We begin our 52nd year of publishing with timely and important articles from our two new editors, Mary Rose Somarriba and Christopher M. Reilly.

In “DIY Abortion Returns: From Back Alleys to Bathrooms,” Somarriba makes the chilling case that the easy availability of “medication abortion” has brought back the dangers of the back alley. “In a strange full-circle moment,” she writes, “the abortion lobby that once invoked the horrors of self-managed abortion and demanded doctor-directed procedures now promotes at-home abortion as a comparable solution.” The abortion “pill,” really two medications taken separately, is now the dominant method of abortion in the U.S. Women lose their unborn children alone, in their bathrooms, with excruciating pain, tremendous bleeding, and often (more than with surgical abor-tions) complications requiring emergency care. Many have not been examined by any medical professionals, and, in the case of an ectopic pregnancy, “their life-threatening condition will be left untreated and could lead to a ruptured fallopian tube.” Somar-riba includes harrowing first-person accounts from several sources and points to other dangers of the pills, including coercion—recently exposed in several news accounts—where women are deceived into ingesting the drugs by those who want the child dead. What about any restrictions? The abortion lobby is not having it. As Somarriba writes, it is clear that now “The goal is abortion access, not women’s health.”

Debates about AI are prominent in the news and across academic disciplines. So, we ask, “Is AI Pro-Life?” Christopher Reilly, author of the recent book AI and Sin, gives us a resounding No. Although there are some positive uses for the technology, they pale in comparison to the dangers. AI, because of “its anthropomorphic delu-sion that nonhumans can have distinct human qualities—depreciates the aspects of human nature that truly make it exceptional.” And yet many are now enamored with this delusion, sometimes tragically; young people have taken their own lives because of a “relationship” with a chatbot. Regarding pro-life issues, the age of AI is the “logical conclusion of man’s pursuit of power over the world,” and “power is also the core value of the culture of death”—“power over our own bodies and any persons conceived in it,” in abortion, “power over nature” in the eugenic screening of embryos, and so on. In this fascinating essay, Reilly traces the roots of AI in our history and explains why we are so tempted to embrace it, at our own peril.

What about “pro-Natalism”—isn’t that pro-life? Not so fast, writes Nicholas Frankovich in “The Strange Bedfellows of Modern Pronatalism.” The movement, he writes, is “a precarious coalition of visionaries and pragmatists.” While pragma-tists, like Catholic economist Catherine Pakaluk, believe having children increases personal happiness and improves society, she calls the overall movement an “unholy alliance.” Frankovich explains that the visionaries involve two camps: religious tradi-tionalists and techno-futurists, and enmeshed in both are some leaders with disturbing agendas, such as promoting eugenics, in-vitro fertilization and, as Frankovich writes “comic-book fantasies about dominance and hypermasculinity, the flip side of some

dark emotions about women.” This is an eye-opening read, and an important call to keep a critical eye on a movement that at first blush may seem completely benign.

We couldn’t ask for a more shining example of authentic pro-birth and pro-women leadership than what you will read next: Jennie Bradley Lichter’s address, “Leading with Love.” Last October, the Human Life Foundation joined with the Center for Law and the Human person at the Catholic University of America to hold an ecumenical conference of pregnancy resource center leaders. We were thrilled to have Lichter, president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, de-liver the keynote address on the university campus. It’s a masterful combination of spiritual exhortation, intellectual refreshment, first-hand experience of pregnancy resource centers, and surrounding it all, the conviction that “Love is the best way to draw people in”—especially love for the moms so that they feel “comfortable ap-proaching a pregnancy resource center or other organization.”

Our special section highlights another great event: our 22nd Annual Great De-fender of Life Dinner. On November 7, we honored Dr. Christina Francis, CEO of the American Association of Prolife OBGYNs (AAPLOG)—whose article, “It’s Time for a New Path Forward in Medicine” led our summer issue. We also hosted a fond salute to our retiring longtime editor (of 30 years!), Anne Conlon, who was lauded by Helen Alvaré, a Great Defender of Life herself. The evening was one of fellowship and joy, as you will see in the photos included. (You can also see the video online, at www.humanlifereview.com).

In her sobering article, “As Western Civilization Lay Dying,” senior editor Ellen Wilson Fielding writes about our “our civilization’s increasingly suicidal course.” She deftly sums it up: Our “many-faceted death urge manifests itself in orgies of liter-al death, including abortion, euthanasia and mass murders; in avoidance of life, such as the retreat from marriage and formation of families; and in escape from reality like transgenderism, social media, pornography, and the seemingly endless prolongation of adolescence.” Although the pursuit of human betterment has yielded many great benefits—advances in medicine, comfort, convenience—“many of us have lost our way” because all improvements in the human condition “leave unaddressed the real problem, the real human challenge in this and every age—how to discern our human purpose and attempt to fulfill it. What do humans mean? Why are we?”

But it’s not all doom and gloom, there are always signs of hope, illuminated by Fielding in her poignant prose. And because we need to stress the hope as well, we bring you a new feature, “Life Stories.” Every day, women choose to bring their babies to life, and their stories need to be heard. What better places to find them than the wonderful pregnancy resource centers we support? You may not know that our educational endeavors are just one part of the HLFs mission; since the beginning, we have also had a charitable aim, in offering grants to pregnancy resource centers around the country—organizations, like us, without major institutional support but dependent on the generosity of individuals. Our first story “My Daughter Emma” is from the Sisters of Life, the order founded by the late Cardinal John O’Connor specifically to foster a culture of life.

There is a subject that even those devoted to a culture of life find difficult: the adoption of frozen embryos. As Jason Morgan writes in “Booknotes,” even in the Catholic church, “there is no magisterial consensus on how these poor souls should be cared for, including how or even whether they should be freed from their frozen limbo.” Morgan reviews two books on the subject: the National Catholic Bioeth-ics Center’s Human Embryo Adoption, Volume Two: Catholic Arguments For and Against, edited by Trent Horn and Kent Lasnoski, and The Zygote of Christ and the Mystery of Man, by Francis Etheredge and Elizabeth Rex. Morgan lays out the strong opinions on both sides of the debate—from “embryo adoption is illicit and unlikely ever to be sanctioned” by the Church (Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk) to adop-tion is act of “redemptive love” and “an adopting love goes beyond the injustice of a child conceived ‘maternally homeless’ without endorsing the method through which the injustice was perpetrated” (Francis Etheredge). A thorny question, to be sure, and one greatly clarified for us in this articulate essay.

Leah Libresco Sargeant’s’ The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto is a notable and important new book. We are pleased to reprint remarks Sargeant gave at a book-signing event last fall. She says she was “counseled against” using the word “feminist,” now a controversial word in pro-life and some religious circles. But she insists on using it, properly: feminism is “at its core about responding to women as women. Not women as defective men, but distinctively women with our own

needs.” Another “negative” word in our culture: Dependence. Yet she counters this: dependence is actually what makes us human beings. We are dependent, first on our Creator, and then on our fellow humans, and acknowledging this dependence frees us to live and thrive. “Women are the canary in the coal mines of a society that makes an idol of autonomy” because “women are exposed early to the ways that our mere existence makes us vulnerable to the need someone else can place on us.” The false shame of being dependent is used to promote assisted suicide and eu-thanasia around the world. Sadly, in October, Uruguay became the first country in Latin America to legalize euthanasia. The HLR interviewed Professor Michael Pastorino, a professor of philosophy and bioethics at the Catholic University of Uruguay, about how the law came to be, what it involves, and what other countries

in Latin American may be next.

Finally, our appendix is an interview from Catholic World Report with Kat Talalas, assistant Director for Pro-life Communications at the Catholic Bishops’ conference, about their pro-life initiative Walking with Moms in Need. It’s a framework, she says, “for a parish to evaluate how they are serving pregnant and parenting moms in need in the community, discovering what resources are available, and prayerfully deciding what they can do uniquely to bridge gaps in services.” We wrap up with the hopeful message that we can all promote a culture of life, by sharing the truth found in these pages, and the life-saving resources in our communities, with others.

Maria McFadden Maffucci

Editor in Chief