stem cell – Madison Catholic Herald

Producing human embryos in the laboratory for research purposes makes most people uneasy.

Even those who tolerate the creation of embryos in test tubes so that infertile couples might have children will often have reservations about the creation of embryos to serve as experimental research material or to destroy them for their cellular parts.

Creation of embryos for research

Twenty years ago, when a deeply divided government panel recommended allowing such research experiments on human embryos for the first time, even Bill Clinton summarily rejected the idea.

Two years later, Representative Nancy Pelosi concurred in the Congressional Record: “We should not be involved in the creation of embryos for research. I completely agree with my colleagues on that score.”

The proposal to engender human embryos by cloning has similarly drawn strong opposition from Americans for many years.

On January 27, 2011May 20, 2021

Fr. Tad Pacholczyk

Clear ethical thinking and the tyranny of relativism

I once asked a young physician whether he had received any training in medical ethics during medical school. I wondered whether he had been taught how to handle some of the complex moral questions that can arise when practicing medicine.

It turned out that he had taken only one ethics class during his four years of medical school, and it was a rather loose-knit affair. For the first part of each class, he told me, students were presented with medical cases that raised ethical questions.