Why My Brother Won

Robert and I used to commiserate with each other about this: how the violence allowed the media to paint us all as extremists, how frustrating it was to see the harm that the Pensacola killings did to the movement. I remember one day last August, a few weeks after the Hill...
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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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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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My Controversial Choice to Become Pro-life

It took me a long time, when I was much younger, to understand a conversation like the one a nine-year-old boy was having recently at the dinner table with his mother, a physician who performs abortions. I heard the story from her husband when he found out I’m a pro-lifer. “What...
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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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The Ethics of Fetal Implants

In September 1987, an operation took place at the La Raza Medical Center in Mexico City in which the tissue of a spontaneously-aborted fetus was transplanted into the brains of two patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease. The recipients, a fifty-year-old man and a...
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