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 - About this issue . . .
. . . Senior editor William Murchison’s “Farewell Roe, Hello Dobbs” leads our issue with a bracing evaluation of cultural realities in the United States post-Roe. The pro-life cause in the 21st century consists in continuing, against hardship and rebuke—including political rebuke—to proclaim the moral worthiness of life yet unborn. That a Court or a Congress might buy into such a duty is logically consequent upon the nation’s antecedent understanding of duty and love, and its attachment to those virtues.
As I write this, just days after the November elections, those who would protect the unborn have indeed suffered political rebuke. Now that Dobbs sent the matter of abortion back to the states, the consequences of almost 50 years of Roe and the erosion of the culture are inescapable—aided mightily by over a billion dollars of false advertising aimed against anti-abortion politicians (we know of no anti-abortion state law that does not include a life-of-the mother exception, for example).
Writing in 1979, merely six years after Roe, our founding editor, J.P. McFadden, observed with prescience: “The greater the polarization becomes, the harder it is to imagine what kind of compromise will heal a wound so festered. . . . Solomon in his wisdom suggested that each party get half the baby, but that was not the solution—the solution came from the mother who chose life.”
Encouraging mothers and others to choose life continues to be our mission, and the issue you hold has abundant evidence that the brightest minds and hearts share our conviction. Our articles include fascinating explorations of the results of embryonic vs. adult stem-cell research; the rise of transhumanism; our understanding of freedom vs. liberty; and the current, alarming, persecution of pro-life activists. But we will not be deterred, and, on a positive note, if you would like to see brilliant pro-life scholarship and joyful pro-life activism in living color, please tune in
to our website and watch the film of our Great Defender of Life dinner (October 6) honoring brilliant law professor Gerald Bradley and New York City’s Pregnancy Help, Inc. (https://humanlifereview.com/special-event-great-defender-life-dinner-2022/). Printed emarks and photos will appear in our next issue.
Our thanks for permission to reprint go to the good people at: First Things (Appendix A); Catholic News Association (Appendix B); Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (Appendix C); and National Review Online (Appendices D and E). It’s been a remarkable year! We look forward to bringing you more information and inspiration, for life.
Maria McFadden Maffucci
Editor in Chief
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Let’s face it. Until the Supreme Court overturned Roe last June, most Americans had largely ignored the nation’s ongoing abortion debate for almost 50 years. Why? Maybe because to pay attention would entail coming down on one side or the other regarding the desirability of killing little humans, ones that look just like the sonogram on the fridge. Or, as William Murchison puts it in “Farewell Roe; Hello Dobbs,” our lead article, “We seem as a nation, as a people, to desire a little of this and a little of that: not wholesale permission to abort and not a wholesale prohibition either.” For nearly half a century most Americans have been irresolute, comfortable with the judicially imposed Roe, willfully ignorant about the details.
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