Life Issues, Medical Choices: Questions and Answers for Catholics

Medical and technological advances over the last decades have left millions of Catholics grappling with tough issues. When is it permissible to remove a feeding tube from a patient? Is the use of contraceptives for medical purposes acceptable? Is it morally acceptable to try to select the sex of one's baby? What is the difference between ordinary and extraordinary means of preserving life? How does determination of death affect organ donation?

Life Issues, Medical Choices not only provides answers to many questions troubling Catholics, it also supplies fundamental principles of Catholic thought to help readers arrive at morally sound decisions in those areas that have yet to be settled.

Janet Smith and Christopher Kaczor offer clear guidance to help you make decisions about complex medical and life issues.

JANET E. SMITH is the Father Michael J. McGivney Chair of Life Ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. She wrote Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later and Why Humanae Vitae Was Right: A Reader. She speaks nationally and internationally on the church’s teaching on sexuality and on bioethics. Over one million copies of her talk “Contraception: Why Not” have been distributed. DR. CHRISTOPHER KACZOR holds a PH.D. from the University of Notre Dame, studied as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Cologne in Germany, and is the Robert H. Taylor Chair in Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He wrote Proportionalism and the Natural Law Tradition, The Edge of Life: Human Dignity and Contemporary Bioethics and How to Stay Catholic in College.