Ethics Headlines            


Volume 1, Number 8
                            Friday, February 25, 2005


Ethics Headlines is an ethics-in-the-news clippling 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. You may also visit the ethics course web site.

SUBSCRIBE. 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--click on the headline to read the full article
  • Kansas attorney general seeks records of late-term abortions. The Kansas attorney general is demanding abortion clinics turn over the complete medical records of nearly 90 women and girls, saying he needs the material for an investigation into underage sex and illegal late-term abortions.
    Two clinics are fighting the request in Kansas Supreme Court, saying the state has no right to such personal information.
  • Children 'harmed' by vegan diets. Putting children on strict vegan diets is "unethical" and could harm their development, a US scientist has argued. Lindsay Allen, of the US Agricultural Research Service, attacked parents who insisted their children lived by the maxim "meat is murder".
  • Iran girl gets 100 lashes for sex. A teenage girl and two young men in Iran have been sentenced to lashes for having sex. The court dismissed the girl's claim that she was raped. It said she had sex of her own free will, the official Iran Daily newspaper reported.
  • Coming to grips with abortion's new vocabulary.  Abortion is legal. It must stay safely available. For rich and for poor. Because, as anyone who has ever advocated war knows, sometimes there are tragic conflicts of life with life. It's that stark and that simple.
  • A crushing choice for Ethiopian mothers with HIV. I am dying," a young mother told a worker. "I want my child here at your place. He is too sick and no relatives will take him in."
  • Defining free speech. Four months after The David Project released Columbia Unbecoming, Columbia is embroiled in a public fight over allegations against the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department...it is essential for all involved to understand that nothing described in the film constitutes either harassment or intimidation in any formal sense.
    • Panel defends academic freedom. After only a matter of months in the public eye, the Columbia University  controversy is already drawing comparisons to the McCarthyist scandals of the Cold War era. By Lisa Hirschmann, Poly '04.
  • British fox hunters test bounds of new ban. Baying packs of hounds and a cavalcade of riders set out across the English and Welsh countryside Saturday to test the limits of a ban on the time-honored British sport of hunting foxes The controversial law, which has pitched animal rights campaigners against hunters who trace their pursuit back centuries, came into force Friday after the Labor government forced the legislation through parliament late last year.
  • Don't give me an 'R.' Despite moral watchdogs lamenting Hollywood's vile tendencies, the studios have actually been cleaning up their act. R-rated films, once the studios' mainstay, are on the decline, both in numbers and in lure. In the last five years, R-rated pics have dwindled from 212 in 1999 to just 147 last year.
  • Nebraska Supreme Court spares life of dog. The high court ruled unanimously that Murphy, an Alaskan malamute-shepherd mix belonging to Doug and Lorele Dittoe, should not be killed for causing "relatively minor injury" to the other dog after slipping out of the couple's fenced-in yard.
  • Court rejects challenge to abortion ruling. The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a challenge to its landmark 1973 ruling legalizing abortion by the woman once known as "Jane Roe," who was at the center of the historic case.
  • High court to review assisted-suicide law. The Supreme Court on Tuesday said it will hear a challenge to the nation's only assisted suicide law, taking up a case embracing the Bush administration's appeal to stop doctors from helping terminally ill patients die more quickly.
  • Concern in Africa over private doctors giving AIDS drugs. Patients are at risk because the medicine is not being prescribed correctly, experts say.
  • Moving stem cells front and center. Dr. Hans Keirstead, an assistant professor at the University of California Irvine, has been making paralyzed rats walk again, using a treatment based on human embryonic stem cells. Next year he and his corporate partner, Geron, plan to try treating people who have recent spinal cord injuries, in what would almost certainly be the first human trial of any therapy derived from such cells.
Previous Weeks' Headlines