Harvey Weinstein’s Pro-Life Lessons

  The Harvey Weinstein Hollywood sexual-predator story offers one lesson for defenders of life: We defend or deny life even when we’re not within a thousand miles of a life issue. Here’s why. We don’t form a culture mainly by what we do in the big obvious cases. We form a...
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Searching for the Soul of R2-D2

  My familiarity with Star Wars is largely confined to the first few releases of the franchise back in the late 1970s. In the initial Star Wars film, aside from the romantic weirdness of this “galaxy far, far away” and the David-and-Goliath quality of the battle of Good...
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Grassroots Pro-Life Panel Talks Trump, Millennials, and Effective Strategies

  Last Saturday, the Human Life Review’s EXPECT initiative and ProLife Future NYC hosted a discussion panel on how four organizations are working to build a culture of life in America. The participants were Aimee Murphy of Rehumanize International, John Hinshaw of Good...
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Audrey Hepburn’s Beauty Tips

  My title is misleading. It attributes a poem to the stylish actress which she did not compose. “Time Tested Beauty Tips” was one of Hepburn’s favorite poems—she is said to have read it to her children on the last Christmas Eve she spent on earth. Legend credits her with...
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Our Haunting Insecurities and the Human Weeds

  Modern cosmetics tells us something about our culture’s desire to abort the unborn and euthanize the sick and elderly. In our desire to beautify the body, writes Zygmunt Bauman, “the appearance of the remedy as a rule preceded awareness of the deficiency that clamored to...
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Ask Me Anything

Sometimes word games can become mind games. My 11-year-old daughter has Down syndrome. My instinct has always been to put it exactly that way—Down syndrome is something she has, not something that has her or something she is. Does that seem obvious? These are actually hotly...
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Easy but Uncomfortable

  It’s the language we use for diseases. Polio, we say, has been eradicated from the earth. Last week many pro-lifers jumped on the moral carelessness of a CBS story which declared giddily that Down syndrome had been “basically eradicated from Iceland”— as if someone in...
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A Cure for MS?

  The shocking headline seemed to jump out at me from the computer screen: “Brit scientist could be about to CURE multiple sclerosis and provide hope for millions.”[1] Really? Did I dare hope for a cure after living with aggressive multiple sclerosis (MS) for more than 30...
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Tribute to a Prophetess

  The name Clare Boothe Luce should not be absent from the minds of contemporary Catholics. While she may not have been a saint, she understood well that in times of crisis saints are what we need. In 1952, Luce edited a classic anthology of essays entitled Saints for Now. Twenty...
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We Just Have a Picture. They Have Stories

“Facts are the background noise of debate and analysis,” former Reagan media expert Merrie Spaeth explained in The Wall Street Journal. “Anecdotes are a message’s most powerful anchors. In the battle for public opinion, personal stories win.” Stories decide whose claims feel more...
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