Free Republic

There's an argument out there that oral sex is not sex. For some grown-ups, it's a way to deny that they're cheating. To some young people, oral sex preserves virginity—technically speaking—and allows for what is perceived as risk-free sexual intimacy. From a medical perspective, however, this is sex—and generally, as practiced, it's unsafe. People seem clueless that sexually transmitted diseases such as herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and human papillomavirus can take hold in parts of the oral cavity during sex with infected partners and that the oral contact can infect the genitals, too. HPV is a particularly scurrilous threat, since it...

Terri Schiavo got her day in court--or rather her years in court--but that time was mostly spent on tugs of war over states' rights, separation of powers, and legal precedents, issues utterly irrelevant to her medical condition. And so she departs this world not in peace but in bitter turmoil among those she loved and with lingering uncertainty as to her state of mind. Her last in-depth neurological evaluation was back in 2002. At that time her parents, and the two doctors the court allowed them to choose, believed she had some minimal level of consciousness that enabled her to...