At our 50th anniversary dinner last fall, co-host Jack Fowler rolled his eyes at the notion of “depressed” Americans who, unhappy with the election results, wanted to move to Canada: “They kill depressed people in Canada,” he quipped. That might come as a surprise to Hollywood types who make gauzy films about euthanasia, but it’s no surprise here. Since its beginning, the Review has paid close attention to post-war efforts to rehabilitate “mercy killing” in the wake of the Holocaust. And to the metastasizing number of kills in countries that have legalized what Canada calls MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying), as if doctors who administer deadly drugs really are—as Hollywood depicts them—mere servants of empowered patients seeking to schedule their own death. Hardly.

“Less than a decade into legalized assisted suicide,” writes senior editor Ellen Wilson Fielding in “The Inalienable Gift of Human Dignity,” “with annual body counts mushrooming and embarrassing stories of impoverished Canadian elderly and handicapped being counseled to consider suicide, it begins to look like Ottawa has come to consider the only good Canadian a dead Canadian.” In this wide-ranging essay, Fielding looks at modern cultural avatars like Brave New World and other dystopian novels, which “have insinuated into their futuristic social fabric various forms of expedited ‘assisted suicide’ or euthanasia.” She then makes her way back to the Old Testament, the urtext of Western civilization and repository of its erstwhile moral codes: “While our ancestors apparently resembled us in being tempted to neglect or mistreat their feeble and senile elders,” she gleans from Sirach and Job, “they differed from a good number of us in refusing to regard those elders as lacking inherent human dignity.” As in: Honor thy father and mother. (Not to mention Thou shalt not kill.)

A “late-comer” to the euthanasia debate, England recently opted to join Canada (and other countries including Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Belgium, as well as 10 American states) in trading the age-old sanctity-of-human-life ethic—and Hippocratic Oath—for something more suited to modern times. As William Murchison reports in “The Irreligious Embrace of Self-Slaughter,” Parliament “made international headlines” last fall when it “voted in principle for a bill that, once implemented . . . would let doctors ‘terminate’ the lives of the ‘terminally ill.’” (“Terminally ill” is where Canada, now seeking to kill the mentally ill, started in 2016.) “A war against life goes on,” says Murchison, with “weariness and futility” taking center stage and “apostles of the modern” like Kim Leadbeater, the bill’s Dickensian chief proponent, enshrining “a perverse conviction of life as essentially worth neither the pain nor the sorrow nor the time, nor, frankly, the money.” Best to put inconvenient people out of our misery.

“The civilized obligation,” says Murchison, hearkening back to what we believed just yesterday, “the God-loving obligation, is to the relief of misery—a different thing from its extinction.” But have relief and extinction become synonymous? After all, abortion, the extinction of an unborn innocent, is posited as relieving the mother of an inconvenient life inside her. In “When a “Nurse” Kills Her Unaware Patients,” Gerard Mundy, a new contributor and philosophy professor, uses the case of a renegade medical practitioner to frame an important lesson in logic: “If one finds disgust,” he insists, “in the acts of [one] who is charged with killing her patients, but simultaneously believes in the moral licitness of someone committing an abortion, one must analyze and refine one’s first principles and premises.” Which is precisely what Mundy does in this carefully argued article, challenging abortion ideology adherents “to defend rationally how the killing of an unaware innocent child . . . may be licit but not the killing of an unaware health care patient.”

Perry Hendricks is also a new contributor, and also a philosopher. His provocatively titled “Abortion Restrictions Are Good for Black Women” comes to the Review having been accepted by another publisher but then rejected after “a social media firestorm,” set off by a fellow academic who questioned on X (Twitter) how an article exhibiting “patent sexism, racism and moralism about healthcare” could have made it “through peer review.” The New Bioethics, a journal that claims on its website to provide “a space for dialogue between different perspectives” and “offers the chance to find new kinds of common ground,” initiated another “peer review” and promptly rescinded its acceptance. We invited Hendricks to send us the offending article, in which he argues that “being prevented from performing a morally wrong act is good for someone,” and since “abortion is morally wrong” and Black women have the highest abortion rate, abortion restrictions are especially good for them. A “contentious” claim, he admits, but one that “depends on the ethics of abortion,” not on the author’s sex or the color of his skin.

We follow with “Changing the Culture of Contraception” by Karl Stephan, an engineering professor from Texas who wrote for us last year about the Kate Cox case (“A Pro-Abortion Epiphany,” Spring 2024). Here Stephan argues that the “the push for autonomy,” which artificial contraception celebrates, has become “a foundational aspect of popular culture.” “Anyone,” he says, “secular or religious, who hopes to change some aspects of that culture must start from where it is, not from where we wish it might be.” As we are seeing today, cultural addiction to abortion as a contraceptive backup won’t be cured by law—pro-life measures in the states have taken a drubbing since Dobbs—so much as by radical conversion to another point of view. Natural family planning (NFP), Stephan posits, perhaps “rebranded as something like ‘natural birth control to widen its appeal,” offers a “family of techniques and practices that all begin by taking a woman’s biology as given, rather than as just raw material to be manipulated.” Something even progressive-minded women might be ready to embrace (see Alexandra DeSanctis’s “Feminists and Contraception” in our Spring 2023 issue).

From artificial contraception to artificial intelligence, or AI. It’s hard to avoid the topic these days what with the startling introduction of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI Chatbot, rocking the stock market even as I write. Jason Morgan’s painstaking review essay of Ray Kurzweil’s latest book, The Singularity Is Nearer, could not be better timed. Readers may be familiar with Kurzweil, the computer scientist—and patriarch of the current generation of tech-bros—who predicted nearly two decades ago that by 2050 humans would merge with machines, a convergence he branded the “Singularity.” Definitely not, argues Morgan in “The Singularity Is a Mirror”— not near, not possible, not ever:

Humans are not things, not machines. We are also not information, and are not information’s by-product. Neither are the machines we build. So, no matter how hard we try, we will never be able to “merge” with computers. We can go on training computers to ape our abilities, and soon, if not already, computers will surpass us in the subtle motions of mind. But that will eternally be a derived achievement. Doubly so. First there was us, then there were computers. And before there was either, there was some greater mind, from which the orderliness of information and the ability to know what information means—that is, the mystery of consciousness at play—first came.

Amen to that.

* * * * *

At our anniversary dinner, longtime contributor Wesley Smith paid special tribute to two fellow anti-euthanasia stalwarts who are no longer with us—Rita Marker and Nat Hentoff. Smith’s remarks, plus tributes to other pro-life heroes, including HLF board chairman Jim McLaughlin’s stirring salute to our editor in chief and the journal she shepherds, follow Morgan’s essay. (The complete speaking program can be accessed on our website.) In John Burger’s “Intellectual Backbone of the Pro-life Movement Celebrates 50 Years” (Appendix A), our editors reflect on the Review’s history and its unparalleled role in the abortion debate. The text of Victor Lee Austin’s keynote address at our “Breaking Through” event last summer is next (Appendix B), along with remarks by Diane Moriarty, who also spoke at the conference. The titles of George Marlin’s “What Catholics Were Thinking on Election Day” (Appendix C) and Michael New’s “New Knights of Columbus/Marist Poll Shows Strong Support for Pro-Life Policies” (Appendix D) speak for themselves. As do “How the Pro-Life Generation Is Redefining ‘Unthinkable,’” by John Grondelski (Appendix E) and Kate Quinones’ “California Settles with David Daleiden” (Appendix F). We close with a lovely column from our own website, “Reflections on the March for Life” by Eva Cooley. “It is no small thing,” she writes, “to have tens of thousands of men and women from all different stages of life, marching in a mass of unity and joy.” Not a small thing, indeed.