What Does Autonomy Have to Do with It?
D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director
On the second day of May, 2022, a U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion in the Mississippi Dobbs case, regarding abortion, was leaked to the media. The resulting cultural distress frenzy has been somewhat akin to dropping meat into a pool of piranhas. Much energy is being spent in projecting what will happen if the final decision resembles the draft. A summer of rage is being threatened by some abortion supporters.
Where, O where, is reason in all of the verbiage? Interestingly and amazingly, a book of compassionate pro-life counters to abortion advocates was published by Moody ...read more
Life and Choice
Janet Liljestrand, M.D., M.A.
In 1862 Louis Pasteur performed the definitive experiment that proved even the smallest organisms, those only seen under the microscope, derived from other like organisms. (1) Life came from life. Fast forward to 1973, and Justice Blackmun, writing for the majority decision in Roe v. Wade stated “We need not resolve the difficult decision of when life begins”. (2) What was the Justice’s definition of life? The human zygote contains all it needs for cellular division–and thus growth–at the union of a living sperm and living egg. How then has its human life not begun? Yes, in ...read more
The Prescription for Flourishing Embodiment in Public Bioethics
A Book Review
C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D. Distinguished Fellow
American public bioethics does not have a sterling history because it misunderstands its most important subject, the human subject. This is the claim of a brilliant new book by O. Carter Snead, the Director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture and professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame.
In What it Means to be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard, 2020), Snead offers a genealogy of American public bioethics. Public bioethics, as contrasted with clinical bioethics, is the realm of human subjects research where, instead ...read more
The Problem of Ill-Gotten Gain in Health Care
C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D. Distinguished Fellow
The politicized debate about President Trump’s treatment for Covid-19 may have shrouded an important set of questions about the science of developing treatments, viz., the problem of ill-gotten gain.
Among other treatment protocols, the President received Regeneron’s REGN-COV2, a “cocktail” of two neutralizing antibodies that has shown promise in some animal studies (see here and here). The media jumped on an association between REGN-COV2 antibodies and fetal cells, some even claiming that the antibodies were developed from fetal cells.
Screenshot of NYT headline on Oct. 8, 2020
The fact of the matter is REGN-COV2 was tested for its virus-neutralizing ...read more
Focusing on “Culture”
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 moreLife Without Us?
By Jane Patton, Guest Columnist
It is not new that some people say that they do not want to bring children into the world. And, as far as the do’s and don’ts of being environmentally responsible, the carbon footprint of a single human being tops the list of avoidable behaviors. One presidential candidate even advocates abortion as a way to combat climate change. So, it may be okay to have one or two children. Any more than that and parents might be called selfish.
But, a growing movement is taking the idea of limiting births to the next level—preventing all births. Who ...read more
Shift and Puzzle: What do an ape and a donkey have to do with bioethics?
D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director
In C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle, Shift is a shrewd, crafty ape, and his neighbor, Puzzle, is a meek, somewhat simple donkey. It has been a long time since Aslan, the all-powerful lion, has been seen in Narnia. Therefore, when Shift spies an old lion skin, he decides to have Puzzle dress up in it and pretend to be Aslan. Shift constantly insists that Puzzle do all the heavy-lifting involved in any of their escapades, but in such a way that Puzzle thinks he is getting the ...read more
Bioethics “Reading List” — Summer 2016
D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director
History, U.S., recentLetter from Representative Marsha Blackburn, chair of the Committee of Energy and Commerce’s Select Investigative Panel investigating fetal tissue procurement in the United States, to New Mexico’s Attorney General, Hector H. Balderas, Jr., included the notebook of a laboratory technician, who recorded the following:
See pages 9-10/291 of the document, as well as “attachment 28.”
Instead of history, however, the request for “whole, fixed brains” (human, fetal) for summer campers to dissect should be classified under HORROR.
TechnologyA.I. (Artificial Intelligence) “Intelligent robot that ‘remembers and learns’ could be scrapped after escaping a lab for a second time,” ...read more
Why Did Gosnell Keep Severed Fetal Feet?
D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A.
Regrettably, in defending human dignity, we are often confronted with circumstances in which humanity is degraded. Warning: The following graphically details some of those circumstances brought to light.
The 2011 report of the Grand Jury investigating abortionist Kermit Gosnell included a number of strange details about his place of business, including, “The investigators found a row of jars containing just the severed feet of fetuses” (p. 21).
Image from LifeNews.com.
Why would anyone do this?
Fast forward to the summer of 2015 and the Center for Medical Progress, which released a series of ...read more
Tennessee Constitutional Amendment 1
D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A.
Update: Tennessee voters approved Amendment 1 on 4 November 2014.
From the outset, I need to remind the reader that I am not an attorney, and that our organization is an educational corporation. What follows is hopefully educational and helpful as you move through the next several weeks.
A Constitutional Amendment is a serious undertaking, as represented by the path necessary for an idea/concept to become an amendment in Tennessee. Amendment 1 is the first of several on our 4 November 2014 ballots. It is a long-term result of a State Supreme Court decision in the year 2000. That ...read more
