The Humanitas Forum

When we think of selling some things, we think of a shady character on a street corner hustling counterfeit or ill-gotten merchandise.  For most of us, the possibility of selling made-to-order human embryos on the open market would fit …

Having a handicap can get you killed!  This is a message we hear from the folks in the disability rights movement.  They know that adequate medical care may not be forthcoming if you suffer from a severe, untreatable, …

It’s a temptation—a big temptation!  Success in growing and transplanting lab-grown organs is so revolutionary that it’s tempting to look at the immediate results without asking any of the larger questions. 

As we saw in the previous …

“If a salamander can grow a new arm, why can’t a person?”  This is one of the questions asked, some twenty-five years ago, by Anthony Atala and his colleagues who now work at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative …

Over the past half-century, American doctors have begun to use the tools of medicine not merely to make sick people better but to make well people better than well. Bioethicists call these tools “enhancement technologies,” and usually characterize them as …

Designer babies! As the name implies, these babies are made to a certain specification—to have certain traits, but not others.

Some of these babies are produced for parents in search of a healthy baby—a baby without a genetic disease.…

On the theology, the technology, and the ethics of today’s reproductive technologies, few books can compare with Oliver O’Donovan’s Begotten or Made?  Even in 1984 he anticipated the current situation in parts of the assisted reproduction arena, where there …

The new reproductive technologies produce a host of profound moral questions, as illustrated in the posts from the two previous days.  For a thorough survey of assisted reproduction from an evangelical Christian perspective, see Outside the Womb: The Ethics of Reproductive …

In a cartoon, a kindly woman and a young child are standing in front of six people.  The woman is telling the child, “This is your intended mother, this is your intended father, this is your egg donor, this …

Money is obviously the common denominator in the surrogacy industry.  And it is an industry, a global industry that connects the wealthy who have money with the poor who are willing to rent their wombs as a source of …