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.”

Dobbs no doubt was a great move forward. Thanks to the Supreme Court, abortion is no longer “welded to our beloved Constitution,” as George McKenna memorably put it in his 2023 Great Defender of Life speech. Still, these days it can feel like a backward move. The exuberance following the overruling of Roe has been overtaken by what Dr. Christina Francis calls “a multi-pronged rhetorical strategy designed to inflict unfounded fear in the American public” (“Why It’s Time for a New, Life-Affirming Path Forward in Medicine,” page 5). “Three years after my phone was bombarded with text messages from colleagues wondering what the newly released Dobbs decision would mean for them,” she writes, “I am dismayed at the confusion that remains among some of my fellow physicians about how to practice medicine under pro-life laws.”

Dr. Francis, CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists and this year’s Great Defender of Life, contributes an eye-opening account of how ruthless abortion activists—with major medical organizations like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in tow—disseminate “Blame the Bans” propaganda, “pinning mothers’ negative health outcomes” on post-Dobbs state legislation. This was brought home to me last year when one of my sisters told me that her daughter and son-in-law were leaving a life they enjoyed in Texas because they wished to have a child and were afraid the state’s abortion ban would preclude safe treatment should there be complications. Dr. Francis’s prescriptions for curing this media-induced and alarmingly misguided mindset are urgently needed.

A “complication” facing many women today is failure to conceive, and last February President Trump chose to intervene with his own solution. Grace Emily Stark (“For ‘More Babies,’ Fund RRM Rather Than IVF,” page 15) recounts how, seeking to address the nation’s “fertility crisis,” the president who gave us the Supreme Court majority that gave us Dobbs “signed an executive order to expand access to in vitro fertilization (IVF).” Stark makes a medical case against IVF, not a moral one. “While IVF can, indeed, help couples overcome fertility,” she writes, “it does not actually treat infertility.” There is another option, called restorative reproductive medicine (RRM), which can help effect conception by addressing an “underlying pathology [such as endometriosis] via surgical interventions, hormone balancing, and other aspects of a holistic approach.” RRM, she continues, “treats the woman’s health conditions while concurrently allowing conception to occur ‘the old-fashioned way.’”

Lest we despair of proliferating new-fashioned biological perversions, the Supreme Court’s recent Skrmetti decision, says William Murchison, should make us “feel better about the future” (“There Are Boys; There Are Girls,” page 22). Skrmetti, reports our senior editor, is “a remarkable step in the nation’s provisional, slow, and sometimes grudging movement toward plain old everyday common sense in the face of brazen, over-confident ideology.” In this case transgender ideology, whose adherents failed in their bid to quash a Tennessee law protecting children from life-altering genital mutilation and other trans medical mischief. “Relief should be our first take on Skrmetti,” Murchison counsels. “But after that, reflection.” How have so many come to embrace “a kind of personal autonomy unknown to, unthought of, by virtually any who ever have inhabited this planet”?

Fellow senior editor Ellen Wilson Fielding ruminates along similar lines (“‘I Am What I Say I Am’ and Other Fictions,” page 39). “In recent decades,” Fielding writes, “we have chosen to extend our indiscriminate approval of choice beyond the standard moral questions to the great ontological question: What is a human being?” But there is, she observes, a modern twist: “While philosophers like Aristotle describe us as rational animals, and while the book of Genesis reveals us to be creatures made in the image and likeness of God, the claim of today’s transgender proponents is that human beings are whatever they define themselves to be.” And, she reasons, “if each of us has the power to define himself or herself (and the power to use any desired pronouns to do so), then each person becomes something like a species of one” (rarely does an insight come with such a jolt of lucidity).

At a time when “reality” has moved online, a “species of one” is uniquely vulnerable. The internet, writes Mary Rose Somarriba, harbors unhealthy cyber “communities,” such as the so-called incels, or “involuntary celibates,” single men who “harbor extreme resentment over their status and their conviction that they deserve female sexual attention and activity” (“The Culture of Objectification: How Pornified Thinking Erases Preborn Life,” page 47). Another danger is “easy access to pornography,” which “poisons young men’s brains as early as age 12 or even younger.” Repeated exposure, Somaribba goes on, “rewires viewers brains,” accustoming them to enjoying sexual pleasure “with no effort, no personal interaction, and no consequences. And that includes no pregnancies.” Planned Parenthood, she notes, seduces youngsters with masturbatory advice like this on its website: “Having a healthy sex life is taking care of yourself, whether you have a partner or not.” Planned Un-Parenthood, no?

“Taking care of yourself” could be a tag line for the abortion era. The Court gave women the power to “choose”; most men either quietly acquiesced or breathed a sigh of relief when an inconvenient pregnancy was terminated. Alex Loce put up a fight. Charged with trespass for disrupting the New Jersey clinic where his fiancée had scheduled an abortion, Loce and his lawyers argued that the unborn child he had sought to save had deserved Constitutional protection. Dr. Jérôme Lejeune, a world-renowned French geneticist, testified that abortion “kills a member of our species” at Loce’s 1991 trial. We reprint here excerpts from Lejeune’s riveting depiction of “the tiny human being” who at eight weeks is already making “a symphony of two hearts” with his or her mother (“The Story of Tom Thumb,” page 51). Loce was found guilty of trespass, the judge declaring the death of his child an act of “legal execution.” An appeal to the Supreme Court was declined in 1994. (See “A Father’s Trial and the Case for Personhood” by Patrick Mullaney, HLR Spring 2001.)

One of the many lawyers associated with the Loce case as it made its way through the courts was Robert P. George, the Princeton scholar whose new book, Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment, inspired the following review essay by Jason Morgan (“Life and Law in the American Experiment,” page 54). George is “a towering figure,” writes Morgan, “who represents the best, perhaps the peak in many ways, of the American experiment in ordered liberty.” And now, “at the very height of his powers [George] reveals not only the moral force of the American legal tradition, but also, in many ways, its limits, even its prefigured downfall.” Seeking Truth, says Morgan, is “at once the moral clarion call of one of America’s greatest living legal and political philosophers, and the swan song, as I read it, of the American experiment that he holds dear.” It is a fascinating essay, about a “very important volume,” as Morgan reads it, especially as we witness morality receding from the heights it attained under Western civilization.

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Still, we have signed on for the duration, and as Mother Teresa reminded us, we are called to be faithful, not successful. This issue offers a hearty From the Website sampling, including “RFK, Jr, Autism, Eugenics—and Pro-life Silence,” in which our editor in chief Maria McFadden Maffucci chides not only the NIH chief for dehumanizing comments he has made about people with autism but also the “prolife and adjacent (including religious) press,” whose response was “pretty hard to find.” Brian Caulfield recalls why Cardinal John O’Connor (a prime mover in State of New Jersey v. Alex Loce, securing Dr. Lejeune’s presence at the trial) will be “My Cardinal Till the End.” Other FTW pieces—by Avery West, Diane Moriarty, David Poecking, Victor Lee Austin, Jacqueline O’Hara, and Cecily Routman—will also reward your attention. We finish up with three appendices: An interview I did with Kathryn Jean Lopez when The Debate Since Roe came out in 2012; John Grondelski’s National Catholic Register article on why adoption loses out to abortion, and Wesley J. Smith’s NRO column defending the “dead donor rule” in organ transplants. Alas, a recent New York Times op-ed has called for increasing “the number of donor organs” by expanding “the definition of death.”