Trust

Blog, Other Voices, United States / /

   

Guest Column* by Janet Liljestrand, M.D., M.A.  

Trust, once lost, is difficult to regain.  In last month’s Tennessee CBC article Credibility and How to Lose it, Dr. D. Joy Riley questioned if the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) risks its credibility for recommending “gender affirming care” in the treatment of gender dysphoria.  Such treatment involves radically and unnaturally changing the body and is not based on scientific data.  The AAP is indeed an influential organization.  It makes recommendations, but pediatric practitioners and Children’s Hospitals put those recommendations into practice for minors.  Children’s Hospitals ...read more

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Medical Education and Complicity with Evil

Blog, Other Voices / /

By Dennis Sullivan, MD, MA (Ethics) Professor Emeritus of Pharmacy Practice Cedarville University Moral complicity, sometimes called “moral taint,” is the moral guilt attached to a person by their association with a moral wrong. Complicity requires that a person have some association with the act committed, even if they do not personally perform the deed.[1] However, complicity is complex. For many of us, the perception of cooperation with evil seems to diminish with the passage of time. For example, almost all physicians still recommend the vaccine against Rubella (“German measles”), even though tissue from aborted fetuses was used to develop the ...read more

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Rational Thinking Revisited: The Cass Review

Blog, Other Voices / /

      Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology Emerita Trinity International University     In April of this year, the National Health Service (NHS in the UK) released a long anticipated definitive report:  The Cass Review: Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people. Four years ago, seeking an evidence-informed way forward in the wake of rising controversy regarding the escalating prescription of puberty blockers, cross-sexualizing hormones and radical gender-altering surgeries for young children experiencing gender confusion, the NHS commissioned this comprehensive review headed by Hilary Cass. Dr. Cass is one of the most highly respected pediatric ...read more

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Bringing Light to a Culture of Death

Blog, End of Life, Medicine & Health, Other Voices / /

caption id=”attachment_1852″ align=”aligncenter” width=”300″] Stock image[/caption]   by Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology Emerita Trinity International University In contemporary western culture, autonomy (self will, personal choice) is the supreme value. This value is no better exemplified than in the promotion of self-controlled death through legalization of physician assisted suicide. Physician Assisted Suicide (PAS) means a physician provides a patient-requested lethal medication that their patient can then use to end his or her life. Most recently, we have witnessed the legalization of PAS, also termed Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD), to ever ballooning proportions in Canada and now in ...read more

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My Life, My Death, My Choice … or NOT

Blog, Other Voices / /

 

Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology Emerita Trinity International University

As we emerge from the shadow of a worldwide pandemic that forced society to seek safety in unprecedented government control, we are finding that governments are now unwilling to hand back the reins to the populace. New laws, hastily passed, are designed to limit individual freedoms and solidify the power of policy makers over our lives. Frequently, we are told that these laws are for own good and/or the good of our society. Those who disagree are often marginalized, cancelled, or even arrested, accused of obstructing needed liberal social change. Hard earned ...read more

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EctoLife: A Cautionary Tale

Blog, Emerging Technologies, Engineering Humans, Other Voices / /

 

Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology Emerita Trinity International University

In the December 2022 TN-CBC newsletter article entitled Déjà vu all over again, D. Joy Riley drew our attention to the parallels between the recently released YouTube video EctoLife: The world’s first artificial womb facility, and the fake publicity for the movie GATTACA 25 years ago. The new video, while actually conceptual, presents ectogenesis, the complete development of a baby in an artificial womb, as a current reality. Once again, a number of viewers were fooled. Unfortunately, it is perhaps more realistic than we dare to think. In a revealing interview by Beau Davidson with the Ectolife ...read more

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Informed Consent: A Hazy Concept

Blog, C. Ben Mitchell, End of Life, Other Voices / /

C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D. Distinguished Fellow The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture

We’re all too familiar with those awkward television commercials for drugs whose names cannot be pronounced because they have too many consonants. To be fair, drug manufacturers have run out of eloquent ways to combine the letters of the alphabet, so they just string them together as best they can. But beyond the alphabet soup, the television voice recites a sometimes-arresting list of possible complications of taking the drug: dizziness, insomnia, tiredness—or the even more arresting—intense sexual or gambling urges and explosive diarrhea, which hopefully do not occur simultaneously! The ...read more

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If Monkeys Could Talk

Blog, China, Engineering Humans, Other Voices, United States / /

Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology, Trinity International University Guest Column

Recent news announcements proclaimed, with both excitement and alarm, that Tan and colleagues, scientists from China and the US, had successfully produced human-monkey hybrid embryos. (1, 2) The hybrids (also termed chimeras) were made by injecting human pluripotent stem cells from an induced pluripotent stem cell line into 132 early- stage monkey embryos. Human pluripotent stem cells have the capacity to develop into a range of tissues and cell types which ultimately form all the structures of the human body including the brain and reproductive cells (sperm and egg). (3) In ...read more

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Is It Science or Scientism?

Blog, COVID-19, Other Voices / /

Joyce Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology, Trinity International University Guest Column

In the climate of fear, uncertainty and urgency engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is often difficult to know what to do or whom to trust. Public policy makers are daily making decisions and enacting rules that affect our lives and dictate our actions in the name of protection. They lend authority and justification to their decisions by claiming that they are following the science, implying that this appeal to a trusted, rational voice should be enough to calm our concerns and guarantee our compliance. But the elevation of science to the ...read more

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Focusing on “Culture”

Blog, Other Voices / /

D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director

The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture exists to promote human dignity in the face of 21st Century bioethics challenges. Our theme for 2020 is Human Flourishing. Living in the surreal time of a pandemic with all the increased complexity of our lives, flourishing can almost seem too high an ideal. Artist Carol Harkness penned the following essay (lightly edited) about the important building blocks of culture—integrally related to flourishing—and that not only for our day.

We are still busy with bioethics as well. Here are a few recent articles you may want to check out:

“Dying ...read more

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