The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has raised concerns about a range of freedom of conscience questions related to protection of life issues and supports including conscience provisions in proposed funding bills.

This report from the U.S. Census Bureau published in September 2012 shows that the nation’s official poverty rate in 2011 was 15.0 percent, with 46.2 million people in poverty.

Patrick McCormick is a professor of religious studies at Gonzaga University, in Spokane, Wash., where he teaches about Christian ethics, medical ethics and Catholic social teachings. He is author of Sin as Addiction (Paulist Press, 1989) and Character, Choices & Community: The Three Faces of Christian Ethics (Paulist Press, 1998). He has served as a consultant on various hospital […]

Barbara A. Koenig is a profesor with the Institute for Health and Aging at the University of California, San Francisco.

Margaret McLean is a senior lecturer in the religious studies department at Santa Clara University in California and associate director and director of bioethics for the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Her background is in life sciences and divinity; she has a doctorate in ethics from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She teaches Christian ethics, […]

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is director of Organs Watch, a human rights documentation center that tracks the ethical and legal uses and sources of transplant organs globally. Scheper-Hughes is also a professor of medical anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Paige Cunningham is an attorney and educator who is the executive director of The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity in Deerfield, Ill.

Stephen Streed is director of chaplaincy for Eventide Lutheran Senior Communities, based in Moorhead, Minn. He can talk about the composition of the ethics committee at the home and about issues facing ethics committees in geriatric situations.

The Ohio Health Care Ethics Committees Information Project, run by Cleveland State University, has surveyed hospital ethics committees throughout the state twice.