John Grondelski

  Father’s Day is June 19. A decision by the Supreme Court regarding the fate of Roe v. Wade is likely any day now. The conjunction of these two events is important. It ought to initiate a national conversation about fathers and their unborn children. Roe is just the tip of... Read More →

  Christopher Kaczor (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020, paperback, 236 pages, $30) Reviewed by John Grondelski ______________________________________ In his enlightening book Disputes in Bioethics: Abortion, Euthanasia, and Other Controversies, Christopher Kaczor,... Read More →

  KILLING IN THE NAME OF HEALING: CONFRONTING MEDICAL HOLOCAUSTS PAST AND PRESENT William C. Brennan (Franciscan University Press, 2021, hardcover, 299 pages, $40) Reviewed by John M. Grondelski _______________________________________________________________________ The 75th... Read More →

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 →