SUMMER 2025 FULL ISSUE

. . . This is a summer of much discontent in the US and the world, but here you will find hope amidst the woes. We start with an expert indictment of the nation’s leading medical organizations by Dr. Christina Francis, CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Gynecologists and Obstetricians (AAPLOG), who we will honor on November 7 as our Great Defender of Life. In “Why It’s Time for a New, Life-Affirming Path Forward in Medicine” Dr. Francis criticizes her fellow doctors for denying the humanity of the child in the womb and deliberately using misleading rhetoric to support abortion rights, even when this puts the lives of women at risk. She then highlights the pro-life medical organizations working to transform the culture of medicine. In more pro-life medical news, Grace Emily Stark reacts to President Trump’s executive order expanding access to IVF by offering an ethical alternative, restorative reproductive medicine (RRM). In “For ‘More Babies,’ Fund RRM Rather than IVF,” she writes: “To make America fertile again, look to RRN,” which treats infertility rather than circumventing it. In still more hopeful news, senior editor William Murchison cheers the Supreme Court’s Skrmetti decision, which upholds the State of Tennessee’s right to prohibit sex transition treatments for minors. A step forward, he writes in “There are Boys; There are Girls,” in “combatting the really strange ideology that “we can invent our own Reality,” and change our sex. The illusion of gender identity is also woven into senior editor Ellen Wilson Fielding’s luminous essay on what it means to be human, “‘I Am What I say I Am’ and Other Fictions,” which is timely yet timeless in its wisdom. And Mary Rose Somarriba tackles another enemy of a healthy culture in “How Pornified Thinking Erases Preborn Life,” including strategies to push back against the sex industry.
Jason Morgan contributes a major review of the new book by Robert P. George, “arguably, the most accomplished conservative scholar the country has produced in his generation.” Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in our Cultural Moment is available from Encounter Books. Professor George was a great friend of the late Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, whose powerful speech, “Together for Life,” we include from our archives, as well as the beautiful testimony about life’s beginnings, “The Story of Tom Thumb,” by another legendary pro-life hero, the late Dr. Jérôme Lejeune. Both Neuhaus and Lejeune, along with Cardinal John O’Connor, Faith and Jim McFadden, and Rita Marker, are being remembered at our Great Defender of Life dinner November 7 (see www.humanlifereview.com/Dinner for details). Along with Dr. Francis, we will honor our editor Anne Conlon who is retiring after 30 years!
We welcome newcomer Avery West to these pages with her column “How the Church Can Be the Village,” an inspiring and practical guide for how church communities can combat “America’s twin epidemics of isolation and low birth rates,” which “intersect in the heartbreaking experiences of new mothers in America.” Finally, we recently heard news of the passing of a great Catholic scholar and longtime history professor at St. Louis University, James Hitchcock, who contributed over two dozen brilliant articles (accessible in our Archive) to the Review between 1976 and 2026. Requiescat in pace.

Maria McFadden Maffucci
Editor in Chief

In an address he gave in 2001 at a conference co-hosted by this journal, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus told attendees: “We are signed on for the duration and the duration is the entirety of the human drama, for the conflict between what John Paul II calls the culture of life and the culture of death is a permanent conflict. It is a conflict built into a wretchedly fallen and terribly ambiguous human condition” (“Together for Life,” page 27).

A fearlessly eloquent leader, Neuhaus, the Lutheran minister turned Catholic priest who died in 2009, gave the pro-life movement its marching orders: “Our goal is every unborn child protected in law and welcomed in life,” a formulation so familiar it is routinely cited without attribution. He also acknowledged its limitations: “Now we know there will always be abortions.” The argument about “who is entitled to protection,” he warned, “will prevail incrementally, piece by piece, sometimes moving, it seems, more backward than forward.”

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