Mercy Killing Five-Year-Olds

  She tried the “Where do you draw the line?” argument. A young Facebook friend reported that she’d just got home from a college class that had taken up abortion. Most students treated it as self-evidently good. If aborting an unborn child is all right, she asked them, what...
Read More →

Defenders of Life: Navigating Between Complacency and Despair

  Once I heard a futures trader explain the thought processes behind his job, and the way he explained it illuminated a mindset about earning a living alien to my own. Oh, I already knew the basics about his daily activity: buying and selling futures of commodities, with the...
Read More →

Abortion: How Can They See and Do It Anyway?

Seventeen students would be attending the March for Life, accompanied by three young Sisters of Charity, taking the all-night bus, and arriving in Washington in time to brush their teeth in the downstairs bathroom of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. Spirits were high:...
Read More →

Shōwa That You Love Her

As with many other things—train travel, hot springs, and baseball, to name just a few—you’ve never seen Valentine’s Day done quite like it’s done in Japan. The stores are decked out with hearts and teddy bears and red and white ribbons galore, of course, but that’s just the...
Read More →

With New Eyes

I am rarely left speechless. Snappy retorts are part of my native language, and those few times when my mother’s instructions for what to do when I cannot say anything nice dominate my response, the conversation in question is likely a memorable one. Oddly enough, these...
Read More →

Re-civilizing Western Civilization

We are accustomed to hearing apocalyptic warnings about how the earth is facing mass destruction from epidemics, climate change, economic collapse, and other calamities that will make human life no longer possible. Whatever credibility these dark forecasts may have, as of yet...
Read More →

Why the American Pro-Life Movement Is International

  In one fell swoop on this date forty-six years ago, the abortion laws of the fifty states of this union were made to conform to a uniform standard: The procedure could not be prohibited before fetal viability. Over the years since then, medical and technological advances...
Read More →

Share the Credit for a Culture of Life

While visiting Texas recently I observed two rather different approaches to accommodating Latino migrants released from federal detention into the United States—and learned a lesson applicable to the pro-life movement. At one non-denominational church, Christians received a...
Read More →

Chemical Abortions Require a New Pro-Life Approach

  Last week, in an opinion piece for Lifesite News, Marie Claire Bissonnette (my daughter) wrote that the dramatic increase in early-gestation chemical abortions and the corresponding decrease in later-gestation surgical abortions, is going to necessitate a refocusing of the...
Read More →

Socrates and the Fractured University

  Socrates has proven to be an excellent critic of both modern media and modern modes of education. His great virtue was moral integrity. He lived and taught by a simple principle, namely, that a conviction should stem from knowledge. This, Socrates held firmly, was the key...
Read More →