The Review

The Human Life Review is the only publication of its kind in the world: a journal devoted to life issues, primarily abortion (William F. Buckley once praised it as “the focus of civilized discussion of the abortion issue”), but also “neonaticide,” genetic engineering, cloning, and fetal tissue experimentation, as well as the end-of-life issues of euthanasia, assisted suicide and suicide. We also publish articles dealing with more general questions of family and society: what the “abortion mentality” has done to our culture; how moral relativism has pervaded our political process as well as our educational system; and how the debates over day care and the children’s rights movements, as well as the controversy over health care and end-of-life decision making, reflect a society sharply divided on the most basic moral questions.

Each issue of the Review features original articles and an Appendices section, which reprints opinion columns from around the U.S. and abroad. The Human Life Review has had an impressive roster of contributors, including the late Clare Boothe Luce and Malcolm Muggeridge, John T. Noonan, James L. Buckley, Cardinal John J. O’Connor,

Maria McFadden Maffucci, President, with Micheal Flaherty, 2015 Great Defender of Life

Congressman Henry Hyde, Dr. C. Everett Koop, Nat Hentoff, Hadley Arkes, and Mary Ann Glendon. Recent regular contributors have included Senior Editors William Murchison, Ellen Wilson Fielding, as well as Professor George McKenna, Mary Meehan, and Wesley Smith, recent author of A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy.

Clarke Forsythe

Kristan Hawkins

Reverend Ruben Diaz, 2016 Great Defender of Life

The Foundation

The Human Life Foundation, Inc. is an independent, non-sectarian, not-for-profit 501(c)(3) corporation started in 1975 by the late James P. McFadden to promote and help provide alternatives to abortion. We pursue these goals through educational and charitable means. The Human Life Review, a quarterly journal now in its 30th consecutive year of publication, focuses on abortion while also featuring articles on a variety of other life issues. The Foundation also sponsors a matching grant program which helps support crisis pregnancy centers around the country.

All contributions to the Human Life Foundation are tax deductible.

Our Founder

James Patrick McFadden (1930-1998) was a journalist and publisher, who began his career at National Review magazine in 1956, later becoming the Associate Publisher. In 1973, in response to the Roe v. Wade decision, he founded the Ad Hoc Committee in Defense of Life, an anti-abortion lobbying organization. In 1975, he founded the Human Life Foundation, and its quarterly, the Human Life Review. He also founded in 1975 the National Committee of Catholic Laymen, which produced several publications, including the still-published newsletter Catholic Eye.

J. P. McFadden died on October 17, 1998, after a five-year struggle with cancer.

What Others Are Saying About Us…

The Review has been called

“by far the most valuable and challenging pro-life journal that, to my knowledge, has ever existed”
—Washington Post and Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff

“a scholarly quarterly that is, well, indispensable to anyone contending for the culture of life against the culture of death”
—the late Father Richard John Neuhaus, Founding Editor of First Things

“arguably the finest collection of articles and commentaries on human life to appear anywhere in any language”
—His Eminence Cardinal John O’Connor in Catholic New York

“the distinguished quarterly that for nearly twenty-five years has provided a continuing stream of intellectual enlightenment on the intersection of law, morals and medicine”
—Michael M. Uhlmann in Crisis magazine

In addition, Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette raves, “Every time a Review arrives in its plain brown wrapper, its contents illuminate and electrify. Like a flash of lightning on a dark night.”