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In that uniquely American comedy Ghostbusters, the womanizing, semi-serious scientist played by Bill Murray tries to get his mind around the moral magnitude of his crew’s city-saving mission. “I’m fuzzy on the whole good-bad thing. What do you mean ‘bad’?” he asks his nerdy... Read More →

What if we could know—perhaps through a prophetic vision or an exquisitely refined predictive algorithm—that a particular human fetus developing in the womb of a particular abortion-seeking woman would, if rescued from prenatal death, grow up to be a source of human misery on a... Read More →

Welcome to Insisting on Life, where I will be greeting you weekly with news, commentary, great links and special guests. The name is the title we gave to our collection of essays by the late, great journalist and Review contributor Nat Hentoff, whom we honored in 2005 as our... Read More →

Like theirs of old, our life is death, Our light is darkness, till we see The eternal Word made flesh and breath, The God who walked by Galilee. We have not known thee: to the skies Our monuments of folly soar, And all our self-wrought miseries Have made us trust ourselves the... Read More →

American birth rates plummeted between 2009 and 2019. Lyman Stone offers us a concerning metric to measure the loss: “missing births.” If, he asks, birth rates had remained throughout the following decade what they were in 2008, “how many more babies would have been born?” The... Read More →

Murder begins as a thought. Homicide, the broader category that includes murder, begins as either a thought or the failure to take thought—that is, the failure to take care. Let’s say I was texting on my phone while driving a car. If in my distraction I hit a pedestrian who then... Read More →

“Tell me about your son.” These were the words I heard over the phone three years ago while searching for a doctor who could give psychological help to my 19-year-old son who has Prader Willi syndrome. In all my years of raising him, this was the first time anyone ever asked me... Read More →

There had been a notable uptick in anti-Semitic attacks in Europe. Alone on a lonely street in the heart of Paris, I wondered if just standing where I was could make me a target of either suspicion or of hate. The door to the Holocaust Memorial was locked, as only three or four... Read More →

The message above should appear all over the country, wherever pro-life activists gather. For many years, they have hoped (in a vague sort of way) that more Democrats would be pro-life. Few, though, have done much to make that actually happen, and those who tried often lacked... Read More →

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made (Genesis 3:1). Before proceeding with this short reflection, let me acknowledge that those who perpetrate evil do not always intend to do so. It is possible to be deceived, and therefore... Read More →