Abortion as We Know It: Call Me Cynical

  Call me cynical, but when I see a young man marching with an “I Support a Woman’s Right to Choose” sign, there’s little doubt in my mind that he probably only supports a woman’s right to choose as long as she’s choosing abortion. What if this earnest lad came home from the...
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After Roe and Doe Are Gone

  When the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the American people will once again have the right to enact substantive legal protection for unborn children. In anticipation, many states have already adopted protective laws, although federal judges have blocked...
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“Nobody loves me, everybody hates me”

One way to understand adolescence is as a crisis of the value of life. I may take my mother’s love for granted, but it no longer seems to suffice. Father’s love seems remote and conditional on my (unreliable!) performance. My sense of self-worth is displaced by fickle fads among...
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Saved by a Flesh and Blood Baby

The article you are reading right now, like any article written by an actual person, is a soon-to-be-obsolete artifact of a passing age. If you use the internet, you have read many things generated by algorithms derived from a combination of pre-determined site objectives and...
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Merī Kurisumasu!

    President Donald Trump has made it a motif of his administration to acknowledge his and the First Lady’s Christian faith in public. One of the most striking ways they do this is by wishing the nation, not a happy holiday season or a safe month of interfaith...
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Calling George Bailey

Every Christmastide we are obliged to see the 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Yet we often forget the ordeal the main character George Bailey had to endure before coming to that titled conclusion. For much of the film, life is harsh, mean, sinister, apparently random, and...
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Private Lives, Public Policies, and Abortion

  Every advance in information technology and every expanded frontier for its use seems to propagate media stories of new ways that governments and industries are infringing upon the once sacrosanct zone of individual privacy. From facial recognition software to cars that...
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Why We Repeat the Mistakes of the Past

  “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This oft-quoted phrase, usually attributed to the philosopher George Santayana, was probably coined by Edmund Burke when he said “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” A more trenchant...
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Spina Bifida: Where Some Have Led the Way

  “The baby won’t live to be fourteen.” Our grandmother would announce her skepticism about my cousin’s life expectancy as easily as she would announce that the weatherman had predicted rain. Of course, there was nothing magic about the age of fourteen—every anticipated...
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The Beautiful Mother

My ex-husband’s mother had a poet’s will. She was a silken beauty, vulnerable, observant, wondering where I belonged. I told her the forced abortion is why I left my marriage. However, she never said a word to him, and he never said a word to her about it. But she and I...
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