Preface.

• Author: Bopp, James, Jr.

The feature article in this edition attempts to find middle ground between the supporters and opponents of biotechnology by perpetuating the existing legal compromise pertaining to the complete range of health and welfare doctrines relevant to the biotechnological industry. The author, Nathan A. Adams, IV, Ph.D., J.D., aspires neither to add to nor detract from this liberal democratic consensus, but to preserve its constitutive balance between positivism and natural law and over-regulation and under-regulation in the hopes of stabilizing new political fault lines developing around the few biotechnological innovations already grabbing headlines. The most feasible solution is to extend the existing liberal democratic compromise with respect to equal protection, reproductive rights, the First Amendment, human subject experimentation, patent law, and parental rights. This includes banning or monopolizing certain biotechnologies and extending substantive special respect to the ex vivo living human embryo. He concludes that biotechnology must not be left to regulate itself.

The Verbatim section is a summary and critique of the new nation-wide survey of euthanasia commissioned in 2001 by the Dutch Ministers of Health and Justice, published in 2003. Author Richard Fenigsen, M.D., Ph.D., examines the salient features of the report, its deficiencies, and its alarming statistics. The number of cases of involuntary active euthanasia remains high, around 1,000 cases annually One hundred infants were euthanized in 2001. Smaller numbers of children are being euthanized...