
Humans Are More Important Than Pigs
Mainstream bioethics has long sought to deconstruct human exceptionalism by claiming that species membership is irrelevant to moral worth.The chronic shortage of organs for transplantation has some bioethicists supporting unethical curatives, such as doing away with the dead-donor rule, allowing organ procurement to be not only paired with euthanasia — already being done in Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands — but also used as a means of euthanasia, and even allowing healthy people to consent to donating their vital organs. But another potential avenue of increasing the supply of organs — xenotransplantation — is not, in my view, morally problematic in the least. The idea is to genetically alter pigs or baboons to make their organs compatible for use in human beings. This has now been done successfully for a second time in a human research subject. From the BioEdge story: A 58-year-old patient with terminal heart Read More ›