Asweeping decision by the Alabama Supreme Court in February sent shock waves through the world of assisted reproduction. Justice Jay Mitchell, writing on behalf of the court’s 7-2 majority, concluded that human embryos in IVF clinics “are ‘children,’ … without exception based on developmental stage, physical location, or any other ancillary characteristics.”

A firestorm followed. The decision uncomfortably reignited basic ethical questions that those in the IVF business had hoped were behind us. It had obvious financial implications, since it allowed parents to seek damages against IVF clinics when their embryonic children were lost or destroyed. It effectively upended the tacit assumption guiding the work of every IVF clinic, namely, that human embryos are nothing special, just a “means to an end” or objects to be used in the quest to satisfy customers and improve profitability. As one commentator put it, the court’s decision is “clearly extraordinary in its determination that in vitro, 8-cell, microscopic embryos are considered people.” 

But should it really be so extraordinary? What’s extraordinary is the fact that so many people, for so long, could become so riveted to the falsehood that little human beings are not human beings, just because they are little. 

IVF has become so engrained in lifestyle choices that it’s now not only awkward, but positively impolite, to suggest that pre-born life has intrinsic value, whether in a petri dish, a freezer, or a womb. Yet scientific facts have a hard edge to them, and as O’Rahilly & Muller put it in “Human Embryology & Teratology,” the 3rd edition of their famous textbook: “Although life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new genetically distinct human organism is formed.” 

The awkward truth for the purveyors of IVF is the fact that we are all embryos who have grown up, and if all men are created equal, then all embryos are human beings, each of whom ought to be unconditionally safeguarded and never exploited.

The Alabama court ruling thrust the state into the national spotlight and sent panicked lawmakers on both sides of the aisle scrambling to come up with a quick legislative “fix.” Only a few weeks after the judicial decision, the powerful infertility industry succeeded in convincing both the Alabama House and the Senate to pass legislation guaranteeing fertility clinics and doctors immunity from prosecution for any “death or damage to an embryo” that might occur during the IVF process.

Rather than running scared and caving to pressure from IVF advocates, we should be facing the question of how we have become so complacent about something so glaringly wrong. Why have we stood by to allow the industrialized commodification and destruction of younger human beings?

IVF involves at least two major moral problems — the “collateral damage problem” and the “intrinsic problem.” 

The collateral damage problem means that in order to achieve one IVF birth, clinic workers may create a dozen embryos, prescreen and transfer several of the “best” ones, discard or freeze the “leftovers,” and if more than one implants successfully, selectively abort the additional fetus(es). Those IVF-produced babies who manage to run this gauntlet and cross the threshold of birth still manifest elevated rates of birth defects when compared to normally-conceived babies, another instance of collateral damage.

This high tolerance for collateral damage in IVF clinics and among IVF customers arises out of the intentional prioritization of the desires of older, more powerful and wealthy adults over the rights and needs of voiceless embryonic children. Parental wants are always assumed by the industry to trump their children’s best interests, allowing for grave human rights violations to become “standards of infertility care.”

When it comes to the “intrinsic problem,” meanwhile, IVF always involves actions contrary to the meaning of marriage and to the core designs of human marital sexuality. Even if parts of society assert otherwise, sex remains fundamentally about bringing forth the next generation of human life within the stable bond of marriage. Children are not commodities and are entitled to be brought into the world through the loving embrace of the marital act, and within the protective and loving environment of the maternal womb, rather than being manufactured and manhandled under laboratory lights by hired hands in fertility clinics. 

Through IVF, we create an “exploitable subclass” — those who, although they are just as human as the rest of us, are unjustly instrumentalized and dehumanized by being brought into the world in a manner distinct from the rest of us. This subclass is produced and subjugated through human craftiness and scheming, instead of arriving as free and undeserved gifts through the bodily self-surrender and fruitful spousal love of the marital embrace.

Let us hope that the Alabama court’s decision will provide the impetus for some serious soul-searching about the ongoing calamity of IVF in our society.

At the start of 2024, Pope Francis offered strong public criticism of surrogate motherhood. His willingness to speak out on this important topic has helped to pull surrogacy out of the shadows, where it has often been relegated, and shine some much-needed light on the children at the center of the process and their rights.

Surrogacy is often framed as a generous act, since the surrogate mother seeks to offer her own body to help another woman unable carry a pregnancy. Judith Hoechst, who hired a surrogate to have a son, was quoted in a National Catholic Register article as declaring: “There’s nothing more selfless and more loving than a woman who says, ‘Let me share my uterus with you. Let me do for you what you cannot do.’”

When you examine it more deeply, however, surrogacy offers only the veneer of a selfless act. It relies on evil means to achieve a good end. It tends to be driven by the selfish slant of “entitlement thinking.” It often involves a coercive financial angle, as wealthy individuals offer significant remuneration to secure poor women as “volunteers.” 

Pope Francis cut through much of the duplicity around this issue when he provocatively observed that surrogacy involves a form of “trafficking” of children, implying that children are being bought and sold, treated as property and often transported across international borders, which, all in all, sums up many contemporary aspects of surrogacy.

The whole process of surrogacy typically begins with the creation of children for implantation through in vitro fertilization (IVF), a practice that itself raises numerous moral objections.

Most fundamentally, IVF misappropriates the generative powers we have received from God that are ordered to procreating new life.

The powers we have are not meant be used any way we wish. For example, we have the power to use our hands to pick things up, to write, and to reach out to help others. But that same power in our hands can be used in reckless and improper ways to hit people, to choke them, or to otherwise harm them. 

Just because we have the power to do something — or the fact that science may open up a new power to us — does not automatically mean we should utilize it.

Our power to procreate is a very special gift, meant to be shared in collaboration with God and our spouse in an exclusive manner. That we have the technical prowess to take hold of our sex cells and manipulate them to manufacture a new life constitutes a misuse of our God-given powers. We fail to respect our children’s dignity when we turn them into “projects” to be engendered in laboratory glassware and implanted into third party carriers. By such an approach, we end up twisting the designs of human sexuality and turning what is meant to be an act of love into an act of production.

Yet many people today have accepted the notion that children are a kind of "entitlement” or even a “right” to be claimed for themselves. This flawed thinking enables a facile movement into the twin evils of IVF and surrogacy, and ultimately encourages the trafficking of unborn children. Clearly, a child — or any person — is never a “right,” or a possession, or a piece of property to whom we are entitled. 

The only “entitlement” or “right” operative here would be the right of the child to be conceived uniquely through the marital act. Rather than being summoned into being in glassware and implanted into surrogates by fertility clinic employees in exchange for valuable consideration, children have the inalienable right to be conceived through the one flesh, body-to-body spousal communion of their parents’ marital embrace.

Having a sense of “entitlement” about children and imagining that I “deserve” a child corrupts the delicate order of our receptivity towards the mysterious gift of new life in marital sexuality.

Whenever we turn to IVF and surrogacy to satisfy the desire of adults for offspring, we override that delicate order of receptivity and arrogate to ourselves the right to control and even dominate our children. We pay to have them implanted into strangers who act as “gestational carriers.” We impose on them a multitude of "parental-role figures,” ranging from the surrogate mother who becomes pregnant, to the woman who receives the baby afterwards, to the third-party egg donor. We multiply father-role figures, depending upon the source of the sperm. We trap our left over embryonic children, potentially for decades, in the wasteland of frozen orphanages connected to fertility clinics. We carry out genetic testing and discard less-than-perfect embryos. We selectively reduce children when multiplet pregnancies arise.

The use of the term “deplorable” by the Pope is not excessive, but spot-on when it comes to describing these offensive aspects of surrogacy. His observations help refocus our attention on the runaway train that IVF and surrogacy have become, and invite us to push back against the problematic-but-widely-endorsed approach that seeks to satisfy adult desires for children while largely ignoring the consequences to the kids.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D. earned his doctorate in neuroscience from Yale and did post-doctoral work at Harvard. He is a priest of the diocese of Fall River, MA, and serves as Senior Ethicist at The National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia. See www.ncbcenter.org and www.fathertad.com.

Neuralink, a company run by Elon Musk, announced in September that it had received approval to implant wireless brain-computer interfaces (BCI) into human volunteers. 

A BCI is a neural device that translates a person’s brain activity into external responses, enabling, for example, the movement of a prosthetic limb via brain signals. 

The goal of Musk’s study is to enable people with paralysis to use their thoughts to control external devices, especially computers, through the BCI. 

While this end is clearly worthwhile, some future uses of BCI technology will probably not be equally praiseworthy, and some foreseeable applications of this technology will likely be unethical. 

In an MIT Technology Review article, Professor John Donoghue at Brown University mentions how as a child he spent time in a wheelchair, which later motivated him to try to help individuals who were paralyzed. 

One time after he delivered a speech at Google, he was surprised to encounter an engineer who was an avid gamer who wanted to know if it would be possible to have a “third thumb.” 

“That’s taking things to an extreme,” commented Donoghue. “I don’t want to implant electrodes into people so they can be better gamers. I always challenge all of these ideas because I don’t see what it gets you. But I don’t dismiss it, either... that is what is driving people. It’s the cool factor, that you could have this new interface.”

Restoring lost function offers an obvious benefit, but enhancing people’s abilities beyond their typical talents raises ethical concerns. When it comes to “therapies” vs. “enhancements,” the former will generally be OK, but the latter will often be problematic. 

Yet such a distinction, for all its usefulness, still falls short. 

For example, consider a hypothetical device that, when implanted into the brain of a person with advanced dementia, would improve his or her ability to remember and recall facts at a level similar to pre-dementia times. Suppose further that in a healthy person, the same device would confer a new ability, the power of a photographic memory. Would this mean it would be ethical to use it for the dementia patient, but not for the healthy one? 

Suppose there were a BCI that not only improved hand-to-eye coordination and motor control for Parkinson’s patients having movement deficits, but also improved the acuity and coordination of healthy athletes, so a professional pitcher could now throw a baseball even more accurately. Would it be OK to use the BCI for the Parkinson’s patient but not for the athlete?

What if the therapeutic implant for the Parkinson’s patient not only restored his ability to move in a coordinated way, but also gave him the ability to play baseball essentially as a professional, something he had never been able to do at any point prior in his life?  

The apparent blurring of the distinction between therapy and enhancement by BCIs can become complicated to sort out. 

As BCIs become more sophisticated, they may be able to capture and interpret more and more intimate aspects of a person’s thoughts. When it comes to the collection of brain data from sensors, it seems fitting to require that such data be protected like other medical information. The confidentiality of our neurodata will need to be assured, even as we seek to safeguard and expand the notion of mental privacy.

What if students in the future had BCIs that allowed for the monitoring of the pupils’ attention in class by scanning or recording their brain activity? What if workers in a factory could be monitored in this way for lapses of attention? Could BCIs enable the modulation of sleep patterns, so employees could be made to put in extra hours of work time? 

It seems that coercive scenarios involving BCIs might arise relatively easily.

What about the non-voluntary implantation of BCIs, enabling control of some individuals by others without their consent? One could envision forced implantation of chips to “neuter” a criminal’s bad behavior, for example.

Furthermore, the degree to which a neuroimplant would interfere with human autonomy would be vital to assessing its morality. A BCI might serve to increase or decrease human autonomy. If someone addicted to drugs, for example, received a brain implant that generated specific stimulation patterns to break his addiction, this could be therapeutic and helpful. But what if the setting were adjusted, and it instead became possible to dial in an electrically-induced “high” that provided an experience far more intense than any illegal drug? 

Using BCIs to mimic the effects of recreational drugs, or to pursue more intense erotic experiences, for example, by directed neural stimulation, could contribute to the enslaving of future generations through novel addictive behaviors, generating a raft of new concerns. Moral objections invariably arise any time men and women experience a loss of freedom or “personal agency” on account of addictions or other compulsive behaviors. 

In sum, while BCIs could offer important medical and therapeutic uses in the future, they also are poised for dubious or clearly immoral uses. Careful ethical discernment around selective deployment of this technology, therefore, will be essential going forward.

When I was recently visiting with friends, a group of young girls was playing in a neighboring yard. Every few minutes, for more than an hour, one of them would scream at the very top of her lungs. A woman in our group finally commented, “When I was a kid, if I ever screamed like that, Mom would have pulled me aside and said, ‘Don’t you dare raise your voice like that in public!’”

In another episode more recently, I saw two young people, maybe 16 years old, rush out of a home. A girl with pink hair and tattoos was following a guy, yelling at him and saying, “Don’t get into that car! Don’t even think of leaving!” As he got into the car and started to back up, she began pounding her fists on the driver side window, letting out a series of expletives. Next, she placed herself right in front of the car and began to beat the hood. Then she got up onto the hood and started to pummel the windshield, screaming a barrage of profanities. By this time, other vehicles had stopped. When the girl stepped aside from the car for a moment, the driver sped off. She took off after him, running down the road, waving her arms and yelling hysterically.

In a middle class residential family neighborhood, I was surprised to witness such an occurrence. In discussing it with a couple of bystanders, one offered, “I guess you just chalk it up to their being teenagers.” Another countered, “When I was growing up, even teens knew they couldn’t engage in a spectacle like that.”

Seeing it firsthand made me wonder where the parents were, and whether as a society, we are trending more and more towards “lowest common denominator” standards and behaviors. How concerned should we be when indignation, rage and narcissism replace civility and a common moral code? Not only are young people caught up in these concerns, but society itself seems to be grappling with them ever more broadly.

R.J. Snell gets it right when he says that we shouldn’t be “complaining about kids these days, since it’s not the kids who are the root of the problem: it is the duty of a coherent society, coherent religion, and coherent family structure to provide a moral horizon. This is the fault of the adults, those who refused the grave obligation to offer tradition to the young.”

How is it that we sometimes fail to set a moral vision for the next generation? Kids are endowed with some of the finest hypocrisy-detecting systems in the world, and when Catholic parents, to pick a relevant example, drop off their children at the parish for Catechism, but do not themselves attend weekly Mass, the children cannot fail to notice the disconnect. Similarly, when a Catholic parent continues to live in an irregular marital situation, or picks and chooses from among the Lord’s teachings, the mixed messaging pops up quickly on children’s moral radar. Consistency and coherence are key parental traits for transmitting robust values to children.

Another is parental fortitude. As children are pulled sideways by schools, false ideologies and other societal forces that undermine family life and sound parenting, setting a moral vision for one’s children can be a Herculean task requiring enormous dedication. I often think back to the strength and determination of my parents as I was growing up, battling not only me as a willful teen, but also pushing back against many of these broader currents and challenges around them.

While parents may sometimes deserve blame for the shortcomings of their children, many times they do not. Parenting is no easy endeavor and parents are oftentimes unsung heroes.

When young people witness their parents standing firm and practicing their faith by serving the Lord and others, they are more likely to take their own spiritual and religious identities seriously, becoming empowered to make significant sacrifices for others. They also are strengthened to be able to make intentional moral decisions and to direct their behaviors in ordered ways.

Parents who set a moral vision for themselves and their children build up the life of the family. As kids experience the joys of a family life not governed by the insatiable demands of their own desires, they can contribute to building a neighborhood and a world where narcissism and the “lowest common denominator” are replaced by goodness, generosity, right order and peace of heart.

How do we determine that someone has died? The Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA), which has been an important part of the medical and legal landscape in the U.S. for more than 40 years, states: 

"An individual who has sustained either irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions or irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brainstem, is dead. A determination of death must be made in accordance with accepted medical standards."

The UDDA, originally drafted in 1981 by a special Presidential Commission, was designed to serve as a legal standard and a uniform framework for determining that someone has died, as well as to provide a clear legal foundation for declaring someone dead by means of “neurological criteria,” also known as “brain death.” 

Since that time, the UDDA has served as an important benchmark for the medical profession, and a point of reference for legislative standards adopted throughout the United States, with all 50 states relying on language borrowed from the UDDA in their legal definitions of death.

Clearly defining and ascertaining when someone has died is important for a number of reasons: grieving can begin; burial arrangements can be made; and organ procurement can take place if the person had indicated a desire to become a donor. Most importantly, establishing that someone has not yet passed on helps us provide appropriate care and medical treatments until the time of death.

Recently, a group of physicians, ethicists, and lawyers recommended revising the wording of the UDDA. Their proposal adjusts the definition of brain death from whole-brain death to less-than-whole-brain death. 

Whenever brain death assessments are done today, physicians carry out a series of bedside clinical tests. They check whether the patient can gasp or initiate a breath when taken off the ventilator (known as an “apnea test”). Any attempt at taking a breath would indicate that the person’s brainstem is still functioning, and that he or she is still alive. Physicians also check for other reflexes and responses mediated by the brain: Do pupils of the eye respond to light? Is there any reaction to, or withdrawal from painful stimuli? Is there any gag reflex when an object is placed in the back of the throat? If such reflexes are present, the individual is still alive.

For somebody to be deceased, then, there needs to be evidence of a catastrophic neurological event that has caused their brain to become irreversibly non-functional. One type of brain function that is not routinely assessed by doctors when carrying out brain death testing involves the hypothalamus. This important region of the brain coordinates with the pituitary gland to enable the secretion of hormones and small molecules that regulate the function of the kidneys and other organs, and helps control salt and water balance in the body. Sometimes a person can pass all the tests for being brain dead, but still have hypothalamic function. 

If a patient has continuing hypothalamic function in this way, it seems clear that he or she does not manifest “irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain” as delineated in the UDDA.

Regrettably, some are now proposing that a person in this situation should still be considered brain dead, and they are seeking to revise the wording of the UDDA to reflect this, substantially lowering the standard for a declaration of brain death. They declare, without compelling support, that the persistence of neurosecretory function by the hypothalamus is consistent with brain death.

In cases of genuine brain death, when all functions of the entire brain have ceased, the bodies of these individuals can typically continue to function on a ventilator only for a matter of hours or perhaps a few days before their various subsystems, like blood pressure, electrolytes, and fluid balance become erratic and dysregulated, leading to cardiac arrest.

Meanwhile, some brain-injured individuals who have retained hypothalamic functioning have survived for months or years on a ventilator after losing both their brain-mediated reflexes and their ability to breathe. Even though these patients suffer an extremely severe central nervous system injury, they are clearly still alive.

Even to be “slightly alive” is still to be alive. If the language of the UDDA ends up being changed to allow for a declaration of brain death even with continued hypothalamic functioning, individuals who are not-quite-dead will be treated as if they were already dead.

Rather than revising the language of the UDDA and seeking to lower the standards for declaring brain death, the battery of routine reflex and apnea tests used for ascertaining brain death needs be expanded to include tests that can verify the loss of hypothalamic function.

Such improvements in testing will help ensure that people are not declared deceased prematurely. It will also help strengthen public confidence in the life-saving work of organ transplantation.

As internet pornography continues to make inroads into the daily lives of millions, greater numbers of young women are making the decision to participate in its production, with some even seeing it as a “path of empowerment” for themselves. They may hear about the “success stories” of porn stars, one of whom declared during a media interview a few years back that her breast implants were the best investment she had ever made, making her a multi-millionaire.

Young women today can indeed be tempted to “play the pornography card,” but as girls become women, parents and society face the important task of conveying to them that when they immodestly display their feminine attributes and participate in pornography, they end up objectifying themselves, trivializing their sexuality, and harming their interpersonal relationships.

In a recent interview, Pamela Anderson Lee, the former Baywatch actress, revealed how her Playboy photo spreads and pornographic videos impacted her sons and left them in tears after being teased at school about her sex tape with their father and her ex-husband Tommy Lee.

She explained: “I wasn't thinking when I was in Playboy that I was going to have kids soon and they were going to grow up and it was going to be embarrassing for them…”

“I remember one day after school Dylan came to me in tears and he was like, ‘Mom why did you do that tape?’ …But I always thought I'd tell them, age-appropriate — but I never got the chance — they always found out before I could really talk to them about it.” 

Her other son Brandon described it this way: “When I was a kid, I thought everyone knew things about me and my family that they never should've known. Everyone had this dirty little secret about my family.” 

The powerful misappropriation of a woman’s sexuality through involvement in pornography can wreak havoc on multiple fronts. 

Another front where chaos can arise as sexual mores shift is in the very delicate interpersonal area of sexual attraction that is ordered to connecting young women to young men through a stable marital commitment.

Many young women, for example, feel pressured to sleep with and cohabitate with dates and boyfriends to try to win them over and perhaps one day marry them. It should come as little surprise that these kinds of relational mistakes on the part of a young woman often lead a young man to ask the proverbial question: Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? The unique influence or leverage that a young woman has with a potential future husband is squandered away.

A woman who is not sexually available before marriage is perceived and approached differently by men: they have to put in the effort to woo and win her, and later she is a “catch” and a “treasure” as she becomes a man’s “better half.”

In contemporary hook up culture, meanwhile, young women give themselves away for nothing, and men don’t have to woo anyone or bother with the complexities of interpersonal relationships or real-life intimacy skills.

As men are drawn into the addictive world of pornography, they similarly devalue women by reducing their gifts to a single highly sexualized dimension. This disrupts healthy patterns of attraction and courtship that are meant to lead to male-female friendship, bonding and marriage.

As Fred Rabinowitz, a psychologist and professor at the University of Redlands who studies masculinity has noted, young men today “are watching a lot of social media, they’re watching a lot of porn, and I think they’re getting a lot of their needs met without having to go out. And I think that’s starting to be a habit.” 

Parents face a real challenge in trying to convey to their sons and daughters that their sexuality is a gift to be treasured, not squandered. At times, they may need to be very direct in how they share their values with their children. 

A friend once shared with me that as a teen, she and her mom were watching a movie at the local theater when a mostly unclad woman doing a pole dance unexpectedly flashed up on the screen. Her mom, a woman of fortitude, hardly missed a beat as she gently leaned over to her daughter to whisper just three words: “I’ll kill you…!” The moment left an indelible impression, and nearly 50 years later, my friend still appreciates her mother’s humorous but direct and loving approach in conveying the importance of modesty for a young woman’s maturing sexuality.

The remarkable gifts of a woman — her “feminine genius” as Pope John Paul II used to refer to it — including the gift of her sexual nature and her interpersonal acumen, need to be esteemed and safeguarded. Over the course of civilization, these gifts have built up the family, protected children, supported men through the bond of marriage, and more broadly strengthened the life of society itself. We need great courage and resolve today to protect and advance these precious gifts.

The possibility of suffering from dementia later in life is a worrisome and unpleasant prospect for many of us. Most people I know would like to remain in possession of their mental faculties until the end. Stephen Post, Director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics at Stonybrook University describes it this way: 
 
“The leading symptoms of dementia are, frankly, terrifying: loss of memory, of language, and of reasoning ability. We all feel at least a slight anxiety about dementia because these dreaded symptoms seem to assault our very identities, to dissolve the autobiographical narratives that constitute the very story of our lives.”
 
The dreaded symptoms of dementia may lead to spiritual temptations. The prospect of losing autonomy and control can lead some to despair and even attempt suicide. 

What can we say about the meaning of a life-changing reality like dementia for ourselves and our loved ones? Could it be that God is seeking to carry out a particular spiritual work?
 
For some who face dementia, it can have the effect of getting them off the treadmill and detaching them from those aspects of their lives that may be binding them, whether it’s work and career, hobbies or pastimes, or something else that may be drawing them away from a needed spiritual focus.
 
In one of his articles, Stephen Post mentions Peter, who through his struggle with a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, experienced a spiritual reawakening and encountered the Lord’s grace: 
 
“I’d say, ‘Why did you let this happen to me? I had such a good career. Everything was going fine for me.’ He would say to me probably, ‘Well, why did you fight it? I was trying to lead you in this direction.’ Oh, I didn’t realize that. Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that everything has a purpose, so the Good Lord, He knows the best for you. So maybe this was to slow me down to enjoy life and to enjoy my family and to enjoy what’s out there. And right now, I can say that I’m a better person for it, in appreciation of other people’s needs and illnesses, than I ever was when I was working that rat race back and forth day to day.”
 
It can be very hard for a family, especially a spouse, to watch the slow destruction of a loved one’s faculties. At times the person suffering from dementia can become so frustrated they are aggressive towards those around them. There is need for a great deal of patience and spiritual and social support in these situations.

The lives of caregivers tend to be upended and changed profoundly by caring for a family member, relative or friend with dementia, and the generous love they share is itself often sustained by faith in God. As caregivers watch their loved ones with “deep forgetfulness” disengage from the people around them, and from other previously important reference points in their lives, they also witness the emergence of an unmistakable simplicity in those they care for. 
 
In a 2010 essay, Mary Anne Moresco beautifully sums up her dad’s and her family’s transformative spiritual journey this way:
 
“My 83-year-old father has dementia. He can remember things that happened a lifetime ago like it was yesterday, but he often can’t remember yesterday at all… My father needs this time in life. And we, his children, need it too. We need to glimpse into his past days, as he journeys backward. We need to show him love, as best as we can. We need to offer up our prayers for him. This time is useful. It is valuable. For everything there is a season, and this winter season of my father’s life is part of what will help guide his soul into eternity. Dad, through his dementia is working out his salvation. He isn’t doing that the way his children wanted him to do it. He isn’t doing that the way he wanted to do it. He is doing it the way God has deemed that he must do it. ‘…unless you become like little children, you will not ender the Kingdom of Heaven.’  (Matt: 18:3)… With each passing month, my father grows more humble and more childlike, more dependent and more trusting and I do not doubt, closer to our Lord and to Heaven.”
 
As the symptoms and complications of dementia unfold, the challenges we face from the disease can unexpectedly become an invitation from God. Although dementia can contribute to spiritual growth, it almost always involves a great deal of suffering for all concerned, and the challenges should not be underestimated. Such moments, nevertheless, offer important opportunities to grow in grace, to slow down, to reevaluate our priorities and to enter into a more profound relationship with Him who is our final destination and abiding hope.
 

A female sharpshooter nicknamed “Lady Death” has recently become a Ukrainian folk hero for defiantly attacking Russian soldiers undercover. The young markswoman fought for several years in eastern Ukraine against Kremlin-backed separatists, before shifting to the front line of hostilities as Russia initiated its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Her real name has not been made public and photos hide her identity by blurring her face or showing her with a mask. Long range sniper attacks are her area of expertise. As she assassinates enemy combatants, she militantly proclaims, “We must take them all out. These people are not human beings. Even the fascists were not as vile as these orcs. We must defeat them.”

Her battle cry, though clearly motivated by the atrocities unfolding in Ukraine, should also prompt some circumspection and soul searching. Whenever we move in the direction of believing that others are “not human beings” and dehumanize them in our thoughts and words, we risk diminishing our own humanity in the exchange. Even in the face of great depravity, we cannot fall prey to thinking that those who commit horrific evils or even war crimes are somehow no longer really human beings.

I was reminded of this recently as I viewed online videos of armed drones firing on Russian tanks traveling along Ukrainian highways. As they took successive missile hits, Russian soldiers could be seen launching themselves out of the hatch and escaping from the tank before it went up in a fireball. Sometimes they would barely get out alive, only to collapse and die by the side of the road. If the mother of a Russian tank driver were to watch a video of her son trying to escape this way under fire, she would be justly indignant, offended and even more saddened if anyone dared to declare he was “not a human being.” In the posted remarks section following these videos, in fact, many commented on the hideousness of a world in which 18-year-old boys have to perish in this manner.

By demonizing others, we no longer acknowledge the transcendent realities common to all human beings: our shared desire for truth, goodness, beauty, and love. Whenever we ignore or negate the important commonalities that unite us in our humanity and instead choose to dehumanize others, the consequences will be dire. Historically, the use of language that dehumanizes others has been a key tactic in marshaling support for atrocities.

Such language has always been central, for example, to acts of genocide. During the latter part of the 20th century, the Tutsis were often denigrated as cockroaches and snakes in Rwanda. This dehumanizing nomenclature culminated in approximately 800,000 men, women and children being murdered during a 12-week period in 1994. In Nazi Germany, Jews and other enemies of the Third Reich, including persons with disabilities, were contemptuously viewed not as humans, but as vermin and rats, in order to justify their systematic extermination.

President Abraham Lincoln strongly objected to treating any person, whether slave or free, as “less-than-human” during his 1858 public debate with Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln rebuffed the idea that African Americans fell outside the "all men are created equal" clause, declaring such a concept to be marked by “an evil tendency, if not an evil design.” He repudiated every attempt to “dehumanize the negro ... (and) prepare the public mind to make property, and nothing but property of the negro in all the States of the Union.”

Still in our nation today, the process of dehumanization continues to derail our thinking and diminish our collective conscience, especially when it comes to those humans who are very young and still in the womb, as well as the elderly and the infirm, the mentally-fragile, and those in vulnerable medical situations, such as newborn children with genetic defects.

By dehumanizing these individuals in a “progressive” society, we can subject them to a range of unjust actions, from abortion to infanticide to euthanasia. Preborn children, for example, have undergone this dehumanization for decades, being denigrated as “tissue,” “pregnancy,” or  “clumps of cells,” to paper over the brutal reality of abortion.

The website of Planned Parenthood, to cite one instance, defines a suction abortion as a procedure where a “suction device” is used to “take the pregnancy tissue out of your uterus.”

We need to fight against dehumanization both by recognizing and opposing its occurrence in our midst, and by recognizing it within ourselves. The temptation to dehumanize people who are themselves dehumanizing others can also be very strong.

In the end, our shared humanity, from the weakest to the strongest, from youngest to oldest, constitutes an ineradicable bond of unity that should prompt us to spurn our own dehumanizing impulses. Renewing hope for conflict-laden humanity begins precisely in the acknowledgement of each other’s humanity, strengthening those fraternal bonds on which peace is grounded.

A recent article in the New York Times by Gina Kolata chronicles the remarkable story of a patient who for many years suffered from type 1 diabetes. After receiving a newly-developed form of embryonic stem cell infusion, he became able to live insulin-free, apparently cured of his blood sugar imbalances.

It was largely a matter of time, funding and elbow grease before cures of this kind would start to appear. That makes it urgent for us, as a society, to confront and address the ethical questions arising in the wake of these up and coming therapies.

We can formulate the ethical question this way: Is it wrong to develop treatments that rely on the direct destruction of fellow human beings who are in their embryonic stages?

It should go without saying that it is always wrong to take the life of one human being to harvest body parts, even to save the life of another human being. Such medicine is fundamentally exploitative and immoral, and ought to be summarily rejected.

Many people are beginning to ask, however, whether receiving a treatment for diabetes developed from embryonic stem cells is really that different from getting vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine developed using abortion-derived cell lines? The two cases are, in fact, quite different.

When it comes to abortion-derived cell lines and their use in developing some of the COVID-19 vaccines, the wrong that was committed involved taking somatic cells (not stem cells), such as kidney cells or retinal cells, from an aborted fetus and working them up in order to prepare a special “cell line” for use in research or vaccine development. The abortion, it should be noted, as wrong as it was in itself, was not performed in order to obtain research material, and the evil of this “corpse raiding” was compounded by not having obtained valid informed consent.

What makes embryonic stem cell-based therapies ethically worse is that a very young human being, still in his or her embryonic stage of existence, is being targeted and intentionally killed in order to obtain the desired stem cells that stand at the center of that medical treatment.

Why, then, would it be morally allowable to receive a vaccine prepared using abortion- derived cell lines, but morally unacceptable to receive a diabetes treatment developed from embryonic stem cells?

Because the type of moral offense and its gravity are different in kind and degree. Directly killing someone to obtain their cells for treatment is different in kind and worse than the wrongdoing involved in taking cells from a corpse, even from a young human whose life was unjustly ended for an unrelated reason. It is always wrong to steal, even from a cadaver. But it’s much worse to kill in order to take.

In one case the researcher himself becomes the executioner who procures cells and tissues from the individual he has just directly and purposefully killed; in the other case, the researcher shows up at the morgue or the abortion clinic following the death, and procures cells or tissues from the individual’s body (with the death having occurred at the hands of others and the researcher afterwards profiting from the resultant cadaver). This latter case would not raise ethical concerns at all if researchers were to derive the needed cells from a miscarriage instead of a direct abortion. If an unborn baby girl, for example, were to die of natural causes, her parents could validly grant informed consent for the use of tissues and cells from her body, in effect donating her body to science.

These kinds of distinctions are important, because receiving a diabetes treatment produced with embryonic stem cells signals a willingness on our part to tolerate the killing of younger human beings in order to benefit others who are older. Meanwhile, receiving a COVID-19 vaccine produced using abortion- derived cell lines does not indicate a willingness on our part to tolerate killing for research (since the killing was not done for research, but for some other unrelated motive), and instead indicates a willingness to tolerate cells and tissues that were unethically taken from a corpse.

Should we always avoid using therapies that are produced using embryonic stem cells taken from young humans who were killed in order to obtain the cells? Yes, such therapies are unethical because killing one human being for the purpose of healing another crosses a fundamental moral line.

But the fact that the question is being raised reminds us of the slippery ethical slope that arises whenever we try to use parts of human beings derived from abortions: legally permitting abortion only makes the confusion worse. Hence, there is an urgent need to encourage the use of alternative, non-embryo- derived cell sources by researchers, including cells derived from miscarriages, adult stem cells, or embryonic-type alternatives such as induced pluripotent stem cells, which can be obtained by genetically manipulating adult human skin cells. These approaches open a path forward in the direction of ethical research and medical therapies.

Although most Americans today are unaware of it, the United States has a sad and extensive history of forced sterilizations, especially within the past century. In 1907, Indiana legalized forced sterilizations of white men who were “mentally deficient,” diseased, or otherwise disabled. More than 30 other states subsequently followed suit, and the practice quickly expanded to both men and women.

In 1927, the Virginia law allowing the sterilization of patients in mental institutions was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell. In the decision, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes made his now infamous proclamation that "three generations of imbeciles are enough," referring to Carrie Buck, her mother and daughter. Carrie was committed to a state mental institution as a “feeble minded woman,” and the Virginia law allowed for her forced sterilization, allegedly for the “health of the patient and the welfare of society.”

The Supreme Court’s decision featuring Justice Holmes’ histrionic flair served to catalyze the then-trendy push for eugenics, the idea that preventing unfit individuals from reproducing served the public welfare. The flawed notion behind eugenics was that many social ills, including crime, poverty, and mental deficiency, were not due to environmental factors, but largely to genetic or hereditary defects. Vulnerable, institutionalized populations like the mentally ill, the disabled, and the incarcerated were thus among the first targets of state-sponsored sterilization programs. The Virginia law remained on the books for a half century until it was finally repealed in 1974. All told, close to 60,000 Americans were rendered permanently infertile by these state-sponsored programs.

Historians have noted that Nazi Germany likely modeled its forced sterilization programs on the American eugenics programs of the 1930s. The law under which Hitler sterilized countless German citizens contains much of the same language found in the 1924 Virginia sterilization Act, which provided for the sexual sterilization of any state hospital inmate who was "insane, idiotic, imbecile, feeble-minded or epileptic, and by the laws of heredity … the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring likewise afflicted."

The jarring tagline offered by Justice Holmes highlighted a biased, even disdainful attitude toward mentally ill persons and their ability to procreate. Few today would not be revolted by such strident branding of whole classes of individuals and families. Few would similarly countenance forcible state-sanctioned sterilizations, as still happens today, to near universal condemnation, in certain dictatorial regimes bent on population control.

Direct sterilizations violate human dignity. A physician’s decision to recommend or participate in the surgical mutilation of a healthy and properly functioning system of the body for the purposes of impeding fertility runs counter to the authentic healing mission of the medical profession. At its core, medicine should be about fixing damaged systems of the body rather than damaging healthy systems.

Whenever we face situations where family members with severe mental illness or other disabilities may not be suited to the responsibilities and demands of having children and parenting, and hence ought not to get married, the solution should never be direct sterilization but tailored care that addresses their specific mental health situation and respects their human sexual nature by ordering it along a path of chastity.

This implies that caretakers for the seriously mentally ill in institutional settings should assure that residents are not given opportunities to engage in sexual encounters with others, that they be safeguarded from access to sexually- explicit media and internet pornography, that they be instructed on the importance of chastity to the extent possible with their mental disability, and that residential settings be appropriately segregated as single-sex facilities.

In other words, caretakers for the seriously mentally-challenged have a duty to protect them as they would protect, for example, young people or children. Although the bodies of mentally-challenged residents may have matured sexually, some still function intellectually at or near the level of a child. Living in an institutional care facility is meant to offer protection from the chaos of the outside world where they would clearly be vulnerable and largely defenseless.

Sometimes it is argued that due to their well-documented risk to be victims of sexual assault, individuals who are mentally-challenged, especially in institutional settings, should be forcefully sterilized “for their own good,” whether temporarily through chemical sterilization (like contraception), or permanently through surgical sterilization.

It doesn’t require much reflection, however, to see that if it were to become generally known that residents were taking contraceptives or had been sterilized, this would only "lower the threshold" for those who might wish to engage in predatory sexual activities to the detriment of their mentally-challenged victims.

The real aim should be to prevent sexual assaults, not to prevent the obvious consequences that might follow from such assaults, like pregnancy. Addressing inadequate oversight by caretakers and eliminating the "institutional chaos” that allows sexual activity to occur with or among residents needs to be the focus. Individual responsibility and accountability are paramount.

Loving and caring for our family members with serious disabilities demands no less.

This past weekend in Houston, I had the opportunity to speak at a religious liberty conference about transgender issues, homosexuality and contraception. The conference happened to open on the same day that the Dobbs decision overturning Roe vs. Wade was released by the Supreme Court.

There was a noticeable “buzz” in the air because of the Court’s decision. Whenever a speaker would mention the ruling, spontaneous applause would erupt from the audience. Young and middle-aged conference attendees, most of whom had grown up with Roe vs. Wade, couldn’t recall a time in their lives when abortion-on-demand had not been legal in all states. There was a strong sentiment that because of the decision, we had reached a turning point as a society, with an onerous weight finally being lifted from the conscience of the nation.

Abortion-on-demand was the law of our land for nearly a half-century, ending the lives of more than 63 million vulnerable unborn humans. Because of judicial brute force for five decades, the moral sense and reasoning ability of many citizens was weakened, with many Americans growing accustomed to the ongoing practice. A number of other nations also legalized abortion, following our troublesome lead.

This historic reversal by the Supreme Court has myriad implications. People are stirring again and beginning to ponder their longstanding complacency. Many are starting to ask how a country professing “liberty and justice for all” could enshrine killing on such a colossal scale. Other nations are re-examining their policies. The jolt from the court’s decision is also prompting questions about the enormous sums of American taxpayer money that have been funneled into the coffers of the abortion industry. We stand at a pivotal moment, a moment of reawakening, dialogue, conversion and renewal.

This historic Dobbs decision has also sent shock waves through the abortion industry as it suddenly realizes that its profitable enterprise of death is facing an existential threat in many states. Its forces are certain to intensify the relentless misinformation campaigns that have misled people for decades, relying on support from corporate America, Hollywood, and the media. Those same forces have already shown that they will not hesitate to gin up noisy, and sometimes violent, protests around the country.

With the Court’s decision, a first and important first step has taken place. What Dobbs did, as noted on the first page of the decision, was to leave abortion policy “to the people and their elected representatives.”

Now that the Court has assumed a neutral position on the issue, and state or federal legislatures can enact measures to protect moms and their unborn children at any stage of pregnancy, the door has finally been opened to protect human life by revamping and strengthening state and local laws.

As new legal initiatives made possible by Dobbs begin appearing on state legislative dockets, Americans will have an opportunity to mount a full court press to bring abortion to an end in their home states. Bold legislators, courageous governors and informed voters will need to work together.

Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute offers some helpful recommendations:

“In states that do not yet ban abortion, we must work with pro-life state legislators to protect all human lives. Where a complete ban is not possible, we must advocate for Heartbeat legislation, that will prevent all abortions after six weeks, understanding that this is only a way station on the way to a complete ban.... At the local level, talk to your city councilman or county supervisor about making the place where you live a sanctuary for the unborn. Outlawing abortion within city or county limits is possible even in hostile states like New York or California if you happen to live in the more socially conservative parts of these states. Even closer to home, support your local crisis pregnancy centers, whose services will now be more in demand than ever before from young women who have nowhere else to turn.… Volunteer if you can, donate if you can't."

The years of dedicated work that have gone into educating people about the harsh realities surrounding abortion, setting up crisis pregnancy centers, drafting pro-life legislation and electing pro-life candidates has created critical momentum for definitively enacting pro-life laws and securing the human rights of unborn children around the country, state-by-state, instead of having such initiatives almost continually enjoined by courts. We should all have a renewed sense of hope and determination as a great nation once again comes to its senses in the face of abortion’s ongstanding injustice and violence.

Near-death experiences (NDEs) are a complex set of phenomena that often include reports of leaving one’s body, seeing it from outside or above, passing through a tunnel of light, seeing various forms of illumination, experiencing the presence of deceased relatives and friends, and even sensing the presence of angelic or divine beings. Between 12 and 15 percent of resuscitated heart attack patients report NDEs. 

Sometimes discussions of these experiences include spiritual interpretations and religious overtones, and some commentators have claimed that “near-death experiences are certainly pronounced and conspicuous evidence of a transphysical soul” that we may use “to extract information about the afterlife.” Such strong claims, however, require further substantiation, even as they trigger vigorous discussion.

NDEs, to be clear, are not instances of a person actually dying and then returning from the dead to tell about it. If an individual were to die and return to life, there would have to be a supernatural explanation and cause. Human corpses do not come back to life, apart from the rare miraculous events surrounding the deaths of Jesus, Lazarus, the daughter of Jairus, the son of the widow and Nain, as we see in the Gospels. 

Human death always involves the key notion of irreversibility, which is to say: the irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or the irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, as explained in the 1981 Guidelines of the American Medical Association. NDEs involve situations that are reversible. They may be caused by physiological phenomena that arise as the human brain faces various stressors, like oxygen deprivation, rather than any properly supernatural phenomena.

While supernatural forces could, in theory, cause an NDE, explanatory entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity, as “Occam’s razor” counsels. The Church’s wisdom in evaluating such matters is that we should generally prefer a natural explanation for a phenomenon, unless and until the evidence for a supernatural explanation becomes truly compelling or overwhelming.

Rather than presupposing a supernatural explanation for NDEs, scientists have considered alternative explanations by examining stressful, near-death situations and their effects on brain function. 

A 2023 Scientific American article notes how researchers “analyzed EEG data from four comatose patients before and after their ventilators were removed. As the patients’ brains became deprived of oxygen, two showed an unexpected surge of gamma activity, a type of high-frequency wave linked to the formation of memory and the integration of information.” 

This raises the prospect that even in situations of severe hypoxia, certain brain functions may, at least briefly, operate in ways that could still affect thought and perception.

Dr. Kevin Nelson, a researcher who has studied near-death experiences extensively, notes “One of the most common causes of near-death experiences is fainting," which is able to generate a sense of being separated from your own body, or a feeling of euphoria. Researchers have also reported that a restriction of oxygen flow to the eye can sometimes result in an experience of tunnel vision.

Others have argued that central nervous system hallucinatory mechanisms may contribute to NDEs. The well-known neurologist, Dr. Oliver Sacks, notes how migraine headaches can generate illusions or hallucinations, which sufferers often describe as pulsating lights, shimmering illumination, or fields of brightness.

Sacks has also described the work of Swiss neuroscientist Dr. Olaf Blanke who was able to generate a hallucination, “a ‘shadow person’ in a patient by electrically stimulating her left temporoparietal junction. ‘When the woman was lying down,’ Sacks reported, ‘a mild stimulation of this area gave her the impression that someone was behind her; a stronger stimulation allowed her to define the [someone] as young but of indeterminate sex.’”

NDE’s can also resemble drug-induced experiences, and many have noted the similarity of NDE accounts to essays written by conscious drug users about their experimentations and trips while using drugs like mushrooms, cannabis, LSD, ayahuasca, etc.

Sacks also offers the important observation that the reason hallucinations seem so real is that “they deploy the very same systems in the brain that actual perceptions do.” When a person is hallucinating a face, the fusiform face area, normally used to perceive and identify faces in the surrounding environment, is activated; when someone is hallucinating a voice, the auditory pathways are stimulated. It seems reasonable to believe that NDEs may rely on similar mechanisms. 

Sacks also raises the possibility that NDEs may not occur when individuals are actually suffering an absence of circulation to the brain or when they are trapped in a deep coma, but rather as they are surfacing out of the coma and their cortex is beginning to regain function.

Since it is difficult to verify the cause of an individual’s NDE, it is wise to use some caution around the interpretation of such experiences. 

The most authoritative source of information about the afterlife remains the One who came from heaven, redeemed us through His suffering, death and resurrection, and who invites us to follow Him into eternal life.