Making Sense of Bioethics: Column #217 : Poking the Hornet’s Nest of IVF

IVF involves at least two major moral problems —the ‘collateral damage problem’ and the ‘intrinsic problem.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 212: What About Synthetic Embryos?

A great deal is at stake in these kinds of synthetic embryo experiments that threaten to manipulate and destroy human life.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 196 : New Cures from Embryonic Stem Cells?

Receiving a diabetes treatment produced with embryonic stem cells signals a willingness on our part to tolerate the killing of younger human beings in order to benefit others who are older.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 165: It’s Not Just About the Frozen Embryos

Through IVF, husband and wife use their own (or even another person’s) sex cells to become “donors”, while constructing their own offspring through a kind of programmed project, with the marital act no longer an essential part of the equation.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 154: Cowboys, Infertility and Deeper Moral Questions

…we realize how the procreation of our own children is meant to involve a strict exclusivity between husband and wife.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 146: The Expendable Children

This attitude of seeing our offspring as expendable is becoming more widely accepted not only among IVF customers, but also among biomedical researchers…

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 140: How Does the Catholic Church Resolve New Bioethical Questions?

Many people appreciate that the Catholic Church holds firm and well-defined positions on moral questions, even if they may remain unsure about how or why the Church actually arrives at those positions, especially when it comes to unpacking new scientific developments like embryonic stem cell research.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 137: Orphans in Liquid Nitrogen

Some humanitarian tragedies occur quietly and “in the background,” only gradually coming to light years or decades after serious harm has already occurred...

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationNovember 30, 2016Embryos, Frozen Embryos

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 131: Embryos & the 14-Day Rule

That every one of us was once an embryo remains an indisputable scientific dogma, causing a "fingernails on the chalkboard" phenomenon for researchers every time they choose to experiment on embryos...

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationMay 30, 2016Embryos, Research

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 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 89: Thinking Clearly About Consciousness and Abortion

Regardless of whether we might or might not be able to manifest consciousness at a particular moment (as when we are asleep, under anesthesia, in a coma, or growing at early timepoints in utero), our humanity is still present and deserving of unconditional respect.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationNovember 30, 2012Embryos, Abortion

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 085: The Embryo That Grew Up

Upon fusion with a sperm, however, the egg qua egg no longer exists, and an embryo, a human being at the earliest stage of his or her existence… will be simultaneously engendered and launched onto the trajectory of ‘growing up,’ representing a new entity that can live for more than a hundred years.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationJuly 30, 2012Embryos

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 075: Human Stockpiling

Not much reflection is needed to realize the serious injustice involved in forcefully ‘crystallizing’ another human being. The freezing and thawing process itself subjects embryonic humans to significant risk, and up to fifty percent of embryos do not survive the process.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationSeptember 30, 2011Embryos, Frozen Embryos

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 066: Humans in "Frozen Orphanages"

…either one discards the embryos or one destroys them in the laboratory to obtain miraculous cures for diseases. An important third option is often not even mentioned: namely, that we continue to store the embryos in their current, frozen state as part of our moral duty to care for our own offspring.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationDecember 30, 2010Embryos, Frozen Embryos

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 054: Stem Cell Ethics and the Things We Refuse to Do…

We cannot choose evil that good might come, nor can we ever afford to sell our souls by ignoring the sacrosanct humanity of the embryo, that tiny creature that each of us once was ourselves.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 048: What Should We Do with the Frozen Embryos?

In fact, however, the decision to continue cryopreserving an embryo in liquid nitrogen is not likely an instance of using extraordinary means, since the burden and costs associated with taking care of embryonic children in this way are actually minimal.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 042: Germany and Italy Have Done It — Shouldn’t We?

In the United States today, we urgently need Embryo Protection Laws.

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” CMS