John Grondelski

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 →

ABC’s award-winning television show Life Goes On, which ran from 1989 to 1993, was built around a family whose eldest son, Corky, had Down syndrome. The show, set in the Chicago suburb of Glenbrook, won accolades for giving many Americans their first real insight into the... Read More →

The Old Testament’s story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac (Gen. 22: 1-18) is in many ways unintelligible to modern man. How could God command a father to kill his son? How could God even desire human sacrifice? And how could we believe in such a God? Read against... Read More →

America recently has been roiled by wholesale efforts to erase history. Monuments go missing in the middle of the night. Undergraduate snowflakes demand “trigger warnings” before they read a book that might tackle somebody or something ugly, hateful, or even controversial.... Read More →

  On September 22, 2017, U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt, in Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky et al. v. Indiana State Health Department Commissioner et al., permanently enjoined enforcement of a 2016 Indiana law regulating abortion... Read More →

  The New York Times headline warns: “As Mexican State Limits Surrogacy, Global System Is Further Strained.” The gist of the story is that the southern Mexican state of Tabasco, which for a brief moment became the next Mecca for wealthy Westerners looking for Third World... Read More →

  All sorts of natural, legal, and Constitutional standards have been warped in order to accommodate the unrestricted right to abortion inherent in the Supreme Court’s 1973 rulings, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. It is a right that denies fathers an equal interest in the... Read More →

  Linda Greenhouse’s Thanksgiving Day op-ed in the New York Times, “Sex After 50 at the Supreme Court”  is a telling piece: telling about the thinking as well as the politics that inform it. Greenhouse’s essential argument is this: Fifty years after the Supreme Court... Read More →

  The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) reported May 7 that with aggressive treatment a quarter of premature infants now born at 22 weeks (i.e., five months) survive. This is good news: Medical research and scientific advances increasingly are making it possible to save... Read More →

“Should we give fetuses painkillers before we abort them?” That’s the title of Jeff Guo’s March 26 Washington Post report on a bill subsequently passed by the Montana Legislature stipulating that any abortion performed after 20 weeks (five months) be preceded by anesthetization... Read More →