The Odd Couple: Freedom and Liberty

“My chief hope for the future is that the common people have not parted company with their moral code.” —George Orwell While serving as Allied Commander during World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower, later the 34th President of the United States, told his troops in North Africa, “You...
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BOOKNOTES: WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN: THE CASE FOR THE BODY IN PUBLIC BIOETHICS

  WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN: THE CASE FOR THE BODY IN PUBLIC BIOETHICS O. Carter Snead (Harvard University Press, 2020. Hardcover, pp. 336. Also available on Kindle.) Reviewed by Maria McFadden Maffucci O. Carter Snead’s What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in...
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FROM THE ARCHIVES: Forty Years after Roe: Onward We March

   “No issue in U.S. history has produced such an impressive and sustained outpouring of citizens protesting a single evil (in both numbers and timespan, for instance, it dwarfs the media-favored anti-war demonstrations of yesteryear),” wrote James P. McFadden in the January 16,...
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The Business of Family Planning

  The global contraceptives market was estimated to be $22 billion in 2016  and projected to rise to $37 billion by 2025.1 To promote contraceptive use, especially among youth, manufacturers and other familyplanning advocates commemorate World Contraceptive Day on September...
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Abortion Looming in Ireland

When last I wrote for this publication, Ireland had been through a huge national and international controversy about the tragic death in an Irish hospital in late 2012 of a pregnant Indian woman, Savita Halappanavar. The world, and the Irish public, had been led to believe that...
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President Obama and “Black Genocide”

Barack Obama has made history in two unprecedentedly dramatic ways: He is the first black American president, but, in a chillingly grim breakthrough, also the most pro-abortion president in our history. In his unbroken record of voting against saving the lives of babies born...
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Pro-Woman Messaging: The Strategy to Win the Mushy Middle

For more than four decades, pro-lifers have been characterized as advocates for the unborn. Our messaging has been baby-focused, and understandably so: Preborn children are the fatalities of the greatest human rights atrocity in history. But in the process of fighting for the...
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In a Basin Clearly

Friday, 6:00 p.m., September 30th. Three deliveries and two hours of sleep in the past 36 hours.  I run to escape the weariness of a solo obstetric practice. Ascending out of town on a dirt road, the majesty of fall in Montana envelopes me. Ahead are groves of golden quaking...
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What I Saw at the Abortion: The doctor observed, the man saw.

I am a surgeon. Particularities of sick flesh is everyday news. Escaping blood, all the outpourings of disease—phlegm, pus, vomitus, even those occult meaty tumors that terrify—I see as blood, disease, phlegm, and so on. I touch them to destroy them. But I do not make symbols of...
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Should We “Harvest” Fetal Tissue?

Last summer, a medical ethicist received an unusual phone call from a woman whose father suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease. The woman presented the ethicist with a startling scenario. She had heard about a new experimental technique that used fetal brain tissue implants to...
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