NASA and Planned Parenthood Share Bioethicist

As a science fiction reader, I'm concerned that the bioethicist for NASA can't even tell which humans are human enough to have their rights protected.

What's going to happen when he runs into another species somewhere "out there"?

Paul Root Wolpe, Ph.D. has been the NASA bioethicist for a few years, but I wasn't aware until this Philadelphia Inquirer article. I did know that he's the bioethicist for Planned Parenthood and the President-Elect of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. I should have known all of this, since it's on his University of Pennsylvania biography page. He's a senior fellow at the Center for Bioethics at U Penn, working with Art Caplan.

It's a shame that the major names in bioethics are not prolife. Instead, they discriminate among which humans are human-enough for protection and which are not. And the definition seems to change and grow narrower with each year.

Discrimination is ugly and anti-life.

That's where each of us can make a difference. When we see the name of a non-ethical, "pro-choice" person who has been appointed or hired to work with an agency, bureacracy, or institution that is funded with our tax money, we should complain. We can let our Legislators know that it is not acceptable to pay for any activity that runs the risk of encouraging abortion, euthanasia, or destructive research.

If we want our voice to be heard, we must ensure that our elected and appointed officials and the bureaucrats know what motivates us to spend our extra dollars on elections and politics and what gets us out to vote.

Watch your professional associations and memberships, too. Step up, attend meetings and make your voice heard.

A few years ago, I resigned from the American Medical Association over their support for making Plan B over the counter. This may have been the one and only time that the AMA ever endorsed taking any activity from the exclusive control of physicians. (And we certainly did not have the excellent research that's been done since, by Durand, et. al.)

However, it soon became clear that if people like me left the AMA, the membership would have nothing but pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia, and pro-utilitarian research advocates. Then, a friend pointed out to me that a wise Teacher once told us to be "salt and light" in the world.

So, I went back to school and started crashing attending every committee and council meeting I could. My letters to the editors became more focused and regular. And I started Life Ethics.org.

Y'all write your legislators and friends, and let's ask NASA to ask Dr. Wolpe to reconsider his concurrent association with Planned Parenthood. Or ask them to find a bioethicist who actually believes that all humans are human enough.