As I write, news outlets are reporting what AP calls “the first reported use of [Chinese] artificial intelligence to direct a hacking campaign in a largely automated fashion.” On the euthanasia/suicide front, a Canadian reports losing two grandmothers to Medical Assistance in Dying.

Serendipitously, we open this issue with a doubly timely essay by Edward Short alerting us that “with AI knocking on the door, and the prospect of so influential a technology falsifying language to an extent scarcely imaginable . . . Christ’s insistence that we follow Him as ‘the way, the truth, and the life’ has never had so urgent an import.” Noting that “We have been sounding the tocsin of truth about the evils of killing innocent life in and outside the womb for over five decades,” Short exhorts prolifers to “continue ringing that tocsin on behalf of the life of all those threatened by . . . the culture of death.” Among the newly threatened are the aged and infirm of England if, as seems likely, Parliament succeeds in legalizing assisted suicide. Short highlights the address in the House of Lords of Baroness May of Maidenhead, the former Prime Minister Theresa May. Not recognizable in her political heyday as a pro-life defender of any stripe, May vigorously opposed this bill: “I worry that, as we have seen in countries where there is such a law, people will feel that they must end their lives simply because they feel that they are a burden on others. I worry about the impact that it will have on people with disabilities, with chronic illness and with mental health problems, because there is a risk that legalizing assisted dying reinforces the dangerous notion that some lives are less worth living than others.”

Next, longtime contributor Wesley Smith eyes the imperiled legacy of Dame Cecily Saunders, founder of the hospice movement. Smith, who has served as a hospice volunteer and has seen the difference hospice care made for his parents, notes, “Before the emergence of the modern hospice movement, dying had become institutionalized, with most deaths occurring in sterile hospital rooms rather than in one’s own bed. It was almost as if people died hidden away in dark corners.” Unfortunately, today he hears “horror stories of poor-performing hospices. Some even believe that hospices are more concerned with patients dying sooner rather than with providing the level of care that Saunders pioneered and championed.” And alarmingly, “For the past several decades, euthanasia/assisted suicide ideologues have . . . strived—too often success-fully—to redefine homicide or the prescription of poison as ‘medical treatment’ they euphemistically call MAID (medical aid in dying).” Smith lays out the kind of guard rails needed to ensure the integrity of hospice care in the era of assisted suicide.

Leanne Hart, a newcomer to our pages, offers her perspective on the pro-life world as a “Chinese; adoptee; Catholic; and business owner.” In response to seg-ments of the adoptee community who argue that “You have a ‘good’ adoption story, Leanne, and not all of us have that,” Hart expresses her conviction that “For me, adoption was not perfection or tragedy, it was a possibility to experience life. And

sometimes the possibility itself is miraculous.” Sadly, “One of the sharpest divides I’ve felt is between pro-life and pro-choice adoptees.” In certain circles, “there’s an assumption that we support a woman’s ‘right’ to abortion to prevent more ‘bad’ adoption stories.” But Hart takes a different path: “What matters to me now is bearing witness to the dignity of life, to the complexity of adoption, and to my Catholic faith that holds me steady when nothing else does.”

William Van Ornum shares another area of pro-life involvement in “Supporting People with Developmental Disabilities.” The father of a 40-year-old man with Down syndrome, Van Ornum recounts some of the failures, missteps, genuine progress, and continuing challenges America faces in better recognizing the moral and legal rights and needs of individuals with developmental disabilities and their families. Arguing that “the dignity and quality of life of developmentally disabled people falls under the direct purview of the pro-life movement,” Van Ornum reminds us that “the pro-life commitment does not end at birth.”

First-time contributor Stephen P. White also has in mind a more capacious set of pro-life concerns and suggests that Catholic social teaching can offer a way of identifying, understanding, and framing these concerns. White advocates “for a vision of what is best for the human person rather than merely a defense (as necessary as such a defense may be) against what is worst.” As we navigate “a post-Dobbs world, with new challenges to human dignity growing under various guises—from advancing euthanasia to the rise of artificial intelligence,”—White recommends Catholic social teaching to prolifers as “a way to frame these challenges that is comprehensive, durable, flexible, and consistent.”

Turning to abortion, Alexandra DeSanctis grapples with the difficult truth that for most Americans, “while abortion may be an evil, it’s one we can’t do without.” DeSanctis unravels the daunting implications of “why young Americans are more likely to identify as pro-life than older Americans but are nevertheless also more likely to say that they’d drive their friend to an abortion clinic.” We will have our work cut out for us in the years ahead, she warns, since the unsavory truth is that “some of our fellow citizens—perhaps more of them than we’d care to admit—believe that killing innocent human beings is an acceptable trade-off for preserving our present social order.”

Next, Jason Morgan takes a deep dive into the world of “Modern Antinatalism: Against Life, Against Humanity.” While some people have always made the case that life isn’t worth the pain, today, “What many antinatalists are saying is that it is not just inconvenient to be born or better to put oneself out of one’s misery, but that it is morally wrong to give life to another person.” Morgan’s counterargument focuses on a wider perspective: “Human lives may or may not be ‘meaningless’ [. . .] from the perspective of the universe. But the universe is not at issue here. Human lives are. And human lives most certainly are not ‘meaningless’ to other humans.” His “pronatalist” conclusion packs a punch: “Human beings have always known that life is hard and that suffering is the lot of all who see the light of day. But almost all of us have chosen to live anyway. Not because we expect the pleasure that might

await us to cancel out some of our pain. But because there are others whose certain pain, should we no longer exist, stays our hands and opens our hearts once more to the gift of life we have been given.”

That takes us to Peter Pavia’s “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of,” a change of pace that also reflects on whether life is worth living—and what makes it so. Pavia presents a film-noir-like telling of two would-be authors moving through life from youthful optimism to tempered ambitions. As it opens, “we were convinced the pot of gold would be ours as soon as a few conflicts got resolved in our favor. Prizes. Awards. We’d live like mini-Hemingways— expatriates, bullfights, all of that.” Near the close, Pavia references The Maltese Falcon whose last line provided his essay’s title:

The “priceless” figurine of the title is within reach of all the principals. The stuff of dreams is at hand, standing in for luxury and limitless sexual license—and expatriatism and bullfights—but for one brutal reality: The bird is a fake, a lacquered manque of no provenance, a fraud, a fugazi, a nothing. It’s worthless. Does an authentic Falcon even exist, or is it a myth, itself the mere stuff of dreams? We never find out.

We’ll let readers “find out” what led him to this observation, and what followed. In October we learned of the sudden death of our faithful contributor and senior editor William Murchison. Anne Conlon has written a stirring tribute to him (see the inside front cover): she also takes her final editing bow, as she is retiring after thirty years with the Review. In this issue we retrieve from our archives a 2007 article by Mr. Murchison on Children of Men, the movie adaptation of P.D. James’s novel The Children of Men. A fan of the book, he did not like the “dark, dingy and weird” film; yet, he writes, out of bad may come good if a defective movie stirs customers to see what the book is all about.” We will sorely miss his unique voice in our pages.

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This issue’s From the Website selections include John Grondelski’s account of our October conference in DC, “Leading with Love,” a gathering of national pro-life pregnancy-care leaders. (Appendix D is a reprint of the Catholic News Agency’s Tessa Gervasini’s take on the conference, which was co-sponsored by Catholic Uni-versity.) Also from the website: richly rewarding offerings by Laura Echevarria, Diane Moriarty, and Tara Jernigan. Our appendices include Mary Rose Somarriba’s Verily interview with Kylee Jean Heap of Support After Abortion, Clark D. Forsythe’s argument against prosecuting women undergoing abortion, and John Mize on the brutal reality of coerced abortion.

Ellen Wilson Fielding

Senior Editor