Adult not embryonic stems cells may be our future.

The moral problems raised by human embryonic stem-cell research (or embryo destruction) and the disposition of "excess" frozen embryos are so closely related to in vitro fertilization that Americans need to rethink the assumptions supporting the procedure.

Infertility is a growing problem in the United States. And in true American fashion, there has been a corresponding growth in a reproductive technologies industry to provide a solution.

"A man, even if seriously ill or disabled in the exercise of his highest functions, is and always will be a man, and he will never become a 'vegetable' or an 'animal'", the Holy Father said on Saturday, 20 March, to participants in the International Congress on Life-Sustaining Treatments and Vegetative State: Scientific Advances and Ethical Dilemmas.

Can a human person ever become a vegetable? And be treated as such?

A student at the medical school at the University of Manitoba has been threatened with loss of graduation if he will not offer abortion as an option to a patient. In terms of the legal requirement, the issue is whether or not a physician is required to refer a patient for an abortion. The answer is no.

The Church is very clear on the meaning of death. "Death can mean decomposition, disintegration, a separation," Pope John Paul II said in a 1989 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. "It occurs when the spiritual principle which ensures the unity of the organism no longer exercises its functions in and upon the organism, whose elements, left to themselves, disintegrate."

In my opinion Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics by Leon Kass is unquestionably one of the most important books on bioethics ever published.

Here is the text of the Holy See's speech delivered Monday at a U.N. session on human cloning. Archbishop Celestino Migliore, permanent observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, gave the speech.

Oh Death, where is thy Victory? sings the choir, and I look up wearily from my notes and mutter, third bed on the left, behind the curtains, oh, and down in resusc.