Category: Making Sense of Bioethics

On
Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D.

She sent a hundred love letters

In a recent essay in the Wall Street Journal, Kimberly Cutter chronicled the death of her father by suicide. As he struggled with rapidly progressing prostate cancer, he lost more than 30 pounds, becoming gaunt and emaciated. Back pain and nausea forced him to spend much of his time in bed.

A few days before Christmas, he shared with Kimberly that he was thinking about shooting himself. Kimberly argued with him, stressing that she and her sisters couldn’t accept a violent ending: “If he shot himself, my father would die alone. Someone in our family would have to find him,” she wrote.

Looking into options

His daughters convinced him to look into other options. When he started investigating lethal drugs, he ran into questions of reliability. He encountered horror stories about “wrong dosages and unreliable contents, painful, drawn-out demises.”

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On
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk

Christian girls and abortion

When Mother Teresa visited New Bedford, Mass., in June 1995, she told those of us gathered at St. Lawrence Martyr Church: “Abortion is the greatest evil of today.”

Never one to mince words, Mother Teresa’s courage, truthfulness, and charity were palpable. Parents today need similar fortitude, honesty, and love to be able to discuss the hard topic of unplanned pregnancies and abortion with their children.

Parents exercise influence

Parental input and advice are critical when these situations arise. Even as children profess independence, parents exercise influence over them, whether for good or for ill.

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On
Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D.

Contradictory suicide messaging

In July 2014, police found the body of 18-year-old Conrad Roy inside his truck in Fairhaven, Mass. He had died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

As the case unfolded, it became apparent that a friend of his, 17-year-old Michelle Carter, had encouraged him toward suicide. In a series of texts, she repeatedly pressured him to go through with it by sending messages like, “You keep pushing it off and say you’ll do it but u never do. It’s always gonna be that way if u don’t take action.”

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On
Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D.

Concerns about harvesting body parts

Most people recognize the importance of obtaining consent before retrieving organs from the bodies of deceased persons. They also understand the necessity of showing respect for those bodily remains following death.

Selling body parts

Recent news stories have chronicled the troubling story of a funeral home in Colorado clandestinely taking body parts out of corpses and selling them to medical supply companies.

One family was horrified to learn that their mother’s head, arms, pelvis, and parts of her legs had been harvested without their knowledge or consent. They and others are now suing the company.

The funeral home had been selling body parts to places as far away as Saudi Arabia, and returning containers of ashes to the families that did not contain any actual trace of their loved ones.

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On
Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D.

Gene-edited babies and the runaway train of in vitro fertilization

In November 2018, a Chinese scientist named He Jankui (known to his associates as “JK”) claimed that he had successfully produced the world’s first gene-edited human babies using “gene surgery.”

The twin girls, he said, were born somewhere in China with a modified gene that makes them immune to infection from HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. A special DNA splicing technique called CRISPR/Cas 9 was used when they were embryos to make the edits. In a series of short videos posted on YouTube, JK offers an explanation of, and justification for, what he did.

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