Ethics Headlines is an
ethics-in-the-news clipping file published each Friday by Greg
Feldmeth, a
high school teacher at Polytechnic
School
in Pasadena, California. It contains news items from the media in the
past week that deal with some area of ethical inquiry.
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You can receive the file via email every Friday afternoon with
links to the original articles. Just email your address
here and put
Ethics
Headlines in the subject line. If you know of others
who
would be
interested, please forward the page to them.
This
week's headlines--select the headline to read the article
- A wrongful birth? The technology of prenatal care has been shifting rapidly: sonograms became standard in the 80's; many new genetic tests became standard in the 90's. Our ethical responses to the information provided has been shifting as well. As in many other realms, from marriage and its definition to end-of-life issues, those ethics and standards are being hashed out in the courts, in one lawsuit after another. And what those cases are exposing is the relatively new belief that we should have a right to choose which babies come into the world.
- America
is rife with morally dubious awards. Rachel Corrie, a young American woman
accidentally flattened by an Israeli bulldozer during a protest in Gaza
three years ago, is a hero to Palestinians and the anti-American left.
When she died, a photo of her burning an American flag sealed her high
status on the left. Her honors included many vigils, memorials,
buildings named for her, at least two plays, an annual pancake
breakfast, and the Rachel Corrie Award for courage in the teaching of
writing. Why helping people learn to write should require courage is
not explained.
- Going all the way -- to jail. A statute in Uganda aims at men who prey on girls and makes such activity a capital crime. But it is teenage boys who are being ensnared.
- Several states weigh
ban on gay adoptions. In the two decades since it's been a
licensed state adoption agency, Catholic Charities of Boston has placed
a tiny number of children with gay parents: 13 of 720 adoptions. But
when those adoptions became public knowledge, the archdiocese's bishops
- following a Vatican directive - announced they had to stop.