“The problems of our world,” says William Murchison, “have edges, angles, pull-outs, protrusions, and rusty nails sticking out everywhere.” In “IVF: The Next Battlefield,” our senior editor ponders the Alabama Supreme Court’s “out-of-nowhere” pronouncement last February that disembodied embryos were children— a startling reminder that a million frozen souls reside in storage tanks across the United States. “No conversation on IVF itself,” Murchison grants, “can be easy.” But “the urgency of moral conversation grows and grows and grows.” Because not only is there the fate of all those neglected “spares” to consider—and who decides what will happen to them, politicians?—but also IVF’s unchecked progress from basic baby-making to “tailoring the product for higher satisfaction,” that is, eugenic baby design.

“Moral discourse about large matters evades us,” Murchison contends, “due to our aching lack of moral leadership.” Case in point: Reverend Katheryn Barlow Williams of Central Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, a religious leader “of a certain stripe,” writes Karl D. Stephan in “A Pro-Abortion Epiphany,” who works “pro-abortion messages into the church calendar.” In an opinion piece for a local paper, she offered “a modern-day retelling of the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt,” casting state attorney general Ken Paxton as Herod—no kidding— because he was seeking “to kill the ‘love’ that would allow Kate Cox to abort her baby.” Stephan is not unsympathetic: “[Cox’s] plight of carrying an almost certainly doomed baby was agonizing,” he writes, but pace the irreverent reverend, Texas abortion law “implicitly recognizes that even deformed fetuses are made in the image of God.”

Edward Short is delighted that Ireland, “a country that has known a good deal of moral chaos in the last few years,” still officially recognizes the fundamental nature of motherhood. “In an historic landslide,” he reports in “Marriage, Motherhood, and the Plain People of Ireland,” voters rejected amendments that would have stripped clauses honoring motherhood and marriage from the country’s constitution (ratified in a statewide plebiscite in 1937). Comeuppance indeed for pushy elites and their leader Leo Varadker, who abruptly resigned as prime minister following the (surprisingly) sound defeat. “Will the Irish welcome the Mother of God back into their homes,” Short asks, “now that they have refused to allow their political class to take mothers out of their constitution?”

Unlike Kate Cox, Mary Rose Somarriba was pressured to abort (but resisted the pressure) at 20 weeks by an OBGYN who appeared concerned about potential fetal genetic damage. However, in retrospect she wonders if the doctor, sensing (rightly as it turned out) Somarriba’s potential for suffering post-partum depression after giving birth to her fourth child, and during a pandemic, was “offering abortion as a charitable gift—an escape route from the stress that children in any health condition will necessarily bring, at least into the immediate future of any active parent.”

It was, Somarriba relates in “How We Neglect Pregnant Women’s Mental Health,” a “painfully eye-opening” experience: “Now abortion-centric language sounds to me like hectoring women, at their most vulnerable, into believing their depressed, worst thoughts and acting upon them.”

Women acting upon their worst thoughts, observes Leonard F. Grant III in the following article, may make “choices that transgress their own deeply held moral beliefs,” and in doing so sustain what is recognized in therapeutic circles as moral injury—a “soul wound” that can overwhelm them with guilt and shame and remorse even years after an abortion. According to an important study Grant cites in “When Abortion Causes Moral Injury,” Catholic women who violate their conscience may be more likely to experience this than others. But psychotherapy alone won’t restore emotional equilibrium because “moral processes are not mental illnesses, regardless of how troubling and painful they may be.” Rather, for these women, “growing in their faith through religious practices and rituals is where healing awaits.”

Earlier this year, Jason Morgan co-authored a book on the “comfort women,” prostitutes contracted to provide “pleasurable solace” to Japanese soldiers during WWII. It is a “contentious” issue, he writes in his essay here (“The Longest War: Women and Children in the Battle for East Asia”)—one South Korean scholar whose work Morgan admires was “criminally indicted” for “trying to tell the full truth about what the comfort women suffered and how they overcame extraordinary hardships in attempting to live human lives amid often unthinkable conditions.” While he believes “prostitution is evil,” he also recognizes that “we live in a fallen world,” and the comfort women, “human beings in a particular place and at a particular time . . . have much to teach us about the human spirit.”

Abortion, like prostitution, is not easily grappled with in a fallen world. “It would be vituperative,” Raymond Marcin comments in our next article, to fault the Dobbs justices who overturned Roe v. Wade for not addressing “the constitutional rightto-life issue.” They “were and are true heroes,” for ruling as they did “in the face of death threats and the attempted assassination of one of their number.” Those advocating for constitutional protection of the unborn, Marcin continues, can provide a framework for their argument by “taking a close look at the jurisprudential background of the meaning of ‘person’ and the rights of personhood”—which is precisely what he does in “On the Right to Life in the United States Constitution: An Issue Ignored in Dobbs.”

The pre-Civil War “model slave owner,” argues senior editor Ellen Wilson Fielding, “an otherwise just man schooled to believe that slavery is a natural and licit human institution and that only the abusive treatment of one’s slaves is sinful,” was nonetheless guilty of “misperceiving the moral universe and his place in it.” The “parallels,” she notes in “Masters of Misperception,” between that slave owner and today’s abortion apologist “smack you over the head like a two by four.” Misperception, Fielding writes, and the subsequent temptation “to substitute fantasy for reality . . . exact costs,” though “the limits of our human vision into space and time restrict us from reading the bottom of the balance sheet for any particular action.”

Who anticipated “our gender reimagination project” back when Roe disturbed the moral universe a half century ago?

* * * * *

This issue features an especially timely interview with Paul Benjamin Linton, author of Abortion Under State Constitutions: A State-by-State Analysis and foremost authority on the history of state abortion legislation. “Now that Roe v. Wade has been overruled,” he says, “defeating pro-abortion citizen initiatives [at the state constitutional level] should be a priority of the pro-life movement.” Donald Berens, in “New York’s Dangerous ERA Proposal,” warns that a “ninety-six-word” amendment, which may be on the ballot this coming November, threatens to “stymie future democratically elected [New York] state representatives from enacting even the most basic safeguards surrounding the abortion procedure.” I quote here from a summary of his article “New York’s Equal Rights Amendment,” published on our website and accessible at www.humanlifereview.com. [For a brilliant argument about why second-wave feminists never should have tied abortion rights to the (failed) federal ERA, see Clare Boothe Luce’s “Letter to the Women’s Lobby,” an archival treasure reprinted in Appendix A.]

“The appearance of pro-life histories is always welcome,” John Grondelski writes in his review of Pushing Roe v. Wade Over the Brink, especially when the subject is Americans United for Life, one of the pro-life movement’s “major and most impactful groups,” and the authors are “established writers like [Clarke] Forsythe and [Alexandra] DeSanctis.” Isabelle Flood isn’t an established writer—yet. A recent high school graduate, she contributes to this edition of Book/Filmnotes a lively review of Waitress: The Musical—actually, a film, and a rare one, Flood tells us, in that it “highlights the beauty of pregnancy and motherhood.”

From the Website also carries a review: “Many film critics have called The Zone of Interest timely,” observes Jason Morgan about this much-lauded Holocaust story, but not one “has acknowledged . . . the ongoing holocaust that has turned the United States into a living nightmare since 1973.” Diane Moriarty reminds giddy gals “dancing the Irish jig” at abortion rallies that “having the right to do something doesn’t make it the right thing to do.” And in a moving reflection, Tara Jernigan recounts soothing a dying hospice-care patient through song: “It didn’t matter that no one had rehearsed and most everyone would not know all the words. What mattered was a family, singing to sleep their wife and the mother and grandmother who once cradled them. ‘Amazing Grace,’ in the moment, sounded sweet indeed.”

Yes, we live in a morally unstable and divisive world with “rusty nails sticking out everywhere.” But as Jernigan shows us, we can also know moments of sweet accord—best to keep eyes and ears open for them.