A Job For Rita Skeeter?

Over at Bioethics blog, there's a link to a story in Forward (registration required) regarding a controversy which involves, among other things, Orthodox circumcision customs.

Let repugnance inform your wisdom?

...prominent Orthodox rabbi and medical ethicist Rabbi Moshe Tendler, a bioethics expert and Talmud instructor at Yeshiva University, who was criticized by ultra-Orthodox leaders and newspapers after he was quoted in the press as saying that the practice of metzitzah b'peh, or oral suction of the circumcision wound, should be conducted with a sterile tube.
In many ultra-Orthodox circles, especially within certain Hasidic sects, the ritual is performed by having the mohel suck blood from the wound with his lips directly on the baby's penis.
Tendler spoke out against the practice following reports last month that a Jewish infant had died of herpes and that several other babies had contracted the virus after being circumcised by mohel Rabbi Yitzchok Fischer, who practiced direct oral suction...

Well.

It's hard to know what to say.

Read the whole thing?

In another post, bioethicist Art Caplan remarks on Diana Schaub and her love of Star Trek. Said love actually is rather remarkable.

You may remember that Eric remarked on it some time ago.

Diana Schaub, a Loyola College professor and adviser to President Bush, is convinced that cloning and embryonic stem cell research are evil. She says this belief was formed, in part, by watching Star Trek.
The show has "left me receptive to the view that mortality is, if not precisely a good thing, then at least the necessary foundation of other very good things," she wrote in an article last year. "There is something misguided about the attempt to overcome mortality."
"Cloning is an evil," she wrote in an article published in 2003. "It is slavery, plus abortion."

I'm glad to see it getting more exposure. I believe that this may be the article referenced above. Though parts of it may have come from here, just as easily. Over to you, Diana...

Kass suggests there is another difference as well. In the "Foreword," he says that with slavery or despotism, it is easy to identify evil as evil....But in the realm of bioethics, the evils we face (if indeed they are evils) are intertwined with the goods we so keenly seek....with considerable trepidation, I feel I must take issue with the statement. The trepidation arises because Leon Kass was my teacher at the University of Chicago and because I believe the nation at large is now blessed in having him as a teacher.

Scarlett, we have ourselves an abolitionist.

Cloning is an evil; and cloning for the purpose of research actually exacerbates the evil by countenancing the willful destruction of nascent human life. Moreover, it proposes doing this on a mass scale, as an institutionalized and routinized undertaking to extract medical benefits for those who have greater power. It is slavery plus abortion.

It's hard to know what to say.

posted by Justin on 03.22.05 at 01:25 AM





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Well, I'm not allowed to say "Ouch," so I won't!

But in any event Justin (and I say this not to egg you on....), your seeming quest for immortality might make you incorrigible:

We are told in Genesis that the earliest generations of men, through Noah, had lifespans closer to a millennium than a century. We also know that things ended rather badly for them. While Star Trek’s “Methuselah” reforms, the Biblical Methuselah was done away with in the Flood. Would greater longevity for modern man result in the same incorrigibility?

Eric Scheie   ·  March 22, 2005 08:08 AM


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