Abortion rights and health care are rarely far from the headlines, but they are especially hot topics given the furor over the decision — later rescinded — by the Susan G. Komen foundation to end most of its grants to Planned Parenthood.
The death of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a former pathologist who helped dozens of terminally ill people die with a suicide machine, has renewed a national debate on end-of-life issues that never went away completely, even after Kevorkian was sentenced to prison in 1999.
News that U.S. troops have killed Osama bin Laden, leader of Al Qaeda and mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, is a stunning development that is bound to spark a range of reactions — jubilation for many, anger for others, and for some believers, a debate over whether this was the moral and ethical course of action.
Americans are confronting challenges in bioethics every day and in every venue, from hospital rooms and research labs to Congress and the Supreme Court. Developments in genetics, debates over the beginning of life and the fate of embryos, and technologies that extend and even create life are raising complex questions in medical decisions and treatment.
Every year on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day raises awareness about the global spread of HIV infection and AIDS, with statesmen, celebrities and religious leaders announcing new initiatives and releasing statements of support for AIDS patients, doctors and researchers.
The popularity of in-vitro fertilization and other procedures that require the creation of multiple embryos has resulted in an excess of frozen embryos, as many as 500,000. What to do with them, and whether couples can “adopt” them to gestate them to birth, is an ethical conundrum and a matter of intense debate.
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is shaping up as an environmental and social disaster of epic proportions — and one that is also prompting a great deal of national soul-searching. Ethical, moral and religious aspects of the catastrophe are playing a critical role in the debate.
The ethics of fertility treatments are struggling to keep up with rapid-fire advances in biotechnology. The case of Nadya Suleman, the “Octomom” who gave birth to octuplets in January 2009 through reproductive technology, is just an extreme example of the ethical dilemmas that parents, medical professionals and religious leaders are facing.
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