“Benedict XVI, 95, Who Defended Doctrine, Dies.”  — The New York Times, January 1, 2023

    And so it goes: the gaze of society deflected, as usual, by the modern establishment’s failure—or refusal—to acknowledge what should be called and reckoned with as religious truth. As the Human Life Review’s Jim McFadden used to sigh, verbally, in signing off from...
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BOOK Review: TWO PATIENTS: MY CONVERSION FROM ABORTION TO LIFE-AFFIRMING MEDICINE

    TWO PATIENTS: MY CONVERSION FROM ABORTION TO LIFE-AFFIRMING MEDICINE Dr. John Bruchalski with Elise Daniel (Ignatius Press, 2022, paperback, 185 pp., $17.95) Reviewed by Maria McFadden Maffucci _____________________________________________________________________...
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Evelyn Waugh’s Displaced Persons

  “Throughout the early Middle Ages the monks were regarded by their lay contemporaries as the intercessors for the rest of society, divided against those who gave it livelihood by toil and those who defended it by arms. The monasteries therefore were not endowed solely as...
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Campaign Finance and the Right to Life

  In her important new book Dollars for Life, Mary Ziegler, the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California-Davis School of Law (formerly at Florida State University College of Law), traces how American prolifers of various descriptions and...
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How Assisted Suicide Advocacy Overturned Roe v. Wade

  Back in the 1990s, noting the success of abortion rights advocacy in the federal courts, the assisted-suicide movement moved to circumvent the democratic process by convincing the United States Supreme Court to impose an assisted suicide Roe v. Wade: a decision that would...
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Destined to Be Overturned

  Although Roe v. Wade and its companion case Doe v. Bolton survived almost 50 years, they were bound to be reversed someday after careful and honest scrutiny. Both cases began with falsehoods about the situations of Roe (Norma McCorvey) and Doe (Sandra Cano) asserted by the...
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A Paradox of Death

    Death is our ancient enemy, and yet in many lives there comes a time when we should not resist death but accept it. This is a paradox, and it poses a basic question: how to accept death while continuing to affirm the sanctity of human life. An elderly woman was...
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19th Annual Great Defender of Life Dinner

    Anne Manice: Thank you [Jim McLaughlin] for your kind introduction. Thank you, Maria. I remember when you were thinking of taking on the Human Life Review after your father’s death, I said, please continue it because you’re our intellectual sustenance. We’re in the...
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Insisting on Life: Encounter: Worldview Matters, featuring Maria McFadden Maffucci

    In the January 19th edition of David Vaughan’s radio program, Encounter: Worldview Matters, broadcast from St. Louis, Maria talks about the organization’s history and mission then talks about the changes in the pro-life movement happening due...
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Promoting Marriage as an Anti-Abortion Policy

  In the months following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, both sides in the abortion debate have proposed a number of policies at the state and federal level. While the pro-life side has welcomed state anti-abortion trigger laws...
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