As I write, the news that Kate Cox, who unsuccessfully sued for an exception to Texas’s strict abortion ban, will be a guest of the Bidens at the State of the Union Speech signals prolifers are in for a pounding between now and the November election. But of course we knew that. “Abortion,” writes senior editor William Murchison in “The Tragedy of Kate Cox,” was a moral question “until it became a political question, in a world of polls and votes,” where children are “numbers in a game of power, where votes count as much as prayers. If not more so.” And while anyone who reads beyond the headlines will see in fact that Mrs. Cox‘s pregnancy (now terminated along with her lawsuit) presented the hardest of hard cases, it is nonetheless sad—even bewildering—that she would allow herself to be used as a pawn in a game of power whose goal isn’t to win legal abortion for hard cases but to make even healthy unborn children at any stage of gestation as casually discardable as garbage. “Laws,” Murchison bemoans, “often lead to yelling and screeching and the drawing of lines in the sand.” Today many prolifers appear ready to abandon the legal route, at least for a while, arguing that only by first winning hearts and minds will we ever achieve lasting legislative success. But then someone like John Bossert Brown Jr. poses the uncomfortable question: “Why,” the retired pastor and author asks in “A House Divided,” which follows Murchison, “should we think that the world will pay attention to the sanctity of life if substantial numbers of Christians fail to take it seriously?” In fact, millions of them already “accept the legality of abortion.” Brown cites recent surveys showing over 50 percent of American women who have abortions “identify as Christians,” and of these “40 percent identify as Catholic and Evangelical,” findings that “constitute a tragedy of epic proportions” and “are particularly lamentable because the sanctity of human life is rooted in the Christian faith—in the biblical story, in the Christian worldview.” Abortion, he reminds us, “was not all that rare in the ancient world.”

Brown believes widespread secularization has produced “a disenchantment of reality” in which “the preciousness of life, the wonder of a child being knit together in her mother’s womb have been ignored and denied.” Chris Humphrey, in our next article, is thinking along similar lines. Answering those—many of them Christian— who still vaguely refer to “clumps of cells” and “blobs of tissue,” he writes: “There could be no partially human incarnation: God the Son became man at conception.” It is, he insists, “the imagination that fails to see the very young, individual human being as one of us, especially when some action is under consideration, like abortion.” In “Ill-informed: Abortion and the Moral Imagination,” Humphrey, who holds a PhD in philosophical theology, gives readers a spirited overview of traditional Christian thought regarding abortion (including sharp comments on how Judith Jarvis Thomson’s notorious essay depicting the unborn child as a “parasite” is reflected in cultural products such as the film Alien). Humphrey is also a co-founder of Vision for Life, an organization that works to expand the reach and appeal of those pregnancy care centers where women receive counseling that “informs their thinking about pregnancy and abortion with morality” and helps them “to imagine being mothers of these children.”

Lyle Strathman, whose precise argumentation bespeaks his engineering background, opens his article quoting a series of negative responses to the Dobbs decision from leaders of several Western nations. “That the democratic world so explicitly expressed its indignation with the revocation of Roe v. Wade,” he observes, “indicates just how deeply legalized abortion has infected the soul of humanity.” The Dobbs court, he says, could have extended protection to unborn children “but lacked the courage to do so,” showing instead “more concern for the appeasement of the peopleat-large than for the truth regarding a pre-born person’s personhood and unalienable right to life.” In “Personhood Refutes Legalized Abortion,” Strathman draws on history, science, and philosophy—he even recalls “the seeming attempt by Justice Blackmun to entrap the Catholic Church into some kind of conciliatory pro-abortion stance”—to make a compelling case that while “abortion is immoral . . . legalized abortion is criminal.”

Alas, as Stephen Vincent relates in “A Case for Rescue,” the “criminals” in our abortion-obsessed polity aren’t the baby killers but “the brave men and women who stopped abortions for a few hours in one notorious late-term death center in the nation’s capital” over three years ago. The nine “rescuers” were convicted last summer of violating the FACE Act and immediately jailed—they have been awaiting sentencing ever since. The most famous of them is Joan Andrews Bell, age 75, whose husband Chris, when asked by Vincent if his wife hadn’t “done enough over the years,” answered that “There’s no such thing as ‘done enough’ when babies are being slaughtered.” The case against rescue, Vincent writes, “is wholly rational and acceptable . . . Yet the case for rescue is rational as well.” In a statement quoted in the article, Lauren Handy, convicted and jailed along with Bell, chastises those in the pro-life movement who now consider her “useless because I am behind bars.” Rescuing, she counters, “is about love. Loving the most useless, abandoned, and unwanted without fear of punishment.”

Handy figures prominently in the following interview with Terrisa Bukovinac, “a progressive pro-life Democrat” who tells the Review’s Madeline Fry Schultz that she’s running for president to disrupt the Democratic Party and because “as a federal candidate, I can amplify the pro-life message to the American people by running uncensored ads about the babies that I found.” She and Handy made headlines two years ago after they convinced a “medical waste” truck driver to let them take one of several boxes collected from behind the same abortion clinic in DC that Bell and Handy were subsequently found guilty of “conspiring” to disrupt. Opening the box at Handy’s apartment, they discovered the remains of 115 aborted children—some of them, she says, appearing to have been “killed illegally” or “killed legally but past the point of viability.” In Bukovinac’s telling, it’s a riveting story, the details of which have been so distorted in media accounts that even “a lot of people in the pro-life movement just cannot fathom the hell that we were in during that time.”

Thirty years ago, Wesley Smith warned about the growing respectability of euthanasia in a Newsweek column that was reprinted soon after in this journal (Fall 1993). It wasn’t long before Smith, at the invitation of founding editor J.P. McFadden, started contributing articles documenting the West’s disturbing re-embrace of eugenics and so-called mercy killing—in 2008 the Human Life Foundation named him a Great Defender of Life. Most Newsweek readers, Smith recalls in our final article, “accused me of engaging in alarmist slippery slope argumentation,” and “even those who agree that assisted suicide should not be legalized blithely assured me that it would never come to organ harvesting or mercy killing of those without a good ‘quality of life.’” How wrong they were: “Once the act of eliminating suffering by eliminating the sufferer is redefined from a crime to a beneficent medical intervention,” he writes in “Euthanasia Poisons People and Societies,” “there is no limiting principle.” Only, as he shows us here, a raging cultural infection in the Western world.

* * * * *

“Euthanasia advocates,” writes John Grondelski in Booknotes, “even those who are agnostic or flat-out deny that an afterlife exists, call for ‘death with dignity.’” But is mercy killing dignified? Is it merciful? Stephen E. Doran’s To Die Well: A Catholic Neurosurgeon’s Guide to the End of Life “has something for all people of good will,” Grondelski explains, “since much of Doran’s discussion of ethical issues connected with dying is rooted in natural law principles accessible to all.” Senior editor Ellen Wilson Fielding heartily recommends What the Bells Sang, a “hefty collection” of work—some of it originally published here—by longtime Review contributor Edward Short. His “trustworthiness as both a moral and literary guide,” Fielding says, makes it “a perfect ‘dipping’ book—readers can confidently follow their fancy in reading this or that essay or review in any or no order, and they will be sure to find gold.” Tom Shakely’s review of Hadley Arkes’s Mere Natural Law, originally published in the American Conservative, is reprinted in Appendix A.

From the Website features Diane Moriarty on the “progressively flailing logic of the pro-abortion argument” and Brian Caulfield on why “the March for Life never disappoints.” Appendix B carries another website blog, “Who Cares about Britney Spears?” by the Foundation’s 2021 Great Defender of Life Marvin Olasky. And speaking of . . . this issue also includes speeches by our 2023 GDL honorees Thomas Brejcha and George McKenna and photographs of dinner speakers and guests. You can also take an online seat at the table (www.humanlifereview.com/ great-defender-life-dinner/). Enjoy!