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 - . . . ABOUT BILL MURCHISON—AND SOMETHING ABOUT ME . . .“His heart just stopped.” So spoke Nancy Murchison when she called with the sad news that her husband, William Polk Murchison, Jr., had died in Dallas on Oct. 8. And what a big heart his was. Bill reported on the unruly clash of politics and religion, graciously making sense of the nation’s escalating ruckus in over 100 articles he wrote for us. Jim McFadden—who had “cottoned,” as Bill once put it, to the Texan’s writing in National Review—invited him to do something for the Human Life Review in 1992. It was the beginning of a long and fruitful association. Friendship, actually, is a better word to describe it, even though the two never met. In introducing “Choice Is for Voters” (Spring 1992), Jim reminded readers that “a quarterly journal like ours rarely enjoys the luxury of running ‘news’—events distort realities, ours is a long view.” But “Murchison’s reportage will remain perceptive,” he went on, “even if, by the time you read it, some ‘facts’ may already be outdated.” This was because “good-reporter Murchison fills you in on all the as-we-go-to-press stuff, the kind of thing historians will ponder, a snapshot of ‘How It Looked, way back now.’” Bill continued to fill readers in for 34 years, his inimitable voice as vigorous in his last article for us (“There Are Boys; There Are Girls,” Summer 2025) as it was in “Children of Men: Read the Book!” (Spring 2007), which we reprint here in memory of our faithful senior editor and friend.
As it happens Bill’s death coincides with my retirement. I joined the Review as managing editor in 1995. When Jim McFadden died in 1998, Maria McFadden Maffucci (now our editor-in-chief), became my new boss. I like to think I have helped her over the years to carry the load she assumed as a young wife and mother in keeping the promise she made to her father that his precious Human Life Review would survive him. It is a job I have loved since the start, working for a family—and with an extended “family” of colleagues—I have grown to love as well. In 2020, Maria named me the Review’s third editor. What a privilege it has been to mind the record of the abortion/euthanasia debate—what Jim considered this journal’s reason for being. I have had help editing this issue from Mary Rose Somarriba and Chris Reilly, the Review’s new co-editors, who will take over for me in the new year. And due to a family medical crisis that deprived me of the ability to focus on anything else, our other longtime senior editor, Ellen Wilson Fielding, has written the smashing introduction that follows. Thanks to each of them, and to Maria, for letting me temporarily reclaim this space (where I wrote for two decades). Finally, thanks to you, dear reader, for your kind attention during my tenure here.
Anne Conlon
Editor
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As I write, news outlets are reporting what AP calls “the first reported use of [Chinese] artificial intelligence to direct a hacking campaign in a largely automated fashion.” On the euthanasia/suicide front, a Canadian reports losing two grandmothers to Medical Assistance in Dying.
Serendipitously, we open this issue with a doubly timely essay by Edward Short alerting us that “with AI knocking on the door, and the prospect of so influential a technology falsifying language to an extent scarcely imaginable . . . Christ’s insistence that we follow Him as ‘the way, the truth, and the life’ has never had so urgent an import.” Noting that “We have been sounding the tocsin of truth about the evils of killing innocent life in and outside the womb for over five decades,” Short exhorts prolifers to “continue ringing that tocsin on behalf of the life of all those threatened by . . . the culture of death.” Among the newly threatened are the aged and infirm of England if, as seems likely, Parliament succeeds in legalizing assisted suicide. Short highlights the address in the House of Lords of Baroness May of Maidenhead, the former Prime Minister Theresa May. Not recognizable in her political heyday as a pro-life defender of any stripe, May vigorously opposed this bill: “I worry that, as we have seen in countries where there is such a law, people will feel that they must end their lives simply because they feel that they are a burden on others. I worry about the impact that it will have on people with disabilities, with chronic illness and with mental health problems, because there is a risk that legalizing assisted dying reinforces the dangerous notion that some lives are less worth living than others.”
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