Harvesting Organs on the Edge of Death

Over the past 15 months, news on the bioethics front has been heating up as the long-standing practice of the “dead donor rule” (DDR) has been increasingly challenged by prominent medical ethicists.  Up until recently, best practice in the medical industry has demanded that a donor patient be declared legally dead before doctors can begin to harvest any organs from his or her body.  But as the numbers of patients on transplant waiting lists continues to swell, doctors are beginning to reconsider their traditional stances and new ethical frontiers are being broached.

 

Another Way of Seeing Foreign Aid

Hat Tip: Occupy Psychopath.

 

The Super Bowl, Sex and What to Tell Your Daughters

Sunday’s Super Bowl is over. The players have gone home. The confetti has been cleared. But I have been drawn into the post game debrief conversations centered around sex and sexism at the Super Bowl. As a woman, a Christian, a wife and a mother of two young girls, these conversations are important to me.

 

Evangelicals Call for Justice

Christians on the political left often advocate for additional Federal spending as part of bringing God’s shalom to the world, and Christians on the right often, contrary to how scripture uses the term gospel and salvation, disconnect the gospel from any temporal and embodied forms of salvation.  But an issue of justice crying out in the current culture is rallying both the left and the right in God’s Kingdom to work together, and the electoral defeat of Mitt Romney may have provided the necessary impetus for apathetic members of Congress to get on board.

 

Scripture Prohibits a Woman’s Right to Vote and Civil Rights to Homosexuals?

 

Earlier this year, Blood Stained Ink (BSI) asked, Are Women Second Class Citizens in America? This post briefly provided statistics regarding the number of women elected to the US Congress, as compared to women elected to legislatures around the world. That got me thinking about I Timothy 2 and Empire.

 

Where were You when You just had Sex?

As the ever-expanding world of social media appears to be systematically eliminating anything close to what we might have once called “privacy,” it should probably come as no surprise that there is now a social site dedicated to announcing where you have most recently worn a condom.  You read that right.  Just as you might utilize Foursquare or Facebook to “check in” at a restaurant or a theater or a ballgame, Planned Parenthood has now developed a new website targeting teens and young adults, called “Where Did You Wear It?” In short, it allows you to “check in” on where you just had sex with a condom because after all, “sex that safe should be shared!”

And just how much should we expect you to share?  Well, after entering in all the pertinent geographic information, the site also allows you to add a few more details.  Because after all, it’s not enough that everyone knows where you’re having sex.  This is the “Information Age.”  It’s the “Age of Jersey Shore.”  We need more!

So what’s your gender?  Male?  Female?  Trans?  What about the gender of your partner?  No point in making any assumptions or in protecting his or her identity.  This is all about maximum exposure.

How was the sex?  Was it “ah-maz-ing,” as in “rainbows exploded and mountains trembled?”  Or was it a bit more … down-to-earth, say “a work in progress?”   Don’t be shy, now.  Spill the beans.  We want to know.  Was your world rocked or was it not?!

Every once in a while, in a culture as vast and as complex as ours, you run across something so patently “new” that it’s difficult to know where to even begin an analysis.  And so today, I simply want to leave the analysis up to you.  What do you think Planned Parenthood is trying to accomplish through this site?  What exactly are they trying to normalize and should it be normalized?  What about what we, as a society, are sacrificing for this to be normalized?  Is there moral value in trying to protect people from the consequences of their actions?  What about the value in teaching privacy as a virtue of sorts?  Or is the concept of privacy growing increasingly “passe” in a hyper-connected world?   Regardless of religious affiliation, do you want to be part of a society that “checks in” on a site such as this?  Why?  Or why not?  And if the whole point is being “proud to wear protection,” why is there no ability to “share” this information directly through your personal Facebook account or Twitter?  The comment section is yours.  Have at it, readers.