John Grondelski

Broken Bonds provides the accounts of sixteen women from nine countries who experienced surrogate motherhood. None of them sound like happy, altruistic “angels” (a common term for mothers used in pro-surrogacy propaganda), smiling as they selflessly turn over the baby they’ve... 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 →

A literary critic whose name I do not now recall observed that Charles Dickens’s greatness as an author lies in the fact that he could put death into a Christmas story . . . and get away with it. Who, after all, is the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come but the Grim Reaper? Only the... Read More →

  This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of “A New Ethic for Medicine and Society,”  a remarkably foresighted editorial published in the September 1970 issue of the professional journal California Medicine.  The editorial, which has been reprinted many times over the... Read More →

  An old adage warns that “the devil is in the details.” This is especially true of the law, where “standards of review” and precedents (stare decisis) can eviscerate the clearest constitutional norms while apotheosizing the most nebulous. Case-in-point: Linda Greenhouse’s... Read More →

  This year marks the 75th anniversary of the American liberation of Dachau. On Sunday, April 29, 1945, the U.S. Seventh Army’s 45th Infantry Division freed the concentration camp located on the outskirts of Munich. American soldiers had already encountered Nazi bestiality... Read More →

This year has seen a flurry of state-level legislative action on abortion, initiated by both pro-life and pro-abortion advocates. The catalyst for much of this action has been hope (or fear) that the U.S. Supreme Court might modify, if not reverse, the unrestricted abortion... Read More →

  The just-adjourned session of the Virginia Legislature turned the Old Dominion into the latest battleground in an effort begun two years ago to force the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) into the federal Constitution. Although when proposed by Congress in 1972, ERA contained a... Read More →

  The Human Life Review and Plough Publishing hosted “On Personhood: A Conversation with Sarah C. Williams” in Washington the day before this year’s March for Life. It was a most moving event. I originally began this blog with: “Sarah Williams is a former faculty member at... Read More →

On July 25, Catholics worldwide marked the fiftieth anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae (Of Human Life). Written in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Humanae vitae was intended to consider whether the “Pill”—a newly developed contraceptive that suppressed... Read More →