Suicide hotlines are open 24 hours a day because we seek to prevent as many deaths as we can. We treat as heroes those who walk along bridges or climb tall buildings and try to talk people down.
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Weighing benefits and burdens is at the heart of the question of starting, continuing or stopping dialysis.
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The true measure of the greatness of a society will always be in terms of how it treats its weakest members, and the authenticity of our own love will be measured by our compassion and acceptance of the disabled and the powerless.
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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.
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When should we place a loved one on a ventilator? The answer depends on whether the use of a ventilator in a particular case can be considered ‘ordinary’ or ‘extraordinary.’
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By spiritually embracing in God that specific path to death, our freedom is elevated to new heights; indeed, we “achieve control” in the most important way possible, through willed surrender and radical gift in our innermost depths.
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…when we sort out the relevant details and seek to purify our own motives, and when we become willing to submit to the binding character of absolute moral prohibitions, the gray haze can dissipate, and we can see the real moral lines that were there all along.
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Critics of every persuasion quickly condemned the HHS mandate as a particularly egregious violation both of religious freedom and the rights of conscience.
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At times, then, our justifications for avoiding a pregnancy may merit further reflection and scrutiny on our part.
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A sexual ‘test drive’ mentality is essentially exploitative in nature, reducing a potential spouse to someone who is easily replaced by a ‘better’ model. When we take a car for a test drive, and don't like it, we can just return the keys and move on to the next model. But people are not cars that we can just exploit and cast aside.
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A husband and wife are called to give themselves to each other completely and unreservedly, and to accept each other unconditionally in the marital embrace. Every child of theirs, whether entering the world with a handicap or not, is an expression and fruit of themselves and their acceptance of each other.
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Because the recommendations of the committee relate to important aspects of human behavior and sexuality at formative ages for children and adolescents, parents need to look at the psychological and social messages they might be conveying by choosing to vaccinate their children against HPV.
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She wondered whether it would still be allowable for her to engage in marital relations with her husband after the vasectomy. When one spouse is involved in this so-called ‘abuse of matrimony,’ the other is placed in an awkward situation
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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.
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The physician's boldness and unflagging concern for his patient played an important role in bringing Christ into a situation where His healing graces were needed, where even the priest alone probably could not have succeeded.
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Even if we have genes that predispose us towards certain behaviors, we still have a space of freedom within ourselves, and do not have to engage in those behaviors. Our genes may impel us strongly in certain behavioral directions, but they can't compel us.
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The fact remains that the Catholic Church to date has expressed no official doubts about brain death, emphasizing instead that a health care worker can use neurological criteria as the basis for arriving at ‘moral certainty’ that death has occurred.
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In natural family planning, on the other hand, they are not directing any countermeasures towards the fertility of a specific conjugal act; the natural order and telos of the act is respected.
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Some helpful ‘principles of cooperation’ have been developed over the centuries in the Catholic moral tradition as a way of discerning how properly to avoid, limit, or distance ourselves from evil, especially intrinsically evil actions.
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The real costs of this kind of surgery remind us of the importance of making a right and ethical decision for our circumstances. Although there is a heightened probability of disease, there is never any guarantee that a particular woman with the BRCA mutation will develop cancer.
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