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When Catholic couples experience trouble getting pregnant, they often seek medical help and begin to research what options are available to them.
A number of moral considerations and questions generally emerge during this process: Why are techniques like in vitro fertilization (IVF) considered immoral? What approaches will the Church allow us to try? What does our infertility mean, spiritually and personally, in the face of our fervent but frustrated desire for a baby?
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Addiction can be extremely harmful, and in some cases, fatal for those individuals ensnared by it. It can be seriously disruptive and damaging to those around them.
Who is to blame when it comes to addiction? Family and friends may think to themselves, “Why can’t Jane just stop drinking?” Or, “Doesn’t Joe understand that his gambling addiction is bankrupting the family?” Or, “Can’t Bob see how his pornography habit is destroying his marriage and his relationships?”
For those facing addiction, it seems they ought to be able to recognize their behavior as harmful and turn away from it by a resolute decision. Family and friends, however, can face years of frustration when they see their loved ones fall into a slow motion “crash and burn,” spiraling downwards as they remain unwilling or unable to step away from their addiction.
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A number of serious diseases are known to occur because of defects or mutations in our DNA.
Curing such diseases could in principle be carried out by rewriting the DNA to fix the mutated base pairs. Yet until recently, scientists have remained largely stymied in their attempts to directly modify genes in a living animal.
Findings described in the March 30, 2014, issue of Nature Biotechnology, however, reveal that a novel gene-editing technique, known as CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), can be used successfully in mice to reverse disease symptoms for a liver defect known as type I tyrosinemia. In humans, this potentially fatal ailment affects about one in 100,000 people.
*Caution to parents: the following article uses frank and honest language to discuss the serious and complicated subject of human sexuality. Care should be used when determining if your children are old enough to read and discuss the contents of this article.*
Discrimination is often understood as acting out of prejudice against persons who differ from us and do not share our views, traits, values, or lifestyles.
The word “discrimination,” however, has an older meaning as well, namely, to draw a clear distinction between proper and improper, good and evil, to differentiate and recognize as different.
CNN recently profiled the case of a woman named Marlise Munoz, who was both pregnant and brain dead.
Its report noted that Mrs. Munoz was “33 years old and 14 weeks pregnant with the couple’s second child when her husband found her unconscious on their kitchen floor November 26. Though doctors had pronounced her brain dead and her family had said she did not want to have machines keep her body alive, officials at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, argued state law required them to maintain life-sustaining treatment for a pregnant patient.”
Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, in his December 13, 2012 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, argues that the cost of birth control could be reduced by eliminating the required doctor’s visit to get a prescription — making contraception available “over the counter.”
If it were made available this way, it would no longer be reimbursable by health insurance, and people could simply purchase it on their own.
Jindal posits that this approach would result in “the end of birth control politics.” He relies on several simplistic assumptions and inadequate moral judgments, however, as he tries to advance this argument.
In her still-widely-read 1971 article, “A Defense of Abortion,” Judith Jarvis Thomson sets up a thought experiment known as “The Famous Violinist Problem” to argue that abortion ought to be morally justified when a pregnancy arises out of sexual assault:
“You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with a . . . famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help.
“They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own . . . To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.”
At the beginning of December, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a sweeping federal lawsuit against the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops over its Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic hospitals, alleging that the directives, with their prohibition against direct abortion, resulted in negligent care of a pregnant woman named Tamesha Means.
Ms. Means’ water broke at 18 weeks, leading to infection of the amniotic membranes, followed by spontaneous labor and delivery of her child. The child lived only a few hours.
Guilt has gotten a lot of bad press recently. We live in an age where guilt is practically always something bad, something to get past with the help of a shrink.
Particularly when discussing sex, people will declare that religion and morality do nothing more than make people feel guilty.
Andrew Aaron, a sex and marriage therapist in New Bedford, Mass., seems to subscribe to this view: “Through centuries,” he writes, “religious education has associated sex with what is wrong and sinful rather than what is sacred. Instead of an expression of the divine, sex is suspiciously regarded as weakness of the flesh. The result of this influence is that sexuality, a natural part of being human, is tainted with shame, guilt, and ambivalence.”
Private foundations and non-profit groups are frequently involved in advocating for particular causes, ranging from cancer research to protecting the environment. Some of these foundations rely almost exclusively on charitable donations to carry out their promotional work.
Potential donors seeking to support these causes face the challenge of exercising “due diligence,” so that their funds are properly utilized and not misdirected or otherwise targeted by the organization to support immoral projects.
