Nat Hentoff

Veteran journalist Nat Hentoff, our Great Defender of Life honoree in 2005, is a selfprofessed atheist who believes as strongly as fervent religious believers do in the inviolability of human life. In the 1980s Hentoff, a nationally known columnist reporting on abuses of free speech and civil rights, announced in his Village Voice column that he was pro-life. “That was—and is—the most controversial position I’ve taken,” he writes in his article here, and he reveals how his position on life has affected his career. . . . Hentoff recalls how his fellow anti-war activist Mary Meehan “shook up both the staff and the readers of The Progressive when she wrote that ‘some of us who went through the antiwar struggles of the 1960s and 1970s are now active in the right-to-life movement. It is out of character for the left to neglect the weak and the helpless.’”

—Maria McFadden Maffucci, Introduction, Summer 2009 Human Life Review