate-ness of this unusual procedure.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 113: Physician-Assisted Suicide and Confronting Our Fears

Yet in the face of a terminal medical diagnosis, it is not reasonable to let our fears dictate our choices; instead it behooves us to confront and resolve those fears without yielding to panic and without allowing unpleasant future scenarios to loom large in our imagination.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 112: "Redefining" Marriage

Marriage, in fact, is the “primordial first institution,” flowing out of the intimate and creative union of male and female. It… is essentially ordered towards creating and caring for the future in the form of the next generation.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 111: Of Proxies and POLSTs: The Good and the Bad in End of Life Planning

As a set of standing medical orders, the POLST approach is inflexible. Straightforwardly following orders created outside of a particular situation may be ill-advised, improper and even harmful to the patient.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 110: Is Artificial Insemination Wrong Even Among Married Couples?

The pregnancy itself would be brought about by a new and different set of causes, whereby the mechanical actions of a technician would substitute for, and thus violate, the intimate and exclusive bond of the marital act.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 109: Renegade Researchers and the Future of Biomedical Research

Respect for our own progeny, then, will have the obvious consequence that human embryos should not be generated in the laboratory for premeditated destruction, nor for cellular cannibalization by scientists.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 108: Clearing the Air Around Marijuana Use

Part of the unethical character of drug abuse flows from the fact that we are treating something good, namely our personal, conscious experience as if it were an evil to be avoided.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 107: Editing Our Own Genes?

The remarkable tools becoming available not only for genetic therapies but also for human enhancement projects and embryonic manipulation raise daunting ethical concerns about the subjugation of man to his own technology....

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 106: A Path of Renewal for the Catholic Sterilized Couple

Even though a reversal may not be feasible or obligatory, the repentant couple may nonetheless become aware of the need to order their sexual activity and appetites in the face of their original sterilization decision and its extended consequences.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 105: Discrimination and Human Genital Sexuality

It remains the better part of wisdom to discriminate, in the moral sense of the term, between disordered uses of human sexuality and the ordered engagement of human sexuality within marriage.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 104: Difficult Moral Decisions in Brain Death and Pregnancy

Wouldn’t a mother, carrying a child in her womb, and having expended so much effort to foster that new life, naturally want to offer her child this opportunity to live, even after her own death?

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 103: Violinist Violence

In reflecting on the specifics..we begin to appreciate the importance of never subjecting an innocent third party, whether a musician or an in utero child, to direct lethal harm simply because they find themselves in a state of radical dependence upon another human being.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationJanuary 30, 2014Abortion, Sexual Assault

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 102: Ethical Directives and the Care of Pregnant Women in Catholic Hospitals

The application of Catholic moral teaching to this issue is therefore directed toward two important and specific ends: first, the complete avoidance of directly killing the child, and, second, the preservation of the lives of both mother and child to the extent possible under the circumstances.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 101: Sex, Truth and the Illumination of Our Guilt

…no matter what our level of sophistication may be, we have all received the gift of conscience, and the gift of “good guilt” that is ordered to helping us confront ourselves and turn away from wrongdoing.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 100: The Ethics of Donating Money to Charitable Foundations

When foundations have a generally sound list of activities, but promote an intrinsically immoral activity as well (e.g. abortion, human embryonic stem cell research, contracep-tion, etc.), one must consider the serious matter of the fungibil-ity of donated funds.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 099: The Darkened Eye of Pornography

It warps and distorts the beautiful gift of human sexuality, so it no longer serves as an interpersonal force for bonding and building families, but instead devolves into an exploitative and isolating force in the lives of those who fall prey to it.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationSeptember 30, 2013Pornography, Human Sexuality

“Making Sense of Bioethics” CMS