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T H E H U M A N L I F E R E V I E W F E A T U R E D I N T H I S I S S U E A L S O I N T H I S I S S U E VOLUME XLVII No 1 WINTER 2021 THE HUMAN LIFE FOUNDATION INC NEW YORK NEW YORK 10.00 PER COPY William Murchison on HOW TO ASSESS THE 2020 ELECTION Maureen Mullarkey on JOHN LEO PRINCIPLE AND PRESCIENCE Wesley J Smith on DEFEATING TECHNOCRACY IS CRUCIAL TO LIFE David Quinn on IS EUTHANASIA NEXT FOR IRELAND Mary Kenny on RECLAIMING FEMINISMS CHRISTIAN ROOTS Ellen Wilson Fielding on ON SCREEN CHARACTERS OFF SCREEN LIFE Appendices Stephen Vincent Stacy Trasancos David Mills Madeleine Kearns Matthew Hennessey Cardinal Timothy Dolan Booknotes John Grondelski reviews Broken Bonds Surrogate Mothers Speak Out Maria Maffucci reviews What It Means to Be Human The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics From the HLR Website Maria Maffucci W Ross Blackburn Joe Bissonnette Diane Moriarty Politics in the Time of Covid Two Views Nicholas Frankovich and George McKenna

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About this issue Our fervent New Years hopes for better days ahead came crashing down just six days later as we watched with horror the violent scenes unfolding in Washington DC As senior editor William Murchison puts it in the Coda to How to Assess the 2020 Election a prophetic article about mixing politics and religion p 5 One can hardly get already aching arms around the whole crazy mess January 6 would also have been the 60th birthday of my late my brother Robert Arthur McFadden who died from cancer at the tender age of 34 On page 64 I share my thoughts about this years Epiphany day and what Robert might have made of it all In another bit of unprecedented news this years March for Life was almost completely virtual 50 pro life leaders representing millions of pro life Americans processed solemnly to the now fenced in Supreme Court We commend the March for Life Education and Defense Fund for meeting the challenges of the times and putting together an impressive virtual event and especially for honoring Supreme Knight Carl A Anderson of the Knights of Columbus with the Pro Life Legacy Award at the Virtual Rose Dinner Gala see p 96 Winter has already brought the loss of two great defenders of life see pp 73 74 Joseph Scheidler died on January 18 at 93 the godfather of the pro life movement is described by Stephen Vincent as the Supreme Victor in the three decade long court case NOW v Scheidler from our archives p 75 John Patrick Mackey who died January 1 at 73 was an early champion of the unborn in Washington DC serving as Special Counsel for the Ad Hoc Committee in Defense of Life a lobbying organization created in 1974 by the Reviews founding editor J P McFadden John Grondelski reviews Broken Bonds Surrogate Mothers Speak Out edited by Jennifer Lahl and Melinda Tankard Reist both of whom are Review contributors and Renate Klein on p 57 Tankard Reist is co founder and Campaign Director of the grassroots movement Collective Shout which advocates against the objectification of women and the sexualization of girls www collectiveshout org Our thanks start with The National Association of Scholars for permission to reprint Maureen Mullarkeys article John Leo Principle and Prescience which first appeared in Academic Questions For our appendices we thank in order the National Catholic Register for How Aborted Children Are Used in Medical Research in 2020 by Stacy Transacos David Mills and The Stream for How Abortion Disappears Children A Lesson from Argentina National Review for Where the Disabled Have a Right to Be Born by Madeleine Kearns First Things for Matthew Hennesseys Magdalena and finally His Eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan for his permission to reprint Why We Catholics Are So Hung Up on Abortion And we thank as always cartoonist Nick Downes for his needed reminders to chuckle now and then I close here with words from Cardinal Dolan that pinpoint both our challenges going forward and the moral incoherency on life issues of President Joseph Bidens administration How can we sustain a culture that recoils at violence exclusion suicide racism injustice and callousness toward those in need if we applaud allow pay for and promote the destruction of the most helpless the baby in the womb Maria McFadden Maffucci Editor in Chief

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Winter 2021 1 The Human Life Review the HUMAN LIFE REVIEW Introduction 2 Anne Conlon How to Assess the 2020 Election William Murchison 5 What We Owe the Unborn and the Infirm Elderly Nicholas Frankovich 11 On Physical and Moral Plagues George McKenna 18 John Leo Principle and Prescience Maureen Mullarkey 25 Defeating Technocracy Is Crucial to Life Wesley J Smith 30 Is Euthanasia Next for Ireland David Quinn 39 Reclaiming Feminisms Christian Roots Mary Kenny 46 On screen Characters Off screen Life Ellen Wilson Fielding 50 Booknotes 57 John Grondelski Maria McFadden Maffucci From the HLR Website 64 Maria McFadden Maffucci W Ross Blackburn Joe Bissonnette Diane Moriarty Appendices 75 Stephen Vincent Stacy Trasancos David Mills Madeleine Kearns Matthew Hennessey Timothy Cardinal Dolan Winter 2021 Vol XLVII No 1 Editor in Chief Maria McFadden Maffucci Editor Anne Conlon Senior Editors Ellen Wilson Fielding William Murchison Mary Meehan Managing Editor Christina Angelopoulos Contributors James Hitchcock Mary Kenny Rita L Marker William McGurn George McKenna David Quinn Wesley J Smith Business Manager Rose Flynn DeMaio Production Assistant Ida Paz Founding Editors J P McFadden Faith Abbott McFadden Published by The Human Life Foundation Inc Editorial Office 271 Madison Avenue Room 1005 New York N Y 10016 Phone 212 685 5210 The editors will consider all manuscripts submitted but assume no responsibility for unsolicited material Editorial and subscription inquiries and requests for reprint permission should be sent directly to our editorial office Subscription price 40 per year Canada and other foreign countries 60 U S currency ISSN 0097 9783 2021 by The Human Life Foundation Inc New York N Y Printed in the U S A

Introduction 2 Winter 2021 INTRODUCTION Recently while listening to a Jordan Peterson podcast I heard the bestselling author say this Those who formulate the best arguments win They win everything Well then I thought why havent we won Why hasnt the movement for life turned back the movement for death This journals archive bulges with best arguments some formulated by our senior editor William Murchison who recently retired his syndicated column after fifty years of newspapering In How to Assess the 2020 Election Murchison like me asks why Roe v Wade remains legally constitutionally in place after nearly a half century His answer Hearts and minds have been changed Just not enough of them And the way to change enough of them he insists isnt through elections What the society at large believes and believes strongly is what the political class will attend to Cant be otherwise in a democracy What made possible Roe v Wade Murchison argues was the withdrawal of hearts and minds from affection for and attachment to the principle of life It wasnt the politics which at the time he recalls was light and loose There was resistance to the chance the Supremes took with Roe to be sure just not enough to procure an overturn at the political judicial level And there still isnt Politics specifically in the time of Covid is of keen interest to National Review editor Nicholas Frankovich who penned the following essay and to George McKenna professor emeritus of political science at City College of New York whom we asked to comment on it Overnight Frankovich writes in Our Freedom Their Life What We Owe the Unborn and the Infirm Elderly the public health crisis was politicized Donald Trump could have used the presidential bully pulpit to declare a public health equivalent of war he says but efforts to reduce the spread of the virus would depress the economy and thereby harm Trumps reelection campaign To which McKenna replies Thats no doubt true but was that the only conceivable motive Trump could have had What about guarding the country against excessive and unnecessary regulations that damage the economy and make peoples lives miserable In a democracy politicians are supposed to pay some attention to public opinion But Frankovich doesnt have Trump in his sights so much as the Trump supporting pro life movement In their single minded commitment to the tactical imperative of reelecting a man they trusted to deliver anti abortion policies and judges he contends prolifers were cornered into affirming an economic assumption underpinning a longstanding pragmatic argument for abortion that is they emphasized the common sense that life though precious wasnt priceless By backing a president who discounted the severity of a lethal virus killing thousands of nursing home residents pro life leaders and voters adopted the perspective from which many people sensitive to the plight of women with unwanted pregnancies in difficult circumstances defend abortion rights Frankovich has written a very thoughtful and provocative essay McKenna observes at the outset of Of Physical and Moral Plagues one that deserves a respectful response Which is exactly what he gives it

Winter 2021 3 The Human Life Review The much admired journalist John Leo has been watching over American democracy for as long as William Murchison In her beautifully rendered appreciation John Leo Principle and Prescience inspired by Leos retirement last year as editor in chief of Minding the Campus and originally published by Academic Questions Maureen Mullarkey painter critic and senior contributor to The Federalist considers the man whose writing was at the center of much that had stamped my wits and my interests over decades Turning to her much thumbed hard cover edition of Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police a collection of Leos work that has kept me company since it appeared in 1994 she proceeds to show how out of the starting gate the former U S News and World Report columnist took aim at bureaucratic tyranny those totalitarian impulses that seep like salt into our institutions and our lives Several of Leos columns were reprinted in these pages over the years It unnerves me to realize she goes on the degree to which his cautions are still needed Bureaucratic tyranny and totalitarian impulses are on Wesley J Smiths mind here as well In Defeating Technocracy Is Crucial to Life our longtime contributor warns of an increasingly empowered expert class that seeks to impose substantial control over most important aspects of life and exert ironclad enforcement of cultural orthodoxies and policies not only in law but voluntarily via powerful segments of the private sector Like Mullarkey Smith wrote well before the Amazon Google Twitter brigade answered the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol with a coordinated counterattack on Parler and other conservative social media platforms From the World Economic Forums Great Reset Initiative which aims to combat climate change by transforming every industry on the planet to Dr Anthony Faucis stunningly hubristic plan to combat dangerous infectious disease by in his words rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence radical reformers says Smith envision nothing less than an international technocratic authoritarian supra governing system with the power to direct how we interact with each other as family friends and in community Ireland was late to join the Euro American consensus but as David Quinn observes his country helped to set down a new template for how a more liberal abortion regime should be greeted When exterminating the unborn became legal in 2018 ecstatic crowds gathered in the courtyard of Dublin Castle shouted and roared and literally wept with delight For these merrymakers it was a simple matter of good triumphing over evil Quinn founding director of Dublins Iona Institute reports in Is Euthanasia Next for Ireland that the same argument used to sell abortion to the Irish people everyone should have the right to choose to do whatever you want with your own body is now being used to push legislative action on assisted suicide But he observes the topic has not made it to the top of the news bulletins or the front pages of the newspaper in the way it deserves Instead it is almost as though the media have ordained that the less attention they give it the less likely there is to be much opposition Mary Kenny Catholic Herald columnist and author of Goodbye to Catholic Ireland follows Quinns report on present day politicking with an article inspired by the retrospective glance which she says is one of the blessings of the senior years In Reclaiming Feminisms Christian Roots Kenny recounts how she first became a feminist as a rebellious young woman at an Irish Catholic convent school back in

Introduction 4 Winter 2021 the 1950s just edging into the early 1960s And while she and her adolescent mates thought the nuns very old fashioned and in need of updating she now sees them as part of a long line of religious sisters who established the first staging post of womens emancipation by pioneering womens education and so practiced a form of feminism by example Historically nuns were free to study and to research in a way that wasnt often available to lay women Kenny reminds us and in reality were following in a tradition of what we would now call womens empowerment How to describe our final essay In On screen Characters Off screen Life senior editor Ellen Wilson Fielding finds herself pondering the destinies of sitcom characters being streamed into my household by members of my family during this Covid 19 year of limited entertainment options She focuses on the cast of Friends whose pleasantly pacifying format showcases recent generations replacement of the hierarchical family with peers as primary supports and guides But what would happen she wonders if one of these winsome figures their choices and behavior so predictable in sitcom land had a true epiphany a life changing illumination like Why am I sleeping with everyone I date Alas we wont find out Because sitcom writers and producers even and maybe especially those who believe their product is edgy are chiefly collaborating in an echo chamber of accepted opinion the one that exists on our side of the screen In her inimitable way Fielding invites us to ponder an ordinary pastime and discover along with her extraordinary meaning there In this edition of Booknotes John Grondelski reviews Broken Bonds Surrogate Mothers Speak Out the first hand accounts of sixteen women from nine countries whose stories show the multifaceted invidious face of gestational surrogacy Maria Maffucci pronounces O Carter Sneads What It Means to Be Human The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics an engaging dive into the history and philosophical undergirding of Americas contemporary bioethics which is consistently putting vulnerable human lives in peril Our editor in chief also heads up From the Website with a remembrance of her brother Robert McFadden a passionate defender of vulnerable lives who died young but wise as you will see in passages she quotes from his work Other contributors here are Rev W Ross Blackburn Joe Bissonnette and Diane Moriarty whose excellent work continues to enhance the Reviews online presence Finally were pleased to have room for a full complement of appendices articles and columns we think it important to share Scheidlers Supreme Victory reprinted from our own archive recalls a late pro life heros signature fight for justice Following that is an eye opening report on How Aborted Children Are Used in Medical Research Then A Lesson from Argentina How Abortion Disappears Children followed by a look at Poland Where the Disabled Have a Right to Be Born People for instance like Magdalena a young girl who has Down syndrome And ending this section is a bracing answer to the question Why We Catholics Are So Hung Up on Abortion An answer actually as to why all prolifers are hung up on abortion Anne Conlon Editor

Winter 2021 5 The Human Life Review How to Assess the 2020 Election William Murchison Im just coming off a long Andrew Sullivan blog post and I beg my gentle readers not to think less of me for poking into the thought processes of a writer who is not by general definition or for that matter his own the hottest new pledge bro for Knights of Columbus I dont want for present purposes to get into theological details here and indeed dont have to belonging as I do to that very mixed theological bag known as The Episcopal Church once widely celebrated for its gray grandeur Our remaining Gothic wonderlands not only encourage more spiritual nourishment than many outsiders might suppose they afford ready access as well to the thinking of brothers and sisters who bunk way out there in left field We right fielders say thats how they think Eavesdropping on their discourse can be lets just say eye opening Enough of that While framing this commentary on how pro life folk might go about assessing the late elections I read Mr Sullivans musings on the phenomenon of hard core I mean harrrrrrrddd core social Christian convictions among the evangelical bloc of voters I said wait a minute This has implications that go beyond who won what congressional seat last November I am more and more interested at my present stage of life in how people think and believe than in how they vote occasionally in contradiction of what they purport to think and believe Mr Sullivan on the occasion I mention was following up on an earlier post having to do with the aborning belief in evangelical land that Donald Trump is Gods anointed choice to restore the kingdom here in America I know I know Bear with me nevertheless In a manner very hard to understand from the outside Sullivan writes American evangelical Christianity has both deepened its fusion of church and state in the last few years and incorporated Donald Trump into its sacred schematic Christianists his term for political Christians now believe that Trump has been selected by God to save them from persecution and the republic from collapse You might well recall in this context Walker Percys depiction of the Knothead Party in that great dystopic fantasy Love in the Ruins a rich raucous projection of American life into a very near future Theres no special point in hashing over the strategies that fascinate Sullivans William Murchison a former syndicated columnist is a senior editor of the Human Life Review He will soon finish his book on moral restoration in our time

William Murchison 6 Winter 2021 subjects Mainly what they wanted was somehow to ward off Joe Bidens inauguration as president Writing in December I am loath to lay much money on their prospects I am almost equally loath to mock such people the general run of whom Im on good terms with up to an obvious point In their response to the election nevertheless I read the curse of political enthusiasm If you think its time I came to the point thats the point I wish that our political enthusiasts of whom probably as many dwell on the left as on the right would get a good grip Were not getting anywhere this way Im a great deal more interested if I may repeat myself in what Americans think and believe than in how they vote Thats not downplaying the significant electoral gains pro life candidates racked up in 2020 doubling the number of pro life women in Congress while knocking off eight pro choice to employ their own self description Democrats This has to come as excellent news The fewer pro choice candidates in circulation the better There are offsetting considerations nevertheless The first is that which we have already noticed the entanglement of the pro life movement with Donald J Trump a defeated emotionally shaky candidate making things worse for himself through incessantly repeated declarations that he won the election that in fact he lost I do not see the Trump entanglement shall we say clarifying for general consumption the premise that unborn life deserves protection The second consideration offsetting it seems to me the congressional gains of last fall is the coming to power of an avowedly pro choice administration the result of voter decision By all indications says the sagacious Marjorie Dannenfelser head of the pro life Susan B Anthony List Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris have not changed their plans to lead from the extreme left on issues like abortion No I think on abortion at all events shes right Just wait until Xavier Becerra gets started should he be confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services It wont be pretty Politics politics After half a century of experience of writing about this grubby pastime I have concluded politics gets you just so far Then it dumps you in the street with only four bits for cab fare You wonder how you got there And you should because were up to our necks in politics were drowning in it I want to talk a little bit here about why morally and theologically religious Americans should head for shore preserving their political swimwear because after all we cant and shouldnt try to ignore government Political obsession a thing different from legitimate concern over political attempts to downgrade general respect for life at all stages is the folly we need to resist the game we need to refuse The way is hard and long term so different

Winter 2021 7 The Human Life Review from the achievement of a Supreme Court appointment we hope hope will result in greater judicial amity wherever these questions arise It might But thats not enough Not nearly enough I submit out of concern for a number of things among them the realities of life This is where we came in as movie goers used to say before slipping out of the theater A lot of Americans are currently distraught and distracted on account of not getting their way politically back in November 2020 in an election virtually all saw as critical Nor were the state and federal courts amenable to pleas for adjustment of the losers outrage Remember Im writing in December Election apoplexy is the outcome ever to be expected when the whole smoking steaming mess known as life can be viewed as depending on the vote count When the count goes against you a state of personal collapse sometimes ensues Oh my Lord So now theyre in charge Pass the sour mash You see in a society nervous over and obsessed with politics the votes and the way they fall determine everything That means Democrats now in charge progressive to whatever extent Democrats This would seem to argue for questioning whether what happened really happened In other words wasnt there some fraud some robbery going on as Trump certainly asserted Had to be The federal courts proved not to agree but that datum only reminded many that were surely there because of the courts and the great makeover of abortion law they effected in 1973 and because of how in consequence politics swallowed up the judicial system At that the projected civil war didnt break out the war some were forecasting on the heels of Trumps clamor over potentially throwing out the election returns I dont know how many Americans truly thought the ouster of the president pursuant to generally accepted vote counts would lead to a civil war However no governmental handover at such a point as this one can be considered a mere ceremonial occasion with firecrackers and lemonade Most of us began hearing in the election aftermath not quite explicit calls for a division of the house red states splitting the sheets with blue ones I heard and read a number of times the word secession Ummm hmmm as if the unpleasantness of 1861 65 had never taken place and the worlds most powerful armed forces were observed as indulging in a long siesta So What now with respect to a large number of the questions we seem to think without evidence are central to any national future we hope for A civil war were not going to have Nor secession It seems to me the priority is first of all to speak not just of guidelines for the big national handover of political authority but rather of how we imagine ourselves as a nation and people That may sound facile I do not think so Often on lifes journeys moments occur for saying whoa wheres this road taking me and whats up ahead We are at just such a national moment it seems to me

William Murchison 8 Winter 2021 Major stuff is going on in our country Our freedoms and our long term moral integrity are at stake The people Sullivan has his eye on who are not yet of course a dispositive majority and likely will never become such have counterparts on the political left Black Lives Matter the National Abortion Rights League known as NARAL for that matter the united force of the universities to say nothing of the mainstream media The conversational topic in which all indulge freely is power force compelling others in some manner to acquiesce sullenly or quietly with their programs and objectives Thus the quest for power Power means you win and just as important your competitors lose The quest for power is at the center of politics and elections If one party wins the instruments of power will be at its disposal And just watch then Pow Wham Things are going to be different or such is the mythology as shared by true believers across the political spectrum To many with whom we are familiar and not just from reading Andrew Sullivans blog the political survival of Donald Trump some time ago became related to the survival of America It was to these no doubt to some still is an existential question reflecting the way the word is often bent these days in a non Kierkegaardian sense to convey alarm as to basic survival Donald Trump as savior was always a curious concept given the presidents personality and habits but it partly I think reflected alarm at the opposite prospect in other words an Elizabeth Warren or a Bernie Sanders presidency even one with Genial Joe Cmon man Biden in charge of the federal apparatus Bidens decision whether personal or forced to name the pro abortion pro left everything Becerra as secretary of Health and Human Services gives point to concerns about Bidens amiability as to throwing his Catholicism over the side like a plastic water bottle Presidential appointments do matter especially when it comes to federal judges Trump excelled at appointments favorable to the pro life cause Imagine Biden saying to Amy Coney Barrett How would you like a Supreme Court seat Gratitude for good appointments nevertheless becomes an existential question only in moments when political capital is everything and the power of the executive order exceeds the power of the reasoned explication of how human life itself derives from the sovereign grace of its creator known customarily as God The tenuous religiosity of our times strikes me as altogether a larger problem for the pro life cause than the activity and energy of say the Democratic Party That tenuous religiosity can be seen I imagine in the eyes of those whom Andrew Sullivan sees as Christianists wedded to understanding the Republican Party and in particular the Republican president America declined to reelect in 2020 as basic to hopes for the future No Trump no what No pro life secretary of Health and Human Services No protection for the Hyde Amendment Perhaps That is still not the same thing as saying political engagement followed by political victory is rightly the No 1 Christian priority It seems to me there

Winter 2021 9 The Human Life Review is a great deal more to this question than the uses of the democratic franchise The problem with turning over life questions to political people is among other things the complexity of the political game A game it is with many competing aims in view A pure political decision untainted by trade offs and log rolling and wimpy compromises is not of this world the political world I mean Not even where the dictator reigns supreme can it be assumed that purity of intentions and means survives human wresting for advantage Christian author blogger Rod Dreher eying the same political phenomena as Andrew Sullivan cogently observed in a post titled Donald Trump is not the Messiah that he Dreher was not telling people to be politically passive But its frustrating to see people giving themselves over to political passions and would be solutions that dont actually have a lot to do with what most threatens the church and the moral condition of our country The moral condition of our country That would be the consideration most explanatory of the bafflement of hopes for recovery of respect for human life Not the lack of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress Not even the lack until recently of Supreme Court justices in sufficient number to do something of some kind about Roe v Wade It is worth noticing that R v W remains legally constitutionally in place after nearly a half century Why would that be What is lacking Certainly not the tireless efforts of good hearts and good minds such as those that have long guided that estimable journal the Human Life Review Splendid things have been accomplished by the pro life movement through its diligence and persistence through the radiance of its love for lives formed by God Himself Through its witness hearts and minds have been changed And wait There it is Hearts and minds have been changed Just not enough of them Not yet Maybe in a few years who knows The end of the political quest in pro life affairs will come when so many of us agree in heart and mind that life is a wonderful thing to be fostered and encouraged rather than violently extracted and disposed of There will be no need for politics when the voters instruct their representatives that their obviously superb talents are required in some line other than the placation of Planned Parenthood The thing wanted is getting the voters to the belief or acceptance of the belief that in pro life matters and all aspects of what we pleasantly call cultural conservatism life matters more than any competing consideration What the society at large believes and believes strongly is what the political class will attend to Cant be otherwise in a democracy A pro life electorate may take for granted the overthrow of Roe v Wade But we dont have such an electorate which leaves pro life forces nibbling around the edges of success seizing and settling for whats possible If reversal of that condition sounds easy I apologize The factor that made

William Murchison 10 Winter 2021 possible Roe v Wade was the withdrawal of hearts and minds from affection for and attachment to the principle of life It wasnt the politics The politics of abortion back then was light and loose The High Court took a chance Voila Many critics and opponents resisted just not enough to procure an overturn at the political judicial level There still arent enough opponents That is my somber view and I would bet yours also Whats possible in a secularizing society like our own isnt the same as what was possible back when social religious consensus if nevertheless imperfect made possible the passage of strong laws encouraging I like to put it in the positive not the negative nay saying vein the protection of life Contemporary Christianity sapped by that same self regarding secularism whose life force is the desire for inner self determination lacks the vim and vigor to enforce societal regard for unborn life We take what protections the politicians can be persuaded to deliver or alternatively to leave in place out of half the time a visceral fear of losing jobs and pensions This is not a happy ending to the story but I would plead that it is not necessarily the only possible ending A civil war would settle even less than blocking the inauguration of Joe Biden would have settled What is wanted in the most generous spatial sense is a philosophical moral and above all religious reformation against all the odds against shouts of derision by the intellectuals against the frothing of the New York Times and the Washington Post and MSNBC Such a reformation literally a re forming of that which has been deformed and unformed would settle much if not mathematically everything And that would come about and be pursued how I am writing in Advent I hear around me stirrings for which no human can truly account persistent stirrings of an origin hard to pin down however familiar they may be You can never know surely whats to come when heartfelt pleas reach the place where heartfelt pleas are reliably reported always to be welcome not to mention encouraged CODA And after all this as if any more were needed came January 6 Epiphany a day of non theological manifestations covering some of what I said above the U S Capitol overwhelmed by hard core believers in the myth of the Stolen Election egged on at a nearby rally by the fake Messiah himself Who now seems set despite notable achievements in office to become a historical study in turpitude One can hardly get already aching arms around the whole crazy mess With just this exception a gift from Holy Writ O put not your trust in princes nor in any child of man for there is no help in them Blessed is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help and whose hope is in the LORD his God Ps 146 2 4

Winter 2021 11 The Human Life Review Our Freedom Their Life What We Owe the Unborn and the Infirm Elderly Nicholas Frankovich My body my choice reads the sign A cardboard rectangle taller than it is wide it looks handmade At its base the line Trump 2020 stands in counterpoint red and blue letters against a white background You stop short but maybe not Youve seen the rhetorical device before Two ideas that seem to contradict each other are juxtaposed to imply agreement inviting you the reader to supply the logical connection and thereby participate in the discovery of a further third idea the synthesis which is now the product of your mental labor light labor granted but yours and therefore harder for you to let go of and wave aside In this case the challenge is to reconcile an abortion rights motto thesis with an endorsement of Donald Trump antithesis a politician whom the leadership as well as the rank and file of the antiabortion movement on the whole embraces with verve Pro choice and pro Trump Riddle me that The paradox might have any number of possible solutions The one thats correct for the purposes of the sign is laid out in the middle of it There a standard issue powder blue surgical face mask is sketched inside the international hieroglyph for No a red circle with a slash running through it You can find the photo online at Getty Images In the caption the young woman holding the sign is identified as a protester at the Texas state capitol in April 2020 shortly after city and county officials in Austin issued orders requiring that people wear face masks in public An American flag waves from a stick that she holds in the same hand Wearing a baseball cap backwards dark glasses a thin nose ring and a patterned neckerchief she has a look casual but well put together that Ill call metropolitan for lack of a better word In her posture you see poise in her facial expression quiet intelligence She could be a model for a certain positive stereotype of that other more familiar kind of pro choice activist the one dedicated to preserving the legality and accessibility of abortion in the United States The photo is a masterpiece of ambiguity We cant be sure which of two possible ironies the protester represents Is it that of someone who supports abortion rights but also Trump Does she tolerate the contradiction because in her zeal for personal freedom in general she rejects Austins face mask mandate and finds a champion in Trump who promotes a hands off laissez faire government Nicholas Frankovich is an editor at National Review

Nicholas Frankovich 12 Winter 2021 response to the pandemic Or is the irony that of someone who leans right and appropriates the other sides language to promote her as she sees it libertarian cause From the sum of her message pro Trump and anti face mask I would guess that shes a redstate partisan after all The wording on her slab of white cardboard and the whole design of it appear to be copied from products posters T shirts and face masks which take on the added meaning of Im wearing this but under protest that are sold online and I assume that the market for them is a segment of the pro Trump right As an argument against face mask mandates My body my choice collapses for the same reason that it collapses as an argument to justify abortion The body of the person asserting freedom of choice is not the only body in question I may prefer to be free from the inconvenience or encumbrance of covering my face and think that I have a natural right not to adopt the practice I may decide that the freedom to expose my mouth and nostrils to direct contact with the air outweighs the risk that I would get the virus and fall ill but of course the reason to wear a mask is to protect not only oneself Its to protect others as well or others even foremost by taking care not to become a vector someone who spreads the virus The older a person is the more likely the virus is to kill him if he catches it One could argue that the obligation of a younger person to avoid infection is less to himself than to his elders So is the coronavirus pandemic like assisted suicide a pro life issue that summons our concern for the sanctity of life primarily though not exclusively with respect to the elderly The two issues bear some obvious resemblance In discussions of both nursing home residents figure prominently Through December 2020 nursing home residents and employees accounted for approximately one third of the 340,000 deaths related to Covid 19 in the United States The toll on nursing homes in Europe too has been disproportionate Some critics of public health restrictions stress the mountain of cases and fatalities in nursing homes to argue that government responses should be focused on the elderly and that the rest of the population should by and large be left alone for the sake of curtailing economic loss Owners and employees of small businesses in the hospitality industry have been especially hard hit though not only by lockdowns imposed by state and local officials Many people assessed the risk for themselves and decided for prudence spending less time elbow to elbow with strangers in bars restaurants and entertainment venues during the pandemic than before We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself President Trump tweeted on March 22 2020 in the early weeks of the pandemic I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter he said from the

Winter 2021 13 The Human Life Review Rose Garden later that week I still like playing it down he admitted in an interview with Bob Woodward earlier that month referring to the virus because I dont want to create a panic Efforts to reduce the spread of the virus would depress the economy and thereby harm Trumps reelection campaign and so he and his supporters felt an incentive to downplay the pandemic and to criticize those who took and recommended precautions A rhetoric of freedom versus fear came to characterize the spontaneous movement against lockdowns and face masks The notion circulated that to wear a mask was to concede that you belonged to the sheeple while my face in all its brazen bareness signified that I was free frank fearless my own man the Gadsden flag with its script reading Dont tread on me was a frequent flyer among the anti lockdown protesters at state capitals that spring Men dont wear face masks but cowards do a journalist suggested on Twitter Overnight the public health crisis was politicized Trump and his supporters minimized its seriousness said their detractors who in turn were accused of exaggerating it Even if you thought that the call to vigilance and caution was misguided it was understandable It was defensible to the extent that it could be disentangled it often couldnt from partisanship from an apparent wish that Covids domination of the news would harm Trump politically Pundits observed that he could have played the pandemic to his political advantage Had he used the presidential bully pulpit to declare a public health equivalent of war he could have made himself in effect a wartime president rallying the nation behind him to join in a common cause as during World War II although by 2020 the spirit of 1941 had receded into a past almost beyond living memory Were divided and cynical to a degree that would have horrified the Silent Generation in its prime I would expect conservatives to be more worried about virus X coming in from abroad social psychologist Jonathan Haidt told Ezra Klein in a piece at Vox May 21 2020 A correlation between anti immigration views and fear of infectious diseases has been demonstrated by social science researchers When Obama was president and America was threatened by Ebola it was conservatives freaking out Haidt recalled demanding a more vigorous government response to protect us while Obama kept steady on following scientific advice But Trump laid out his view very early This is nothing to worry about its a plot to discredit me and it will magically go away Skeptics of widescale public health restrictions seized on statistics showing that the crisis looked far less severe when cases and fatalities in nursing homes were subtracted from the national totals Sometimes the fact was stated without commentary leaving the reader or listener to infer that the value of what was left of the lives of those already near their life expectancy was minor when compared with the harm that efforts to control the pandemic would inflict on

Nicholas Frankovich 14 Winter 2021 everyone else on our livelihoods and quality of life Imagine a nursing home resident who has dementia heart and respiratory conditions and ten weeks to live She dies sooner than that after contracting Covid In the autopsy report its listed as one of several comorbidities Her case is then added to the hundreds of thousands of deaths that the Centers for Disease Control counts as having been caused in whole or in part by the coronavirus Is the gravity of her death equal to that of the death of say a middle aged man who commits suicide after losing his livelihood and subsequently his marriage to the economic downturn caused by people staying home to avoid contagion Economists have devised formulas for determining the monetary value of a persons life or of her remaining life Attaching a price to human life will strike some readers as uncomfortable if not offensive Chris Conover writes in Forbes March 27 2020 Indeed Governor Andrew Cuomo recently tweeted you cannot put a value on a human life And he is right in important and fundamental ways But when it comes to public policy it quickly becomes impossible to think that way For example if we said that it was worth spending a trillion dollars per person to prevent unnecessary deaths wed run out of money in a day It is sometimes said that life is priceless writes Robert VerBruggen in National Review April 20 2020 But of course this is not true because every day we behave in ways that could shorten or end our stays on this earth whether that means stuffing our faces with Doritos or simply traveling across train tracks through the air or at high speed down a highway We do these things because we value their benefits more than we fear the risk of death they entail And every year this countrys legislators and regulators decide to enact some life saving rules but not others because some of these rules are deemed worth the costs and some are not Making trade offs between lives and other things we value is simply a fact of well life Risk avoidance in other words usually imposes a cost even if its only the ten seconds you need to spend to walk over to the stove and turn it off before leaving the house The cost of risk avoidance may be monetary or monetary in part To reduce the risk that a resident will contract the coronavirus the mayor orders bars and restaurants to close or to reduce their capacity to enable social distancing Would be patrons lose opportunities to enjoy the amenity of dining out The cost to them is a reduction in their quality of life The cost to owners and employees of the establishments is monetary but could as a knock on effect also cut the lives of some of them short as the quality of the nutrition and health care within their means diminishes Some are liable to die deaths of despair if the economic hardship resulting from the lockdown has made them susceptible to mental illness or substance abuse and in turn to suicide or a loss of their motivation to take care of themselves

Winter 2021 15 The Human Life Review Those to whom risk attaches and in whose interest the cost of the lockdown is imposed are the residents of the city and any visitors to it They share the risk unequally A thirty year old may be about as susceptible to infection as his grandparents are but hes far less likely to get sick from it and even less likely to die He misses hanging out with friends at the local dive and most of all he misses his income from the restaurant where he waited tables For him the citys new risk management arrangement is a bad deal a cure worse than the problem you might say if we think of him as a rational actor whose selfinterest is narrowly defined The ratio of benefit to cost increases for him however if he lives with his grandparents and cares about their health The citywide lockdown reduces their risk of infection and alleviates his worry He still suffers the loss of his job and weekends out on the town but he understands the trade off and accepts it as the fairest possible response to a bad situation He could argue but he doesnt that the lockdown was unnecessary even for his grandparents because he would have worn a face mask outside the home lessening the chance that he would get infected and then infect them and they decided not to go out anymore anyway except for trips to the doctor and the supermarket The three of them that is grandparents and grandson would have taken precautions to reduce their exposure to risk Even so despite their efforts they might not have been able to reduce their risk to what it is now under the lockdown in the absence of which more people would spend more time in public spreading more of the virus than would have been spread otherwise As an Australian epidemiologist remarked early in the pandemic Americas uneven patchwork of public health measures is like having a no urinating section in the community swimming pool Never has the pro life movement in its approximately half century of existence met such a pointed challenge to its understanding of the sanctity of life Republican elected officials antiabortion with few exceptions condoned or promoted the presidents loosely defined vision of a Covid policy based on the assumption that one could take personal risks in splendid isolation as if the possibility hadnt occurred to them that their decision to forgo wearing a face mask could have lethal consequences for someone in whose company they exhaled To hear them miss the point as they touted rugged American individualism in the context of a raging pandemic was like reading a New York Times op ed in which the author defends a womans right to abortion while never once using the words fetus or unborn child I took an oath to uphold the constitution of our state South Dakota Governor Noem Kristi told Fox News I took an oath when I was in Congress obviously to uphold the Constitution of the United States I believe in our freedom and liberties What Ive seen across the country is so many people give up their liberties for just a little bit of security and they

Nicholas Frankovich 16 Winter 2021 dont have to do that Voters for whom a candidates antiabortion bona fides usually seals their support for him found themselves in an awkward position They rehearsed rationalizations for the presidents approach to or rather attitude toward the pandemic but for the most part they failed to address their predicament In their singleminded commitment to the tactical imperative of reelecting a man they trusted to deliver antiabortion policies and judges they were blinded to a strategic complication They had been cornered into affirming an economic assumption underpinning a longstanding pragmatic argument for abortion They emphasized the common sense that life though precious wasnt priceless In doing so they adopted the perspective from which many people sensitive to the plight of women with unwanted pregnancies in difficult circumstances defend abortion rights Does the pro life community now better appreciate the resistance that its message meets from the wider world We all like the notion of the intrinsic worth of human life Peter Singer wrote under the heading Fine Phrases in his book Rethinking Life and Death The Collapse of Our Traditional Values 1995 We accept such a noble idea without much critical scrutiny as long as it does not restrict us from doing what we really think is important Then one day we find it is making us do things that are manifestly pointless or likely to lead to disaster So we take a better look at the fine phrases we so readily accepted And start to wonder why we ever believed them in the first place Then we drop them We invoke the sanctity of life but make exceptions to it We lay down the principle that to take the life of a human person is a grave injustice Then we enumerate exceptions Just war self defense and capital punishment are the most commonly accepted Most Americans would make an exception also for abortion or abortion in some circumstances They disagree among themselves about where to draw the line A growing number would make an exception as well for euthanasia and assisted suicide though again they disagree on how permissive or how restrictive the laws and regulations governing the practices should be In theory the argument for hastening death applies to all ages In practice its application to the infirm elderly is disproportionate The infirm elderly especially those in nursing homes resemble the unborn in some notable respects The two populations are voiceless or largely so Passive recipients of our care or neglect or worse than neglect they are largely unable to defend themselves or to act in their own self interest Abortion differs from elder abuse in that the abuser is motivated by malice whereas abortion providers and women who procure their services typically are not but violence is wrought against the passive recipient in both cases all the same Whereas the aborted child is the victim of a deliberate act the nursing home resident who dies from Covid is the victim at the end of a chain of decisions made by individuals who

Winter 2021 17 The Human Life Review may have only neglected to give sufficient thought to age related fragility hers and that of her peers While we recognize the humanity of both populations the unborn and the infirm elderly we are tempted to regard it as marginal hovering at the borders between life and what we are tempted to imagine as nonexistence If we imagine the life of the average person walking around in the world to be a bonfire that of the unborn child is a mere spark of the infirm elderly a smoldering ember If the pro life community honors its principles the infirm elderly belong to its natural constituency Under the pressure of abortion politics alas the pro life community defended a president who discounted the severity of a public health crisis for which the bulls eye has been the nursing home population Those who argued from economic necessity to defend Trumps idea of what the government response should be to the pandemic were not all unreasonable or necessarily acting in bad faith No one has a clear map of the tangled web of tradeoffs involving quality of life for the many and for the fewer the likely amount of life remaining to the elderly whom a given policy might expose to extreme risk Save your criticism rather for those who hoisting their Gadsden flags compartmentalized their opposition to abortion as they adopted for the occasion the hard libertarian rationale of the abortion rights movement All due respect to the many pro life libertarians who object to distortions of their political philosophy We would be nave not to suspect that our protester in Austin saw some cheeky humor in her flashing the slogan My body my choice as a statement against mandatory face masks What she chose for the part of her body that was her face was to leave it uncovered defying local law at the time Her mask was her ostensible irony behind which a stubborn contradiction waits to be resolved

George McKenna 18 Winter 2021 On Physical and Moral Plagues George McKenna Nicholas Frankovich has written a very thoughtful essay provocative in the best sense building a case for avoiding absolute positions on how to protect the nation against the coronavirus and on how to approach the abortion issue Its a fine essay and deserves a respectful response In my opinion he has made some errors largely of omission in treating the first of these issues and one major error in dealing with the second He starts by inviting the reader to make sense of two conflicting images he saw in a photograph online A metropolitan looking young woman is holding an American flag and a sign showing an image of a powder blue face mask with a red slash across it Her physical appearance suggests that she leans left but the slashed mask and the flag suggest a rightward tilt Further complicating the picture are two verbal provocations the pro abortion motto My body my choice at the top of her sign and at its base Trump 2020 So shes both prochoice and pro Trump Is there anything coherent we pull out of this strange juxtaposition He speculates that shes maybe a pro Trumper after all but he seems to leave room for other interpretations Actually the one that seems more congruent both with the illustration and with his argument throughout his essay is that shes both pro choice and pro Trump and wrong on both counts Frankovich aims to take on both a anti abortion absolutists who are indifferent about the need for face masks and lockdowns and b the absolutists on the other side the pro abortion feminists who shout My body my choice Both sides are guilty of thinking only of their own causes ignoring the lethal effects on other human beings when their doctrines are put into effect Lets consider the first of the two the pro life absolutists Here his prime example is Donald Trump But it is far from clear that Trump is an absolutist on abortion To my knowledge Trump never said he believes that human life is sacred from the moment of conception until natural death the position of pro life absolutists Yet it is true that Trumps rhetoric sometimes sounded absolutist I almost fell out of my chair watching his debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016 and hearing him characterize abortion as ripping the baby out of a mothers womb I had never heard any Republican politician talk like that before He was also the first Republican president not just to phone it in but to attend and speak in person at the annual March for Life in Washington So for the sake of argument lets say that Trump is an absolutist on abortion George McKenna is professor emeritus of political science at City College of New York

Winter 2021 19 The Human Life Review But when it comes to the coronavirus Trump was a compromiser while in office too much of a compromiser for Frankovichs taste especially when it comes to using masks and lockdowns to fight the virus We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself That tweet of Trump in March of 2020 annoys Frankovich it seems to him not only irresponsible but self serving Efforts to reduce the spread of the virus would depress the economy and thereby harm Trumps reelection campaign Thats no doubt true but was that the only conceivable motive Trump could have had What about guarding the country against excessive and unnecessary regulations that damage the economy and make peoples lives miserable And even if reelection were uppermost in his mind why did Trump think these regulations would hurt his chances for reelection Maybe because people hate them In a democracy politicians are supposed to pay some attention to public opinion The rejoinder is that they should also pay attention to the science But for at least the first three months of the virus in this country while it was spreading like wildfire nobody seemed to know what was going on not even the scientists and certainly not the politicians and news outlets the people who are supposed to keep us informed On January 21 2020 a week after the first patient arrived here from China Dr Anthony Fauci Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases NIAID declared This is not a major threat This is not something that citizens of the United States should be worried about On January 31 when the White House imposed a travel ban from China to stop any more infected arrivals House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused Trump of racism and xenophobia and introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to stop the ban Former vice president Joe Biden accused Trump of hysteria xenophobia and fear mongering A Washington Post headline the next day said Get a Grippe America the Flu Is a Much Bigger Threat On February 2 the New York City Health Commissioner said The risk to New Yorkers from the Coronavirus is low There is no reason not to take the subway not to take the bus not to go out to your favorite restaurant and certainly not to miss the Chinese New Year next Sunday Im going to be there Speaker Pelosi added her own endorsement more than three weeks later on February 24 We want to be careful about how we deal with it but we do want to say to people Come to Chinatown here we are come join us Five days later Dr Fauci again Right now there is no need to change anything youre doing As late as March 8 Fauci said theres no reason to be walking around with a mask He covered himself though That could change If there was confusion and uncertainty about masks in 2020 there was even more when it came to the lockdowns Masks are a sufferable nuisance but lockdowns cause real harm to restaurants stores schools to the people who run

George McKenna 20 Winter 2021 them who use them and work in them And to the national economy Because of the lockdowns between January and April of 2020 employment rates fell by five percent more than the drop during and after the Great Recession of 2008 In addition 44 percent of the population experienced a decline in earning and 54 percent a decrease in savings Long established businesses closed many of them never to reopen Researchers have documented the human costs of the lockdowns spikes in mental illness alcoholism and drug abuse domestic violence and suicides We do not know how many people put off doctors appointments and surgery during this period worsening their condition but there are statistics suggesting that there were significantly more deaths deaths not caused by the virus itself than would have occurred during a similar period before the virus arrived Here is how Frankovich sums up the reactions to the Covid crisis in America Trump and his supporters minimized its seriousness said their detractors who in turn were accused of exaggerating it Even if you thought that the call to vigilance and caution was misguided it was understandable Understandable perhaps but heedless of the damage they caused Again it was more than economic damage it was lethal damage it cost lives How could anyone think that this was not going to become politicized especially during a presidential election year That is what politics is for at least in a democracy to locate a crisis bring it into the open into the public arena for debate and see if a resolution can be found Frankovich is not opposed to public debate or to compromise at the end of it He quotes approvingly a National Review writer who says that making tradeoffs between lives and other things we value is simply a fact of well life Indeed Frankovich might say that is my whole point What I am saying is that activists on both sides of the debates over coronavirus and abortion need to climb down from their absolutist positions and recognize that virtually all benefits entail costs He does not cite this example but Ill use it here because it fits his argument In March 2020 New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a directive that barred nursing homes from refusing to take in Covid patients from nearby hospitals As a result between March 25 and May 8 approximately 6,326 Covid positive patients were admitted to nursing homes throughout the state We do not know exactly how many vulnerable old people were killed by those transfers but we do know thanks to a 2021 report by New York Attorney General Letitia James that the Governor understated by more than half the number of fatalities resulting from the transfer By the end of 2020 New York State had one of the highest death tolls in the nation with more than 12,000 deaths in nursing homes and other long term care facilities Of course we do not know how many of those deaths could be attributable to the arrival of the

Winter 2021 21 The Human Life Review infected patients but it must have been several hundred at the least Some of Cuomos harshest critics have charged him with killing old people but I have seen no evidence that Cuomo intended to kill anybody or make any conscious assumption that old peoples lives are less valuable than young peoples His intention he said was to mitigate what he thought was going to be a tsunami of Covid sufferers pouring into New York hospitals overwhelming staff and facilities It was a classic trade off in this case a tragically stupid one but trade offs do have to be made in crisis situations As the National Review writer might have said they are simply a fact of well life But it is just here that we come to what I think is the underlying mistake running through the next part the abortion part of Frankovichs essay a category mistake The term category mistake was coined by British philosopher Gilbert Ryle in 1949 in criticizing the philosophy of Ren Descartes who had written a famous treatise on mind body dualism A category mistake means confusing two very different entities thinking them to be in the same category We often talk of people mixing up apples and oranges but at least apples and oranges are both in the same category fruits But a category mistake is more radical its like mixing up apples and monkey wrenches The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives other examples of this kind of mistake The number two is blue The theory of relativity is eating breakfast I think Frankovich has made a similar error not as egregious as in those hypotheticals but far more consequential He has confused fatal errors with deliberate killing He poses the question of whether the coronavirus pandemic is like assisted suicide and his answer is The two issues bear some obvious resemblance What is obvious is that in both cases people get dead But what makes them die is on the one hand incompetent planning and on the other deliberate intent In 2020 Governor Cuomo made what theologians call a prudential judgment the same kind of judgment an airline pilot has to make when a bird gets sucked into one of the engines and he has to decide whether to return to the airport or try an emergency landing in the river The wrong judgment will kill hundreds of passengers and himself but that doesnt mean that the pilot is a killer it means that hes not Sully Sullenberger Had Sullenberger made the wrong decision and perished with the passengers no one would have found any moral fault with him It was in that same category of prudential judgment then that Andrew Cuomo made his decision one that attempted to balance the risks on both sides A purely prudential judgment may be correct or incorrect in either case though it is not per se good or evil But judgments about abortion whether to get them perform them subsidize them promote them put us into a very different discussion category They are not prudential judgments they are moral

George McKenna 22 Winter 2021 judgments The two are as different as apples and monkey wrenches Some years ago I attended a debate between the late Henry Hyde the U S Representative who authored the Hyde Amendment banning federal money to pay for abortions versus someone on the pro choice side The pro choicer passionately and at length described the physical psychological and economic hardships a woman can face in bringing to term an unwanted child There needs to be some remedy he said some procedure to free her from this burden Hyde who had been listening quietly suddenly burst out But abortion is a killing procedure The reason my memory of that moment is so vivid stems from that single word The blast from it continues to blow away all the euphemisms built around it since Roe v Wade in 1973 We know now that the fetus is not a thing not a boil not a tumor not the fertilized entrails of a woman as one imaginative abortion supporter put it but a tiny human being in a journey of development that will continue into adulthood if permitted But each year permission is denied to more than 42 million of them worldwide They are cut up and vacuumed out of their mothers in pieces or in later pregnancies removed intact and left to die in the operating room Either way it is not a nice looking process and seeing it has caused some former participants in it to join the ranks of the prolifers The decision about whether or not to approve the process is not a prudential judgment like those a doctor must make to ensure the survival and health of a premature baby It is a moral judgment a judgment that it is OK to kill an innocent and utterly helpless human being What does Frankovich think about abortion Clearly he doesnt like it He rejects My body my choice because he knows theres another body acted upon in the procedure He sneers at the New York Times for defending a womans right to abortion while never using the words fetus or unborn child But throughout his essay he keeps dropping hints that prolifers need to be more pragmatic to be more sensitive to the plight of women with unwanted pregnancies He never says what that would mean in practice Abortion allowable only for the first trimester or 20 weeks or what When does the fetus become a human being that you absolutely cannot kill He does not directly answer that question himself but he does quote a famous professor of bioethics at Princeton in apparent agreement with the professor that the intrinsic worth of human life is nothing more than a fine phrase completely empty of meaning The name of the bioethicist is Peter Singer Whoa I said to myself when I read this Is this the same Peter Singer who wrote Practical Ethics and Should the Baby Live It is In Practical Ethics Singer wrote human babies are not born self aware or capable of grasping that they exist over time They are not persons But animals are self aware and therefore the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig a dog

Winter 2021 23 The Human Life Review or a chimpanzee In Should the Baby Live Singer and his co author Helga Kuhse suggested that a period of 28 days after birth might be allowed before an infant is accepted as having the same right to live as others They made the case for killing newborns suffering from birth defects such as spina bifida and Down syndrome When Singer spoke to an assembly at a hospital near me security guards were posted at the door and the moderator ruled out any critical questioning from audience members Does Frankovich really want to be in that company He might reply that it is unfair to assume that he would ever carry his premise to such a conclusion But the premise carries itself there This is a Dostoevskian situation Once we agree that the intrinsic value of human life is just a fine phrase why spare the life of someone with no human potential Rodion Raskolnikov the ragged college student in Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment overhears a conversation between two other students as one of them talks about a horrid old woman pawnbroker in the neighborhood who extorts punishing terms on the poor She is not simply useless but doing actual mischief who has not an idea what she is living for herself On the other side fresh young lives thrown away for want of help by the thousands on every side A hundred thousand good deeds could be done and helped on that old womans money which will be buried in a monastery Hundreds thousands perhaps might be set on the right path dozens of families saved from destitution from ruin from vice Kill her take her money and with the help of it devote yourself to the service of humanity and the good of all It was idle student talk but Raskolnikov was violently agitated on hearing it because he realized that at that very moment his own brain was just conceiving the very same ideas Raskolnikov soon put those ideas into effect taking an ax to the head of the pawnbroker and to her mentally disabled younger sister when she came on the scene For the next four hundred or so pages we are led through the young mans sad half hearted attempts to escape detection his eventual arrest trial and punishment Exiled for years in Siberia he is converted to Christianity by his faithful lover who has followed him into exile It is Jesus in the New Testament who makes him understand the sacredness of human life In Western history it was the arrival of Christianity that brought the notion of the sacredness of each person into the world It was unknown before then In pre Christian Rome if for any reason a newborn baby was rejected by his or her father this happened much more often with female babies out the baby went to the forest for a quick end by wolves or a more prolonged death from starvation or whatever The whole crazy notion that each human life has inherent value that human lives matter was what inspired early Christians to set

George McKenna 24 Winter 2021 up orphanages hospitals and other institutions for the needy the impaired and the others who had always been treated with contempt by society Whether that view can survive the decline of Christianity in the West is debatable It has clearly lost the debate in Peter Singers mind if he ever debated it because he has concluded that It does not seem wise to add to the burden on limited resources by increasing the number of severely disabled children By disposing of them parents can always have another pregnancy which has a good chance of being normal In rejecting this kind of thinking do I find myself trapped by the inconsistency suggested by Nicholas Frankovich at the start of his essay of being an absolutist about the sacredness of every human life and a compromiser when it comes to masks and lockdowns My answer is no because they belong in two very different categories of thought Do you know from which filling the government is controlling your mind

Winter 2021 25 The Human Life Review John Leo Principle and Prescience Maureen Mullarkey When I learned that John Leo had retired as editor in chief of Minding the Campus my thoughts leaped to T S Eliots final prayer at the end of Ash Wednesday Suffer me not to be separated The news came as a wrench a decisive twist to the bolt on a repository of shaping memories His writing was at the center of much that had stamped my wits and my interests over decades The man entered my life through a Xeroxed copy of his December 1 1965 column in the National Catholic Reporter It had been handed to me by a Fordham student on the sidewalk outside the Catholic Peace Fellowship on Beekman Street As much a jaccuse against the New York chancery as a brief in support of Daniel Berrigan S J it was a rousing thing to read A Jesuit provincial had just ordered the charismatic activist poet priest out of the country for his role in the anti war movement In passionate defense of Fr Berrigan Leo opened with a description of him as one of the most Christlike men I have ever met one who disturbed the slumber of lesser men He called Berrigan a marked man hounded by a naked and arrogant exercise in authoritarianism The column was intoxicating to an idealistic Catholic schooled girl high on Yeats The blood dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned For so many of my generation at the time Berrigan presided as the conscience of the innocent And squinting through the prism of youthful conceit we saw lesser men slumbering everywhere Cardinal Spellman was an outspoken hawk on the Vietnam War Dan Berrigan spoke otherwise His reassignment to Latin America for a mandatory cooling off was believed to have been the Cardinals doing Leos Thinking It Over The Case of Fr Berrigan appeared together with a front page story in the same issue of NCR A cause clbre was launched Eleven days later the New York Times followed with an open letter to the archdiocese and New Yorks Jesuit community Signers were a stellar roster of Catholic intellectuals To this reader in that day Leos column brought Catholicism alive as something Maureen Mullarkey is a painter and a critic who writes on art and its intersection with religion and politics Her essays have appeared in various publications including The Nation The Hudson Review Arts Magazine Art Antiques and American Arts Quarterly Currently she is a senior contributor at The Federalist She keeps the weblog Studio Matters www studiomatters org This essay was first published in the Winter 2020 issue of Academic Questions www nas org academic questions a journal of the National Association of Scholars and is reprinted with permission The National Association of Scholars 2020

Maureen Mullarkey 26 Winter 2021 more than a system of inherited beliefs Suddenly it became interesting Historian Rodger Van Allen has since denied Spellmans responsibility for Berrigans exile He pronounced it an in house Jesuit affair one the Cardinal simply lacked the appetite to oppose Moreover hindsight gave cause to regret the cult around Berrigan Idolization of the holy outlaw has proven as flawed as the priests own affiliation with Howard Zinn Nonetheless Leos militant defense of his friend was principled and exemplary His anger at what was reasonably understood at the time as an abuse of episcopal authority was matched by a strong sense of loyalty His comment to Berrigan after the expulsion directive arrived has stayed with me over the years Well take care of your cause Well take care of getting the truth out Getting the truth out That is key Leos allegiance was more than personal It was ethical a fidelity to the truth of things In the end as it ever was in the beginning that is the mainspring of the essayists vocation And before anything else the man is an essayist His writing life has been a consistent attempt an essai to extract meaning from events that might otherwise be taken for granted Along the way he fired away at the imperious gall of Those Who Know Better My much thumbed hard cover edition of Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police a collection of previously published essays has kept me company since it appeared in 1994 I love these pieces most from U S News and World Report for their prescience candor and as any writer will concede their underlineability Begin with prescience Whitney to Whitey Drop Dead was a response to the Whitney Museums 1993 biennial a self satisfied romp into agit prop Admission buttons extended the tenor of it onto the lapels of the paying public Some were printed with the legend I CANT IMAGINE WANTING TO BE WHITE the other three bore fragments of that sentence In sum the exhibition showcased the Whitneys embrace of what in the art worlds bloodless argot was hailed as institutional critique Leo put it more bluntly the itch to harangue And to debase In two numbing hours at this organized shambles I learned that the world is neatly divided into good and bad Good women non whites homosexuals transvestites gang members glory holes people with AIDS gays in the military Bad America straight white males family religion hierarchies lipstick liposuction fatism and penises not attached to gay men His discussion leap frogged over the scripted pieties of docents It ignored the exhibition catalogues conceptual fustian and drove straight to the point of the project It is about replacing the center mainstream America and its values with the margin the

Winter 2021 27 The Human Life Review race and gender ideologues and their allies In other words its about a cultural war to destabilize and break the mainstream A prophecy clearly stated the entire commentary was also a lesson in good writing John Leo was not an ordained art critic That means he was able to see what he was looking at His vista unclouded by the higher obscurities of art talk he was free to tell plainly what was in front of him Whatever the topic Leos prose was tart often playful ruled by clarity and logic He brought to his writing a moral outlook that took the measure of those hypocrisies stupidities and stealth objectives that litter the route of the Gramscian march By the time I became a card carrying member of the International Association of Art Critics I had learned from Leo how not to be an art critic At least not to sound like one Leos voice as a writer was both sober and witty a reminder that for any argument to be effective it must be accessible to general readers At the same time it has to keep its heft not fudge its commitments Despite an even hand when needed Leo knew which side he was on How did Emerson put it Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes Just so If only more of us had acted on what we heard In July the Spectator USA ran a polished reflection on the slide of the F word from curse to commonplace A latecomer I thought Surely someone had detected this slippage long before now Sure enough a quick check into Two Steps Ahead turned up The F Word Flows Like Ketchup In the early Nineties Leo declared it all around us now like air pollution His perp walk of F addicts included even the New Yorker once a hotbed of decorum and taste but now a victim of fashion a breathless dowager slipping into her first punk miniskirt The sentences are delicious the verdict unyielding Robert Gottlieb former editor of the New Yorker admitted the magazine had no policy at all on the Fword and he had never given it a moments thought Unintimidated by being deemed judgmental the last taboo Leo countered Thats just the problem When you get to be the editor of the New Yorker youre supposed to spend a minute thinking about standards Maybe even two Behind that simple word supposed lies trust in the existence of a proper order in pursuit of good ends Call it truth the stable beam from which a scale of values can be weighed A subtle indictment the passage implies that Gottliebs detachment was as heavy a thumb on the cultural scale as outright intention Writing in the 1930s Orwell had feared that objective truth even the concept of it was fading out of the culture He feared that media driven lies would pass into history in Spain for the first time I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed We live in just such a time one in which fake news is a weapon against

Maureen Mullarkey 28 Winter 2021 reality and the language that honors it 1984 s goodthink anticipated what we call political correctness Low keyed and lucid Leos columns carried forward Orwells warning against this stranglehold on the free play of the mind And its consequent suffocation of veracity Chapter headings in Two Steps Ahead are a striking litany of dj vu all overagain Is it that we refused to learn Or that we were complacent Just not angry enough From racial arithmetic and vilification of white males to the politics of date rape abortion toxic feminism multiculturalism and more todays concerns were all there autopsied in trenchant columns a quarter century ago Todays vile exegesis of whiteness at the Smithsonians National Museum of African History and Culture ought not surprise In the Orlando Sentinel in 1994 Leo alerted us to the politically correct makeover under way at the various tentacles of the Smithsonian Preparing an exhibition on American participation in the Pacific Theatre of World War II the Air and Space Museum argued that America was conducting a racist war of vengeance against Japan while for most Japanese it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism A stilted view of the war and American motives running through hundreds of pages of early draft versions of the show was bound to attract attention from veterans and historians who knew better But the same dark view of America as arrogant oppressive racist and destructive increasingly runs through the Smithsonian complex Part of the new Smithsonian strategy is to keep stressing the negatives Out of the starting gate Leos writing took aim at bureaucratic tyranny those totalitarian impulses that seep like corrosive salt into our institutions and our lives It unnerves me to realize the degree to which his cautions are still needed Parental control over sex education to pick just one arena has plummeted since Leos Over the Head of Parents forewarned a wide audience in candid detail He asked When you send your child to a state school do you yield all authority over the childs sexual education It was a rhetorical question leading up to an unambiguous answer Yes Today Abigail Shriers newly published Irreversible Damage quotes a fifth grade teachers attitude toward parents who object to indoctrination in transgender ideology Thats nice but their parental rights ended when those children were enrolled in public school John Leo saw our snowflakes coming Contemporary college students are descendants of the self esteem juggernaut What he termed the politics of feeling has created a generation of Faberg eggs who need incubation in safe spaces shielded from insensitivity and micro aggression by trigger warnings and speech codes The use of feelings as a trump card is becoming pervasive The codes and laws generated by the campus based race and gender alliance are aimed at real

Winter 2021 29 The Human Life Review problems But almost all are disastrously rooted in the demand that there must be no negative feelings If there are as is so often the case when the individual collides with the real world then someone must be penalized for it He rejected the notion that it was the states job to pat our chests and help us think nice things about ourselves To the notion of self esteem as a public policy issue well no thanks To keep children feeling good about themselves you must avoid all criticism and almost any challenge that could conceivably end in failure This means each child is treated like a fragile therapy consumer in constant need of an ego boost Difficult work is out of the question and standards get lowered Even tests become problematic because someone might fail them A quarter century later the blissed out mental surfers of California are in the lead to abolish the ACT and SAT Our news has taken over what was once the job of churches instilling guilt It does its best to deliver material that feeds mainstream consumers a rationale to berate themselves for being mainstream Leo objected when he saw it Demonizing White Males for example gave early warning of the crusade to put heterosexual white men the male and pale in the dock Like the guerrillas moving down from the hills to attack the cities the race and gender people are no longer just sniping from marginal positions on campus and in the art world With the aid of an ever credulous press corps they are now pumping their doctrine into the general culture America will increasingly be divided by a truculent tribalism with nonwhites and white women ganging up in a grand alliance to wrest power from white males The race and gender folk will bear watching Now we know we were not watchful enough I think of John Leos working life as a summons to accountability It has been a call issued to each of us ordinary observers to heed what we see To take seriously what passes by And to tell the truth about it

Maureen Mullarkey 30 Winter 2021 Defeating Technocracy Is Crucial to Life Wesley J Smith Pro life advocacy and policies are implacably opposed by the elites of the West The United Nations promotes abortion access as an international norm Leaders of the European Union continually criticize and attempt to stifle prolife laws in Poland and Hungary 1 All of the worlds most influential medical journals the New England Journal of Medicine the Journal of the American Medical Association the British Medical Journal etc take the propriety of abortion as a matter of basic patient rights with some now moving on to endorse assisted suicide 2 And of course virtually all mainstream media oppose sanctity of life advocacy as a matter of course Despite these wailing headwinds the pro life movement has exercised the freedoms available in the West internationally to contest anti sanctity of life orthodoxies and policies in the public square and halls of government battling not only abortion but also legalization of euthanasia assisted suicide the moral propriety of embryonic stem cell research and other biotechnologies threats to medical conscience and the like But come the technocracy a time may arise in which no advocacy zones hinder sanctity of life activists from presenting contrary ideas to the general community and enacting public policies through the usual democratic processes The Danger of Technocracy What do I mean by technocracy In essence the word translates into rule by experts But in its currently gestating iteration it means much more than that The looming technocracy threatens to impose substantial control over most important aspects of life by experts scientists bioethicists and societal influencers but it also poses the threat of iron clad enforcement of cultural orthodoxies and policies not only in law but also via the voluntary actions of powerful segments of the private sector Technocracy is a soft authoritarianism It establishes no gulags to imprison dissenters and pronounces no tyrannous executions to punish the rebellious Instead a technocracy smothers democratic deliberation by removing most decision making about essential policies from the people through their elected Wesley J Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institutes Center on Human Exceptionalism and a consultant to the Patients Rights Council In May 2004 Smith was named one of the nations premier thinkers in bioengineering by the National Journal because of his work in bioethics In 2008 the Human Life Foundation named him a Great Defender of Life

Winter 2021 31 The Human Life Review representatives to an expert class whose decisions are based on their education and experience and the data they think matter In other words rather than laws passed by representatives of the people regulations are imposed by bureaucrats based on technocratic opinion and advice As author John H Evans wrote several years ago The first characteristic of technocracy is a deep seated animosity toward politics itself and toward the public ability to make decisions But it is not just that with technocracy experts will rule The second and more important characteristic of technocracy is that expert rule is justified by making policy decisions seem to be only about facts which are fixed not values which vary from group to group This is accomplished by removing debates about values in politics and making political decisions solely about selecting the most efficacious means for forwarding taken for granted values 3 How did we get to the point where experts threaten to take effective control of society Blame the Covid crisis which unleashed a boldness in the wouldbe technocratic class and at the same time engendered timidity among people who want to be safe Globalists have seized the unique moment to increase their power on an unprecedented international scale As Klaus Schwab founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum explained the pandemics silver lining was to demonstrate how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles 4 To encourage even greater public subservience the WEF launched the Great Reset Initiative with the goal of universally revamping all aspects of our societies and economies from education to social contracts and working conditions with every industry from oil and gas to tech transformed The Great Reset seeks to re order economics on a worldwide scale by imposing new technocratic imperatives as a means of combatting climate change More relevantly to the topic of this article Dr Anthony Fauci audaciously declared that combating future infectious disease requires the mindboggling task of rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence by empowering international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization to impose the radical changes he thinks are required 5 That means according to Fauci and his co author David M Morens that virtually everything in society will have to be transformed from cities to homes to workplaces to water and sewer systems to recreational and gatherings venues The scope and breadth of their ambition is stunningly hubristic In such a transformation they write we will need to prioritize changes in those human behaviors that constitute risks for the emergence of infectious diseases Chief among them are reducing crowding at home work and in public places as well as minimizing environmental perturbations such as deforestation intense urbanization and intensive animal farming Think about what all of that would take At the very least the gargantuan

Wesley J Smith 32 Winter 2021 task would require unprecedented and intrusive government regulations and the transferring of policy control from the national to international level nothing less than an international technocratic and authoritarian supra governing system with the power to direct how we interact with each other as family friends and in community Anyone who thinks that such overarching power would long be limited to fighting climate change or building defenses against future pandemics doesnt understand human nature and the seductive nature of power Technocracy and the Life Issues In a technocracy when it comes to issues that prolifers care most about i e policies such as abortion and assisted suicide that impact the sanctity of human life bioethicists would likely be the most influential experts relied upon to influence public policy This raises two questions What is bioethics and who are bioethicists 6 Bioethics is a contraction of biomedical ethics It is a discipline made up mostly of an elite group of academic moral philosophers doctors lawyers theologians and other members of the medical intelligentsia who dedicate themselves to bending public and professional discourse about medical ethics and the broader issues of health care public policy to fit their ideological desires Unless a bioethicist has a modifier such as Catholic or conservative before the term bioethicists are generally hostile to the traditional sanctity oflife moral values and ethical traditions that prolifers tend to embrace Whereas medical ethics focuses on the behavior of doctors in their professional lives vis vis their patients bioethics has a broader focus concentrating on the relationship between medicine health and society This last element allows bioethicists to presume a moral expertise of breathtaking ambition and hubris Many view themselves quite literally as the forgers of the framework for moral judgment and decision making 7 who will create the moral principles that determine how we are to live and act drawing on a wisdom they perceive as specially appropriate to the medical sciences and medical arts 8 Indeed some claim that bioethics goes beyond the codes of ethics of the various professional practices concerned It implies new thinking on changes in society or even global equilibria 9 my emphasis In other words technocracy The Danger Technocracy Poses to Ethical Medicine Bioethics technocrats dont believe in the Hippocratic Oath As the late Dr Sherwin Nuland sniffed in the New England Journal of Medicine writing in favor of legalizing euthanasia Those who turn to the oath in an effort to shape or legitimize their ethical viewpoints must realize that the statement has been embraced over approximately the past 200 years

Winter 2021 33 The Human Life Review far more as a symbol of professional cohesion than for its content Its pithy sentences cannot be used as all encompassing maxims to avoid the personal responsibility inherent in the practice of medicine Ultimately a physicians conduct at the bedside is a matter of individual conscience 10 What a frightening thought When I tell audiences that only about 13 percent of physicians take the Hippocratic Oath if that invariably they respond with loud shocked gasps of alarm Patients believe that doctors have certain ironclad professional obligations to patients that cannot be violated regardless of a physicians individual beliefs Indeed patients rightly view the Hippocratic Oath as one of their primary defenses against the overwhelming power over our vulnerable lives that we of necessity place in the hands of our doctors This obligation is summarized by the Hippocratic principle that a doctor do no harm to a patient even if the patient may wish otherwise But that is not how most bioethicists see it Rather the most influential among them adhere more toward a quality of life utilitarian approach in which some lives count for more or are perceived as having a greater claim to legal protection than others Here is the problem Quality of life considerations are fine when they are a factor in medical decision making that is does the patient think the potential harmful effects of a proposed treatment are worth risking to attain the health benefit sought But it becomes a form of bigotry when the judged quality of a patients life becomes a determinate of his or her moral worth When applied in this manner it is often called the quality of life ethic In this view a person needs to earn his or her value by possessing identified capabilities and characteristics The Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer explains in Rethinking Life and Death We should treat human beings in accordance with their ethically relevant characteristics Some of these are inherent in the nature of being They include consciousness the capacity for physical social and mental interaction with other beings having conscious preferences for continued life and having enjoyable experiences Other relevant aspects depend on the relationship of the being to others having relatives for example who will grieve over your death or being so situated in a group that if you are killed others will fear for their own lives All of these things make a difference to the regard and respect we should have for such a being 11 The danger of Singers approach should be obvious to every reader The standards Singer uses to measure human worth are his standards based on what he considers important and relevant And therein lies the heart of the problem Subjective notions of human worth in the end are about raw power and who gets to do the judging In our not so distant past for example decisions denigrating the moral worth of a subset of people i e blacks were made to justify their oppression and

Wesley J Smith 34 Winter 2021 exploitation based on the allegedly relevant characteristics of skin color and cultural stereotypes The quality of life ethic is no different only the relevant characteristics have changed not the wrongness of the approach Quality of life as a moral measure strips worth and dignity from people based on health or disability just as surely as racism does based on skin pigment hair texture or eye shape 12 Okay Wesley I understand the theoretical peril But how might that play out in the real world if bioethicists were empowered in a technocracy to set healthcare policy I am glad you asked Here are just a few potential examples Abortion through the Ninth Month Mainstream bioethicists dont only believe that abortion should be legal they view it as a positive right to which every pregnant woman is morally entitled if that is her desire That means erasing all limitations on abortion as to time and method New York has already enacted such a law As described by Richard Doerflinger in the Catholic Standard It expands legal abortions from 24 weeks of pregnancy up to birth for reasons of health which in the abortion context means emotional and social well being a recipe for abortion on demand It allows health care practitioners other than physicians to perform them It also repeals 10 provisions of New York law Among them A provision specifying that abortion is legal only with the womans consent a law allowing a manslaughter charge against an abortionist who causes the womans death during an abortion a law discouraging self induced which Miller calls self managed abortions a law requiring care for a child born alive during an attempted late term abortion a law against providing someone else with a drug or other instrument for the purpose of unlawfully procuring the miscarriage of a female 13 In a technocracy such pro abortion policies could be expected to be imposed on an international scale Legal Assisted Suicide Euthanasia Legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide is the default setting in mainstream bioethics with most prominent practitioners supporting what they euphemistically call aid in dying There are exceptions of course Ironically despite his opposition to sanctity of life ethics Ezekiel Emanuel one of the countrys most influential bioethicists and a leading adviser to President Joe Biden opposes legalizing assisted suicide More on Emanuels views below Healthcare Rationing Most bioethicists also support healthcare rationing Such a policy could take several forms For example futile care in which hospital bioethics committees are empowered to force patients off

Winter 2021 35 The Human Life Review wanted life extending treatment based on quality of life judgmentalism 14 Futile care is more or less ad hoc rationing Many bioethicists would prefer formal rationing such as the quality adjusted life year QALY system in which access to a given treatment is allowed or denied based on quality of life formulas established by healthcare bureaucrats 15 Destruction of Medical Conscience Increasingly bioethicists advocate that access to abortion or assisted suicide become an enforceable right This is a giant step beyond what I call mere legalization because it would require the government to guarantee access which in practical terms would mean legally coercing healthcare professionals to be complicit even if it violated their religious beliefs or moral consciences That would mean enacting laws and ethical rules requiring doctors and other healthcare professionals to either do the deed upon request or procure another professional the original doctor knows will abort euthanize etc sometimes called an effective referral The attack on medical conscience has already commenced Emanuel wrote in favor of such coercion in the New England Journal of Medicine 16 The Australian state of Victoria requires such participation in abortion and has sanctioned at least one doctor for refusing to participate in a sex selection abortion 17 Coerced participation in all legal medical procedures specifically including abortion and euthanasia is required by medical ethical rules in Ontario Canada upheld by a Court of Appeals ruling 18 A desired side effect of such policies from the technocrats perspective would be the forcing of pro life doctors nurses and pharmacists out of their professions The Danger to the Freedom of Association and Thought Of late I have become worried that a technocracy in the West will adopt many of the social control strategies deployed by the Chinese Communist Party to enforce conformity among the people of China Dont get me wrong I dont believe that a technocratic authoritarianism will put dissenters in camps or engage in violent suppression of heterodox ideas But I do believe we could witness a form of private sector enforced social excommunication of those who dont adhere to acceptable ideas or propose what will be defined as discriminatory meaning pro life policies The rough model would be the social credit system being constructed in Communist China Heres how that pernicious tyranny is planned to operate once it goes fully online Deploying powerful cutting edge computer technologies such as facial recognition artificial intelligence and GPS the government monitors the individual behaviors and associations of the Chinese people re

Wesley J Smith 36 Winter 2021 warding those who are socially compliant and punishing those who engage in disfavored anti social activities in particular Christians or other religious believers 19 Computer algorithms analyze the compiled data and compute the social scores of each Chinese citizen The social credit system could become the most effective means of social control ever devised by using ones score to reward compliance or punish resistance Benefits of a high social credit can include lowered rent But the consequences of low score are draconian including job loss the inability to rent housing even blackballing from riding the downtown bus But it gets worse The social sins of the parents are borne by the children A child may be kicked out of university and stripped of his or her own ability to work which in turn could destroy the childs future for example making him or her unable to find a spouse or participate in a communitys social groups It is one thing to accept the consequences of living out ones personal beliefs but it could be quite another to see ones childrens lives ruined as a consequence of ones own actions I do not expect governments in the West to act so despotically The Constitution would forbid it here to be sure But I am worried that a less stringent form of technocratic implemented private sector enforced social control could be wielded by woke major corporations to isolate and marginalize socially conservative individuals and groups who resist reigning political orthodoxies Hear me out What if the private sector began enforcing technocrat imposed utilitarian and quality of life orthodoxies promulgated by a bioethical technocracy We dont have to wonder It has started happening already with what is often called cancel culture 20 When Indiana enacted a Religious Freedom Restoration Act to protect the free exercise of religion in the state some of the worlds most powerful corporations threatened boycotts against the state until lawmakers modified the law 21 Ditto when North Carolina passed a bathroom bill that required people to use public restrooms consistent with their biological sex 22 More recently we have seen the suppression of heterodox ideas on university campuses Try accepting an invitation to speak on a secular university campus if you are a well known pro life advocate Chances are that campus progressives will mount angry protests leading the administration to cancel the invitation Or post a YouTube video that cuts against the orthodox grain on issues of interest to prolifers Not only will the video likely be taken down but the tech companies will prevent a sponsoring organization from monetizing their perspectives 23 Things could get worse We already see financial institutions pressured not to do business with disfavored industries such as gun manufacturers or retailers 24 What if banks were similarly pressured successfully not to do business with

Winter 2021 37 The Human Life Review bigoted groups that advocate restricting reproductive freedoms or that resist transgender advocacy agendas or other socially correct agendas Not only could it happen but it is already happening Look what almost occurred to the Colorado baker who refused to create a cake to celebrate a same sex wedding It took a ruling by the U S Supreme Court to save him from ruin 25 Conclusion This much is certain As the international technocracy increases in power and influence ranging from imposing mandatory Covid policies to adopting utilitarian views on bioethical issues to stifling communication of heterodox opinions and perspectives prolifers could find it more challenging than ever to make their case But that doesnt mean we should surrender democratic principles to rule by experts Aleksandr I Solzhenitsyn the great Soviet dissident wrote relevantly to our current moment Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end Technocracy of the type described above can only succeed when imposed upon a cowardly people If the pro life movement has proved anything it is that its activists are not cowards Of course this does not mean acting recklessly or lashing out in ways that are antithetical to the norms of advocacy in a free society But in this brewing crisis let us not shrink from living fully as free men and women despite the potential costs and that includes resisting the imposition of an international rule by experts Because if ever such an authoritarianism establishes its grip it will be almost impossible to reverse NOTES 1 Reuters European Parliament says Polish Government Influenced Abortion Ruling November 26 2020 European Parliament says Polish government influenced abortion ruling yahoo com 2 For example see Elizabeth Nash Abortion Rights in Peril What Clinicians Need to Know August 8 2019 N Engl J Med 2019 381 497 499 Abortion Rights in Peril What Clinicians Need to Know NEJM www nejm org 3 John H Evans The History and Future of Bioethics a Sociological View 2011 Oxford University Press pp 122 123 4 Klaus Schwab Now is a Time for a Great Reset The World Economic Forum June 3 2020 Now is the time for a great reset of capitalism World Economic Forum weforum org 5 David M Morens and Anthony S Fauci Emerging Pandemic Diseases How We Got toCovid 19 Cell 182 1077 1092 September 3 2020 Emerging Pandemic Diseases How We Got to Covid 19 cell com 6 Some of the immediately following material was adopted from Wesley J Smith Culture of Death The Age of Do Harm Medicine New York Encounter Books 2016 7 Tom L Beauchamp and James F Childress The Principles of Biomedical Ethics Fourth Edition New York Oxford University Press 1994 3 8 Joseph Fletcher Humanhood Essays in Biomedical Ethics Buffalo NY Prometheus Books 1979 5 9 Bioethics and Its Implications Worldwide for Human Rights Protection United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization UNESCO 93rd Inter parliamentary Conference Madrid March 1995

Wesley J Smith 38 Winter 2021 10 Sherwin Nuland MD Physician Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia in Practice N Engl J Med 2000 342 583 584 February 24 2000 Physician Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia in Practice NEJM nejm org 11 Peter Singer Rethinking Life and Death supra p 191 12 For a chilling first person view of how the quality of life ethic endangers the most weak and vulnerable see Wesley J Smith The Deadly Quality of Life Ethic First Things July 6 2020 The Deadly Quality of Life Ethic Wesley J Smith First Things www firstthings com 13 Richard Doerflinger Building a Wall Against Life Catholic Standard January 25 2019 Building a wall against life Catholic Standard Multimedia Catholic News cathstan org 14 See for example Wesley J Smith Medicare and Medical Futility Washington Examiner November 16 2015 Medicare and Medical Futility washingtonexaminer com 15 Many medical journals have already published editorials supporting QALY systems See for example Peter J Neumann and Milton C Weinstein Legislating against Use of Cost Effectiveness Information N Engl J Med 2010 363 1495 1497 October 14 2010 Legislating against Use of Cost Effectiveness Information NEJM nejm org 16 Ronit Y Stahl and Ezekiel J Emanuel M D Physicians not Conscripts Conscientious Objection in Medicine N Engl J Med 2017 376 1380 1385 April 6 2017 Physicians Not Conscripts Conscientious Objection in Health Care NEJM nejm org 17 See Wesley J Smith In Defense of Medical Conscience Rights The Plough August 29 2018 In Defense of Medical Conscience Rights by Wesley J Smith plough com 18 Court of Appeals of Ontario Christian Medical and Dental Society of Canada v College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario 2019 ONCA 393 DATE 20190515 DOCKET C65397 19 See for example Nina Shea The State of Religious Liberty in China Hudson Institute July 12 2019 The State of Religious Liberty in China by Nina Shea hudson org 20 Neha Banka Explained What is Cancel Culture The Indian Express August 23 2020 Explained What is cancel culture msn com 21 Nichole Hensley Corporations cities and celebrities drive push to boycott Indiana after governor signs controversial religious freedom bill New York Daily News March 27 2015 Corporations cities and celebrities drive push to boycott Indiana after governor signs controversial religious freedom bill New York Daily News nydailynews com 22 Savannah Pointer Netflix Boycotts North Carolina Over Controversial Bathroom Bill The Western Journal January 12 2019 https www westernjournal com netflix boycotts north carolinabathroom bill 23 Bill McMorris YouTube Deletes Pro Life Video from Site May 26 2017 YouTube Deletes Pro Life Video From Site freebeacon com 24 Polly Mosendz Banks Refusing Gun Industry Business Is Troubling CFPB Chief Says Bloomberg April 12 2018 Banks Refusing Gun Industry Business Is Troubling CFPB Chief Says bloomberg com 25 MASTERPIECE CAKESHOP LTD v COLORADO CIVIL RIGHTS COMMN 370 P 3d 272 16 111 Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd v Colorado Civil Rights Commn . 04 2018 supremecourt gov

Winter 2021 39 The Human Life Review Is Euthanasia Next for Ireland David Quinn As readers of this journal only too painfully know in May 2018 Ireland voted by a two to one margin to remove from its Constitution the amendment protecting the right to life of unborn children It was a devastating blow not just to the pro life movement in Ireland but to the movement everywhere Conversely it was a huge shot in the arm for pro choice campaigners everywhere In fact Ireland helped to set down a new template for how a more liberal abortion regime should be greeted that is not as a regrettable necessity in an imperfect world but as something to be wildly celebrated as an enormous boon for freedom without any downside whatsoever On the day of the result crowds of ecstatic pro abortion campaigners gathered in the courtyard of Dublin Castle one of Irelands main public buildings to celebrate They shouted and roared and literally wept with delight If was as if Nazi Germany had just surrendered or the Berlin Wall had fallen In their minds something incontestably good had happened It was black and white a simple matter of good triumphing over evil The Taoiseach Prime Minister and Health Minister gathered on the balcony above the courtyard to accept the acclamation of the crowd No thought was spared for the almost three quarters of a million Irish people who had voted to keep the pro life amendment They had been defeated and that was that History had come along and swept them into its dustbin The contrast with what happened in 1983 was total That year the pro life clause the Eighth Amendment had been inserted into the Constitution by a margin of two to one the exact opposite of the 2018 result But were there wild public celebrations on that occasion Was the courtyard of Dublin Castle opened up to revellers Did politicians arrive to accept the congratulations of the crowd No And the reason is simple the Irish media led by the State broadcaster RTE hated the result They greeted it with funereal tones Victorious pro life campaigners were invited onto programs to be questioned by hostile interviewers The defeated side was invited to attack them for what they had done We were told in effect to be ashamed of what we had done Now that liberal abortion laws are to be actively celebrated in public others have followed suit When Andrew Cuomo signed a more permissive abortion David Quinn is a columnist with the Irish Independent and the Irish Catholic and the founder and director of the Iona Institute in Dublin info ionainstitute ie Quinn received the Foundations Great Defender of Life award in 2018

David Quinn 40 Winter 2021 measure into law in New York in January 2019 only months after the Irish result he did so with a broad smile on his face and One World Trade Center was lit up in celebration And what was to be celebrated Only the small matter of a law expanding the grounds under which an abortion can take place after 24 weeks near the point of viability Yes we Irish had set a terrible precedent in more ways than one Now that abortion is in the bag the time has come to move on to the next item on the agenda assisted suicide Pro life campaigners warned this would happen They were accused of scaremongering by their opponents They were told the issues of abortion and assisted suicide were completely different from each other without ever really being offered an explanation of why this was so But I think before moving on to what is happening on this front I should spend a little longer outlining exactly what has occurred since Irish people decided to legalize abortion Our new abortion law came into effect in January 2019 It permits abortion for any reason up to 12 weeks and after that when the life or health of the mother is in danger It can also be performed after 12 weeks when the baby is diagnosed with an abnormality deemed by doctors to be lethal Already we have seen the dire effects of this law Soon after the law was passed one couple were told by doctors that their baby had an abnormality which would kill it They proceeded with the termination but when the results of a second test came back it turned out the baby was perfectly healthy This story hasnt caused the fuss it ought to have Apparently hard cases are only ever to be used against prolifers never against pro choicers More recently a piece of research based on interviews with 10 doctors who are performing abortions in Irish hospitals was published Its core point is that some doctors are frightened they might face prosecution if it is uncertain whether a particular babys genetic abnormality is fatal and they proceed to terminate anyway The doctors want this grey area removed from the law as if grey areas can ever be removed completely from medicine But the report also provided a terrible horrifying insight into the nature of abortion The doctors interviewed admitted that when a baby is late term they must sometimes stab it in the heart in order to kill it before delivery Some of them refer to themselves as Doctor Death They fear some colleagues look at them with contempt They admit that killing the baby in the womb is brutal and awful They strongly indicated that some of the babies are born alive after abortion resulting in their begging people to help them provide palliative care This ought to shock the conscience of the nation and all those who voted yes but it didnt because the research was barely reported Nothing must be

Winter 2021 41 The Human Life Review allowed to disturb the consciences of those who bulldozed the Eighth Amendment from the Constitution For those who wish to look up the report it is titled Fetal medicine specialist experiences of providing a new service of termination of pregnancy for fatal fetal anomaly a qualitative study A few months ago some more information about the awful new regime came to light namely the first annual report on the number of abortions taking place in Ireland The figure ought to stick in the mind 6,666 How horribly symbolic Again the number was underreported by the media Of the 6,666 terminations 6542 took place before 12 weeks 21 were conducted because there was deemed to be a risk to the mothers life or health three were carried out because there was an emergency risk to her life and 100 were performed on the fatal abnormality ground We were told almost nothing else In Britain the U S and elsewhere huge amounts of data are produced This allows us for example to see if women from poor backgrounds ethnic minorities unmarried versus married or younger versus older are more likely to have abortions But the Irish Government in its wisdom decided such information would be an invasion of privacy In any other field of healthcare I use that term advisedly fine grade demographic information is produced to find out who is more at risk of a particular disease and what parts of the population to target with health information But since abortion is not a disease and because no negative moral judgment whatsoever is to be passed on it and because every abortion is apparently requested for the best possible reasons under the circumstances why would we ask any questions That would be intrusive What is to be gained by finding out that poorer women are more likely to have abortions than better off women and then finding ways to reduce the abortion rate among the first group Well by this logic it doesnt matter a whit if poverty drives twice or three times or 100 times more women to have abortions than their more affluent counterparts Its a totally private choice with no public ramifications whatsoever Which is obviously baloney but its baloney our Government is perfectly willing to accept for the purposes of the ideology Nonetheless we now know with moral certainty that the Eighth Amendment saved lives At the absolute outside if you add together the number of Irish women who went to England for terminations the year before abortion became legal in Ireland plus a high estimate of the number who used the abortion pill illegally at home about 5,000 Irish women had abortions in 2018 Take the 6,666 figure and add in the 375 who still went to England for a termination last year and you get a total of 7,041 an increase of more than 2,000 over that estimate of 5,000 which is almost certainly on the high side That 2,000 is

David Quinn 42 Winter 2021 the number of unborn lives saved in a single year alone We can see that in the 35 years of its existence the Eighth Amendment saved tens of thousands of lives This should not be underestimated It was a huge achievement It is also encouraging that half of Irelands maternity units still wont perform abortions because a lot of doctors remain pro life and will have nothing to do with it The vast majority of doctors in general practice wont prescribe the abortion pill At the last count only about 10 percent are willing to do so Now on to the issue of assisted suicide In order to convince people to vote for abortion in 2018 pro choice campaigners and their media allies highlighted the hard cases and the right to choose to do whatever you want with your own body Well now that the Irish people are sold on those arguments it becomes a relatively simple thing to sell them assisted suicide The arguments are the same It is a compassionate response to the hard cases of those suffering from terminal illnesses and unbearable pain In addition people should be given the choice of dying through assisted suicide if that is their wish Who are we to deny them their autonomy During the abortion referendum campaign when people like Kevin Doran the bishop of Elphin in the west of Ireland warned that euthanasia was next he was attacked for scaremongering Now suddenly even quicker than many of the worst pessimists predicted assisted suicide is nearly upon us It could be law by this time next year Gino Kenny a far left member of our parliament which we call the Dail published a Private Members Bill in September called the Dying with Dignity Bill Usually Private Members Bills get nowhere because they lack Government support But this one is different A vote on it took place in October in the Dail and it was advanced to second stage that is committee stage where it will be scrutinized by members of the Justice Committee TDs as we call our MPs in the Government parties were allowed a free vote Some very significant Government members voted in favor of the Bill including Deputy Prime Minister Leo Varadkar Health Minister Stephen Donnelly and Justice Minister Helen McEntee The vote took place as the country was and is convulsed and distracted by Covid 19 It is highly likely that most members of the public are barely aware that euthanasia is now on the legislative tracks and moving fast along them There have been a handful of debates in the media some of which I have taken part in but if you blinked youd have missed them The topic has not made it to the top of the news bulletins or the front pages of the newspaper in the way

Winter 2021 43 The Human Life Review it deserves despite its enormous moral gravity Instead it is almost as though the media have ordained that the less attention they give it the less likely there is to be much opposition Also and vitally this time there doesnt have to be a referendum The reason the pro life amendment was inserted into the Constitution back in 1983 was precisely to prevent the possibility of a hard case being used to bounce the Dail into passing abortion legislation Only the people could decide that But nothing in our Constitution prevents the Dail from voting in favor of assisted suicide In fact a few years ago the Irish Supreme Court explicitly told politicians that they could do so A case had come before the court involving a woman who had advanced MS She wanted to be allowed to avail herself of assisted suicide or medical assistance in dying as they like to call it in Canada She claimed her right to privacy was being violated The court ruled against her but expressed full sympathy and basically told politicians it was up to them now to decide what to do This was before the abortion referendum which the Government wanted to get out of the way first Therefore assisted suicide was put on the backburner but given the scale of the pro abortion victory in May 2018 those who also back assisted suicide were emboldened The only concern the leaders of the two main governing parties Fianna Fail and Fine Gael have is that by passing some version of Kennys Bill they might alienate a few more of their pro life voters when neither party is in great electoral shape at present especially the more traditionally conservative of the two Fianna Fail This is why they would prefer to see the Bill sneak through like a thief in the night with as little fuss or debate as possible It is true that the current Taoiseach Prime Minister and leader of Fianna Fail Micheal Martin voted against the Bill when it was being moved to second stage in October but it is quite likely that his view will evolve as it did in the case of abortion when he moved from opposing abortion to being in favor Lots of our politicians evolved in the same way just like Joe Biden in America Plenty of evolving is also taking part with regard to assisted suicide The Bill in question by the way is only 12 pages long which is pitiful given its importance An equivalent piece of legislation legalizing assisted suicide in the Australian state of Victoria in June 2019 runs to 137 pages I debated Gino Kenny on radio when his Bill was first being proposed It was quickly apparent he did not understand his own piece of legislation He said it mentions unbearable pain It doesnt He said a person would need to be nearing the end of his or her life before choosing assisted suicide It doesnt require that either It only says the person needs to be diagnosed with a terminal illness but doesnt stipulate how close to the end of life he or she needs to be Therefore a person could be diagnosed with a terminal illness tomorrow

David Quinn 44 Winter 2021 have potentially years of life remaining and begin the approval process for assisted suicide on the spot Two weeks later that person could receive a lethal injection if two doctors were found willing to authorize it Note also that the Bill says only that the person is likely to die from the illness Does this mean they are 51 percent likely to die from it Terminal illness is so broadly defined it could cover dementia Despite this supporters of the Bill including Kenny say assisted suicide would be fenced around with all sorts of safeguards which even a cursory examination of the short Bill confirms is manifest nonsense Nonetheless journalists were happy to parrot the Kenny line about safeguards despite all evidence to the contrary It was as though they hadnt read the Bill themselves And it also looked like many of the politicians who voted to move it to committee stage hadnt read the document either Certainly there was little or no evidence of it when the Bill was debated in the Dail In that debate only one pro life voice was given the floor Everyone else given speaking time was for the Bill The standard of contributions for the most part was embarrassingly low This is not how a serious democracy operates or indeed any serious society Something of such moral magnitude ought to be debated in a serious way Instead you got the impression that most TDs who took part in the debate merely wanted to signal their liberal virtue to their supporters rather than do the hard work of reading the Bill researching what has happened in other countries hearing other voices honestly and respectfully and then allowing the public a proper say in the debate But how can you have a proper public debate when all people hear about are the hard cases when they are not informed of how quickly the grounds for assisted suicide have expanded in countries like Belgium and the Netherlands and when they are told that it is compassionate to support such a measure and hard hearted or dogmatic to oppose it Needless to say the voices of the Churches will not be heeded in any debate we do have In any case the Catholic bishops have been very quiet for the most part about the matter and the outgoing archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has been absolutely silent Therefore many ordinary Mass going Catholics are blissfully unaware of what is coming their way or how utterly relevant the development is to them given how many are past retirement age Probably the only group capable of stopping the Bill in its tracks is the palliative care doctors No one deals more with patients nearing the end of their lives than they do and no one can accuse them of lacking compassion If euthanasia and assisted suicide are pro compassion then surely they out of all groups should be most in favor But it is precisely because they deal with people at their most vulnerable that

Winter 2021 45 The Human Life Review they are opposed to assisted suicide They know the terrible signal that legalizing it would send to patients with terminal illnesses namely that their lives are not really worth living anymore and that suicide is now considered a perfectly acceptable totally understandable option to place before them It invites them to feel like a burden to themselves and others to consider their lives to be unbearable Patients diagnosed with MS Parkinsons Disease even dementia will feel less valued And they will feel even less so when they hear other people with such conditions explain why they want to die by lethal substance In fact in the assisted suicide debate we throw out all the usual rules about how we discuss suicide in general One of those rules is that we should take great care not to present suicide as an understandable way out in difficult circumstances because of the well known copy cat effect If a particular case of suicide is presented too sympathetically then some people hearing or reading about why a given person killed themselves might think That person is like me maybe I should consider suicide also But in discussions about assisted suicide the public are explicitly invited to sympathize with the person in unbearable suffering who wants to die So when a person with say MS talks in this way with a sympathetic interviewer everyone listening who has MS is invited to think in the same way This is a terrible thing to do and it is why palliative care doctors oppose assisted suicide If their voices are given a proper hearing in the Irish debate such as it is about assisted suicide and in particular if politicians listen to them properly then there is some chance of this Bill being rejected But if not it will certainly be passed in some form and Ireland will then have taken another giant step into the Culture of Death that sees killing the burdensome as acceptable and merciful

Mary Kenny 46 Winter 2021 Reclaiming Feminisms Christian Roots Mary Kenny I suppose I first became a feminist as a rebellious young woman at an Irish Catholic convent school this would be back in the 1950s just edging into the early 1960s This was a period in Irish life which was traditional and conservative Since the foundation of the Irish state political independence started in 1922 23 the country was stewarded by a careful prudent and sometimes culturally isolated governance and in many respects ordinary life hadnt changed very much over the decades But change was already in the air with the election of Pope John XXIII to the papacy in 1958 and then the announcement of the Second Vatican Council One thing led to another and within a couple of years I was in Paris aligning myself with revolting students protesting about war and peace Thats all a long time ago but access to the retrospective glance is one of the blessings of the senior years You can see how things develop from the vantage of history As adolescents we thought those nuns were very old fashioned and to be sure their order did need a little updating religious magazines in Ireland in that era would publish glowing reports about how much more modern and outgoing American nuns were And yet in their own way it could be said that these sisters practiced a form of feminism by example Nuns had chosen their vocation that is their calling after deliberate reflection They hadnt been railroaded into a pattern of living expected by society Some had chosen the convent for reasons of spirituality but quite a few also brought an element of artistic or intellectual endeavour Women religious were free to study and to research in a way that wasnt often available to lay women The recently deceased Irish historian Margaret MacCurtain remained all her life a Dominican nun Back in the 1950s when many of her female contemporaries were living conventional lives Margaret was researching 16th and 17th century manuscripts in Louvain Belgium and Salamanca Spain And nuns were often confident women accustomed to authority A convent is an institution entirely organized by women In fact their reputation for organization was sometimes considered daunting I have read many memoirs of women of my generation who felt that society Mary Kenny is a well known Irish journalist broadcaster and playwright and one of the founding members of the Irish Womens Liberation Movement She is the longtime European editor of the Human Life Review and a Great Defender of Life recipient in 2006 Author of many books including Abortion The Whole Story 1986 and Goodbye to Catholic Ireland 1997 her most recent release is Am I a Feminist Are You 2017 New Island Books

Winter 2021 47 The Human Life Review offered no other role to women except marriage and children But I never recall the Loreto nuns exalting marriage as a future career Occasionally they would say Girls you are the mothers of tomorrow But they were much keener for their teenage pupils to focus on examination success and obtaining a good job than to entertain thoughts of marriage They were also very critical of women stuffing their heads with silliness in line with the more inane aspects of popular culture I had my differences with nuns at the time yet they were following in a tradition of what we would now call womens empowerment The fight for education is always seen as the first staging post in womens emancipation And womens education was pioneered by women who founded teaching orders of nuns Angela de Merici who died in Italy in 1540 founded the Ursulines the first order of sisters to be specifically committed to teaching girls She was a remarkable person who had a great educational vision Other foundresses followed Mary Ward who died in 1645 founded the Loreto order St Jane Frances de Chantal who died in 1767 was a widow when she started the Order of the Visitation In her lifetime her order expanded to 80 convents and she was said to display administrative genius in her handling of them She was also the grandmother of the French writer Madame de Svign Then there was Nano Nagle who died in 1784 and is regarded as the founder of education in Ireland She launched the Presentation Sisters with a particular view to giving poor children the same opportunities as richer ones And through her so many more energetic women religious thus spread to the new world in the Americas and Australia Many if not most Irishwomen of my generation who became feminists were educated by nuns Our ex President Mary Robinson actually wanted to become a nun She was turned down by the convent where she applied so she became a law professor senator and head of state instead Significantly several of her clever and ambitious aunts were nuns We know that many of the early modern feminists were Christians we think of the legacy of Susan B Anthony and Lucy Cady Stanton and their involvement in the abolitionist movement which was driven by Christian activists In Britain women like Josephine Butler a devout Christian campaigned against the slave trade and against the sexual exploitation and abuse of girls She had a considerable influence on Millicent Fawcett whose statue in London is emblematic of womens emancipation That element of serious Christian commitment and feminism remained a motif throughout the early to middle years of the 20th century Not all feminists were Christian or women of faith Some were secular or unassociated with faith issues But many were motivated by faith So what changed between then and now I believe a key intellectual shift

Mary Kenny 48 Winter 2021 came about first with Simone de Beauvoirs publication of The Second Sex This was originally published in French in 1949 but it didnt gain a universal reach until paperback British and American editions emerged in the 1960s De Beauvoir was a considerable intellectual and her classic text has many facets but certain themes stand out One was that women arent born into the stereotype of womanhood but are conditioned by society into becoming what we identify as womanly This is the basis of so much confusion today about gender The radical American feminist Judith Butler is the chief purveyor of the notion that all gender is socially constructed The second theme in de Beauvoirs work was hostility to motherhood She had contempt for mothers for marriage and for women who defined themselves as homemakers This attitude derived from her own background Her mother was a compliant woman religious and a homemaker Her father was clever feckless and lived freely Simone wanted her fathers life not her mothers Crucially she anathemized pregnancy It turned a woman into the plaything of nature and removed autonomy Repeatedly she speaks of the bondage of reproduction the servitude of fertility womans enslavement to the species and the parasite within a pregnant woman Women could never be as free as men until this slavery to Nature was overcome she ordained And so feminism in the 1960s though initially drawing on the traditions of education suffrage and emancipation moved towards a focus on the body The contraceptive Pill launched at the beginning of the 1960s had a huge impact reproduction became medicalized The birth control movement which had started at the beginning of the 20th century with sexual radicals like Havelock Ellis and eugenicists like Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger now became part of feminism The Womens Liberation movement of the mid 1960s also drew on several other influences student radicals the civil rights movement hippies flower children peaceniks and the music revolution But by the 1970s de Beauvoirs disdain for pregnancy and motherhood fed into abortion politics steering feminism in the directions that we have come to recognize in modern times Yet there were feminist traditions and traditions of womens emancipation that were quite genuinely diverse The Prohibition movements both in Scandinavia and in the United States were driven by women who were strong sometimes extreme anti liquor crusaders they united as the Womens Christian Temperance Union One of its leading figures Carrie A Nation was rather a virago whose practice was to take an axe to the taverns where the men were boozing But the purpose of their campaigns was to put a halt to what we would now call domestic abuse Excessive drinking was implicated still is in threequarters of cases of wife beating as it was then called and in child cruelty Feminism like other isms is always in the process of changing but what

Winter 2021 49 The Human Life Review is in the deposit of history will always remain and its seeds will periodically regerminate The tradition of Christian perhaps that should be Judeo Christian feminism reaches back not just to Angela de Merici but to earlier holy women such as Hildegard of Bingen or Hilda of Whitby the abbess of a double monastery commanding men and women Christian women missionaries by the way were trying to halt Female Genital Mutilation in the 1920s and 30s and were condemned by Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya as colonialists for their efforts Its been heartening to see the surge of pro life women elected to the U S House and Senate in the November 2020 election and more than heartening to witness the visibility of Amy Coney Barrett in the Supreme Court Heres a woman who has had a brilliant education is a highly accomplished lawyer is married and is a mother to seven children two adopted one with special needs Back in the 1960s feminists talked about the need for role models Well here is a superb examplar as well as a living disproof of the de Beauvoir notion that motherhood is incompatible with the development of reason There have been many strands of feminism some with roots in surprisingly traditional Christian and Catholic soil and we should reclaim the good traditions of such humane and pro life feminism where we find them I hardly recognize the old neighborhood

Ellen Wilson Fielding 50 Winter 2021 On screen Characters Off screen Life Ellen Wilson Fielding I once belonged to a book club that tackled Sigrid Undsets mammoth historical novel Kristin Lavransdatter This long work a trilogy actually traces the title characters life in medieval Norway depicting the harm she and later her well meaning but impulsive and undisciplined husband inflicts on herself and others through her willfulness and lack of self governance Outwardly in some ways her life was conventionally lived She married bore and raised children and managed a large household But her inability or unwillingness to submit her wayward emotions to the regulation of reason drove her to many poor choices that once made had to be lived with including her marriage to someone equally unregulated Despite achieving a good and perhaps even holy death from the Black Plague Kristin can at times make this wonderful novel a frustrating read for those rooting for her to as the Mom in Freaky Friday daily admonishes her teenage daughter Make good choices One of my book club members found herself actually praying for Kristin at critical points in her story so real had the fictional character become to her and so deeply did she empathize with her But good fictional characters are like that They make the reader hope for a way these beloved figures can like the also fictional Pinocchio become real someday perhaps so real that they could even be smuggled some way into the colorful company of heaven Even much more pedestrian fictional characters living the prosaic sins of our own era can make us wish that I was pondering the destinies of sets of sitcom characters being streamed into my household by members of my family during this Covid 19 year of limited entertainment options None of us were seeking edgy or esoteric series during this anxious period Instead we were variously craving the equivalent of comfort food which among other offerings meant for some of us many hours of Friends and The Office interspersed with the slightly later and snarkier Big Bang Theory When you ingest long series this way not spread out thin over distracted years but in big thick batches you notice even minor changes in the characters development of a sort In the ordinary sitcom people fall in love with the wrong people and then eventually with the right one and they may flounder a bit professionally until at last latching onto a career or lifestyle that better conforms to their needs and aptitudes They frequently release some childhood Ellen Wilson Fielding a longtime senior editor of the Human Life Review is the author of An Even Dozen Human Life Press The mother of four children she lives in Maryland

Winter 2021 51 The Human Life Review resentments maybe resolve a fractious family relationship They grow up to a point But not so far that the chemistry of the series and the largely predictable actions and reactions of the protagonists are altered out of recognition The series is a brand and as some of us remember from the 1980s New Coke debacle we dont usually like our comfortably familiar brands messed with But like my friend praying for poor deluded Kristin I found myself wishing these sitcom characters could not only progress much faster in the journey to maturity but much farther as well Thinking again of Pinocchio I silently told the screen characters You will never become a real boy or real girl unless you dig deeper than that sacrifice more think more clearly love more devotedly For instance watching Friends characters Rachel and Monica flounder through a series of shallow and unsatisfactory relationships and even one night stands I wondered what would happen if one of them had a true epiphany rather than one of those mini epiphanies so plentifully spread about this and other sitcoms like He really is too young for me or It makes no sense to keep dating him we want different things No I mean a life changing series changing illumination like Why am I sleeping with everyone I date What is the purpose of sex anyway Isnt sexual intercourse implicitly enacting a total gift of self that is therefore a lie if at best neither of the parties even knows where this is going or is prepared to promise forever Or take the episode in which Ross and Monicas grandmother dies Along with many genuinely comic bits in the hospital and in clearing out her home after her death this episode cruised closer than usual to some deeper things leading the younger Friends generation to imagine their grandmother and her friends as young twenty somethings who once also hung out with their friends but that is as far as the episode went No one dug even in a gingerly way into the meaning of this repeated generational handoff of life or delved into what the familys Jewish ancestral religion might be able to contribute towards a theory of an afterlife or its characteristics or its requirements Or take Rachels unplanned pregnancy with ex boyfriend Ross Yes she decides to have the baby who after the first few newborn months pops in for briefer and briefer scenes snatched from Rachels more interesting burgeoning social and professional life But the scene in the Ladies Room where Rachel waits for the result of the home pregnancy test suggests that the determining factor in her not seeking other options is that she wants the baby What if she didnt want the baby but still worked her way through to some deeper realization of the objective reality of the unborn as a fellow human being What if that led her to rethink her lifestyle and choices resolving to better respect her God given power to create such a human person and the huge responsibility that entails Or what if to turn to another character the repeated jokes about Chandlers

Ellen Wilson Fielding 52 Winter 2021 pornography use led him and others such as Joey to examine just how pornography affects his relationships with women including ultimately his relationship with his wife Monica Or what if one of those apparently fairly frequent hangover mornings prompted one of the characters to reluctantly admit an alcohol abuse problem It wasnt a problem that wouldnt have occurred to the cast since one of them struggled off screen for years with addictions The standard response to these what ifs is that a sitcom is light comedy that attempts to appeal to its contemporary audience perhaps in part by steering clear of deeper matters particularly those that might divide and alienate viewers And in this Friends resembles most of its genre Oh some sitcom writers and producers fondly believe they are edgily probing important societal problems or challenging less evolved viewers by for example running characters in gay marriages but instead of courageously producing edgy comedy they are chiefly collaborating in an echo chamber of accepted opinion True edginess would be depicting a gay person struggling not without defeats and temptations to despair to live a chaste life Or it would be an episode displaying the emotional psychological and biological havoc of transgender transitioning in teenagers Or it would be confronting the viewer with the sheer Emperorsnew clothes insanity of believing gender is fluid or changeable Or how about something really radical a straight religious character who believes neither an active homosexual lifestyle nor transgender transitions are morally healthy or healthy in any other way but is not portrayed as a Taliban member a bigot or an ignorant and hate filled fanatic In other words why not convey a little of the reality of conflicting opinions and the experiences that form them Or are its not fair and people should do what will make them happy and youre a hater deemed to fully plumb the depths of progressive thought Or maybe while in the throes of romantic heartache job termination or a parents divorce one of the friends might contemplate suicide prompting all of them to consider what makes life worth living and under what circumstances they might consider ending it or might consider not intervening when a friend chooses to end it Or maybe the marital regrets of Rachels mother and her ensuing divorce could nudge Rachel to reflect on what a marriage vow is the sorts of escape clauses it may or may not offer and whether perhaps Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons correctly captured the nature of a vow or oath When a man takes an oath hes holding his own self in his own hands Like water he cups his hands and if he opens his fingers then he neednt hope to find himself again But this kind of edginess seems largely absent not just from popular comedy but also from many contemporary dramatic presentations Like the Socialist Realism of Stalins Soviet Union our own eras dramatic questions have their

Winter 2021 53 The Human Life Review smugly self satisfied answers the opposition members are cartoon characters and the conversation never gives more than a socially shallow consideration of What are we doing here I dont mean to sound dismissive of the Friends cast of characters or all the other casts of sitcom characters who are now being binge watched during Covid 19 shutdowns In fact an abundance of gratitude for whiling away many a tedious hour drives me to want more from them and for them than a superficial coasting along the surface of life Surely their energy and emotions should not be exhausted by bobbing from one emotional attachment to another where jobs and boyfriends and a really killer pair of boots end up all seeming roughly commensurate because they all derive importance from the intensity of the pull of attraction or push of repulsion It makes me sympathize with Geppettos ambitious desire for more for his marionette creation Or maybe my feelings more closely resemble those of a good teacher who urges her students to uncover a yet deeper layer of meaning rather than the stereotypical therapist of comedy who confines his efforts to asking his client So how did that make you feel In fact I wish that more not only for the Friends cast and the cast of The Office and The Big Bang Theory but even reaching back over the decades for the cast of Jackie Gleasons The Honeymooners I sometimes wonder what happens to Alice and Ralph Kramden in the years following the filming of their series Do they ever have children And do they raise them in that cramped apartment or manage to move to a house in the suburbs What happens to those children who would have grown up in the 1960s and come of age in the 1970s Are they disastrously caught by the cultures toxic undertow Do they veer into radical politics or sexual permissiveness shack up with someone get dumped and exercise their freshly granted abortion right And how would Alice and Ralph react to all this What exactly were Alice and Ralphs deeper beliefs about life and death If characters are drawn well enough for viewers to muse about their post screen lives then they are real enough for scriptwriters to give them apprehensions of higher meaning or the emotional intellectual and spiritual resources to meet possible tragedy address hard questions respond to assaults on their values A sitcom cant grapple with any of these more than tangentially or episodically but it could suggest to us elliptically and allusively in a thousand casual details and throwaway lines the nature and degree of ballast they have to withstand the storms of life Like us these characters may perhaps shrink from facing hard truths or risking rejection by loved ones they may be confused and carried along by the shallow tributary that our own times have steered us into and risk running aground They may turn out not to be like the people we thought them resembling childhood playmates with whom we share no common ground years

Ellen Wilson Fielding 54 Winter 2021 later But if these characters are given nothing significant to confront they are merely marionettes rather than real people The pleasantly pacifying sitcom format with its winsome characters and snappy comebacks has its place among us like mac and cheese for the frayed psyche at the end of a tiring day And in this limited supportive role perhaps it is acceptable that the characters moving across the screen do not stray too far from their largely self absorbed but rarely mean spirited selves It suits our craving for a particular easily digestible experience rather than the more demanding complexities of life and death the problem of pain the pursuit of the good the high cost of love Humankind cannot bear very much reality said T S Eliot in Four Quartets This has been so since the serpent spun his fantasy in Eden of a world where human creatures could be like gods certainly it is true in our own era where human beings cling to their own version of the same fantasy Like gods the tech wizards and their hopeful followers expect to end death Like gods human geneticists and biologists tinker with alternate versions of our DNA with dreams of recreating humanity Like gods some people choose to inhabit female or male bodies they were not born into or at least the best mock up that hormones and cosmetic surgery can achieve Such ambitions to dethrone the Creator are extreme rejections of reality but we all participate in more modest ones employing ingenuity to eclipse from our view the sublime simplicity of God and to replace our civilizations earlier attempts to address the great philosophical questions about ourselves and our place in the world Instead our greatest minds our scientists and technical wizards mostly engage in puzzle solving often though by no means always with good results And side stepping these great philosophical questions or accepting superficial and self serving answers has cost us For example it has dropped us below the level of even the most primitive peoples in our ignorance of human nature and society For much of the series Friends offers jokes at Chandlers expense about his insecure sense of masculinity and what that might imply about his sexual orientation His bizarre family background with a publicly promiscuous mother and an equally public transvestite father are the implicit roots of his insecurities Instead of acknowledging the psychological harm of his unconventional childhood his friends enjoy his mothers celebrity status Monica pushes him to invite his father to their wedding in a scene that takes place in the club where his father performs in drag Never does Chandler discuss the rightness or even the wisdom of his parents choices although he shares ways in which their conduct embarrassed him Nor does he discuss with them or others the narcissistic selfindulgence of their lifestyles More ordinary forms of moral blindness also surface throughout the series For example Chandler and Rachel both suffer from their parents divorces

Winter 2021 55 The Human Life Review however such suffering is depicted as real but necessary collateral damage for the sake of the parents happiness Monicas relationship with a much older man whose children are now grown founders on her desire to have children The disagreement is presented as emotionally wrenching but the characters discuss it solely within the limited realm of conflicting emotions and preferences Her desire to marry and have children which would be understood in almost all other times and places as not only natural but contributing to the survival of the community and aligned with the creative will of God is diminished in Friends to a personal ambition that she hopes eventually to achieve with someone else who also wants children Even in her parents generation this understanding of marriage had begun fraying By the Friends generation re engineering past arrangements and rethinking former conventions is the main order of business The series opens after all with Rachel jettisoning her own conventional future by jilting her betrothed on their wedding day In this same episode Ross discovers his wife has left him for a woman and shortly thereafter he will learn she is pregnant with their son whom the two women intend to raise So the shows premise is not that we learn the fundamentals of how to live happy and fulfilling adult lives from our parents who form part of a millennialong chain successfully handing on the template of human life to us so that we in turn can pass it on to our children Instead Friends displays a more developed version of something we have been familiar with since at least the 1960s and incipiently for much longer the replacement of the hierarchical family with our peers as primary supports and guides in carving out a generations path through the jungle of undifferentiated choices The marital ambitions of the women in Friends are not outlandish or wrong They would be considered legitimate as far as they go in many perhaps most times and places Emotional stability love and companionship and children are primary personal motivations for marriage even among the most traditionalminded persons But when volatile emotions and idiosyncratic preferences are identified as the only legitimate bases for our decisions or at least the ones carrying the most weight there is very little moral ground to challenge the less noble and self sacrificing and even faulty moral choices of others On what grounds can we criticize them Because they hurt other people The divorces of Chandlers parents of Rachels parents hurt others too but the screenwriters do not depict them as questionable on that account As mentioned earlier even Rachels decision to keep her baby is decided on emotion and therefore cant serve as a moral yardstick or even experienced advice for others in unexpected pregnancies There is no suggestion that anyone among the Friends group would have been appalled on grounds of principle

Ellen Wilson Fielding 56 Winter 2021 at her decision to abort however squeamish they might have felt and whatever Rosss paternal instincts might have been In other words just because the protagonists do not defend or discuss abortion or gender choices or anything else on the ethical table today does not mean given how they habitually arrive at their decisions they would not find any or all of these acceptable if the person making the decision felt it was the right one But of course the Friends cast has plenty of company on the other side of the viewing screen In fact by the mid 1990s when the series began airing as far as deciding major life decisions on purely emotional grounds goes the camels nose had long since gone under the tent although portions of its anatomy since on display were not yet revealed to the tent dwellers In the current extremely divisive conditions of our country a divisiveness that has been building for decades but has found fertile conditions for growth in the past year Friends may seem light years removed from our situation But the if it makes you happy tolerance on display in Friends and the boatload of other series whose characters largely share the same emotional decision flowchart is directly related to our bitter cancel culture and its rejection of past role models Both spurn reason history and tradition as guides to thought and behavior and refuse to acknowledge that we stand upon the shoulders of giants Both also reject or ignore religion or else refashion mostly non Western religion in their own image The sitcom world so pleasant and comparatively serene at least for the viewer even in its recent snarkier incarnations presents the domestic or professional lives of characters ripe little though they know it for getting woke Without anchoring their lives in any tradition more substantial than Secret Santa with almost no knowledge of history or adherence to a religious faith deeper more dogmatic or more morally challenging than pop Buddhism or Pachamama style paganism without grounding Western concepts of natural law and the God given value of the individual without an engrained understanding of the value of sacrificing for others without the virtue of temperance to arm them against their materialist culture these characters seem poised to be swept away by levelling political passions and our eras tribal bonding though that strong tide demands repudiation of a religion and civilization that after all they never learned to know love or appreciate Come on Rachel Come on Monica It doesnt have to be this way I tell them as I watch them steer for the unprotected edge of the flat two dimensional world they inhabit But judging by the limited internal resources they and their like have been given by the scriptwriters things dont look too good for our side of the screen either

Winter 2021 57 The Human Life Review BOOKNOTES BROKEN BONDS SURROGATE MOTHERS SPEAK OUT Jennifer Lahl Melinda Tankard Reist and Renate Klein eds Mission Beach Queensland Spinifex Press 2019 Paperback pp 140 Also available on Kindle Reviewed by John Grondelski Surrogacy is a form of human trafficking polite society countenances The 25 billion per year global fertility business what Jennifer Lahl calls Big Fertility wants you to picture its product as happy faces and bouncing babies Unhappy stories rarely get out Perhaps the last time we really paid attention to the exploitation of a gestational mother was when Mary Beth Whitehead made the news back in the late 1980s See her book A Mothers Story for a first hand account of surrogacy gone wrong Big Fertility doesnt want us to listen to stories like Whiteheads because they undermine the mythology it peddles about happy families and huge profits through surrogacy Kudos then to Jennifer Lahl and her co editors Melinda Tankard Reist and Renate Klein for letting women hired to be gestational mothers tell their stories in their own voices Lahl a pediatric critical care nurse is President of the Center for Bioethics and Culture in California which has worked to publicize ethical issues connected with making life gamete donation and surrogacy Renate Klein is a biologist feminist author and retired faculty member of Deakin University in Australia She founded Spinifex Press the books publisher Melinda Tankard Reist the author of several books is a well known Australian blogger and broadcast commentator Broken Bonds provides the accounts of sixteen women from nine countries who experienced surrogate motherhood None of them sound like happy altruistic angels a common term for mothers used in pro surrogacy propaganda smiling as they selflessly turn over the baby theyve carried for nine months to the people who employed their services Most of them are heartbroken A few simply seem indifferent Im not sure which is worse Their stories show the multifaceted invidious face of gestational surrogacy Sifting through them one is hard pressed about where to start in elucidating this sordid world One place might be motive Women often recall noble even altruistic motives for choosing surrogacy Britni USA says At the start I wanted to do something great p 42 Maggie USA a 32 year old woman subjected to druginduced hyper ovulation multiple times and who is now post hysterectomy and diagnosed with terminal cancer discusses how a Big Fertility nurse began enticing her into egg donation 11 years earlier telling her she was beautiful

Booknotes 58 Winter 2021 intelligent capable and had a lot going for her p 28 Maggies verb to describe the nurses MO is typically applied to sex predators and other traffickers She groomed her Kelly USA tells us I love being pregnant I love excitement I love people fussing over baby bellies and I love happy endings you know p 75 Alas she didnt enjoy one As Kelly admits later on Money plays a big role in surrogacy If there were no money in surrogacy I would never have done it p 78 Denise USA seamlessly blends the altruistic and pecuniary We thought this was a great way for us to help our family and help another family at the same time p 65 When Maggie seemed insufficiently motivated by the idea of contributing her beauty intelligence etc to another family her groomer threw in the added benefit of ovadonation as a way of paying down student loans That did appeal to me p 28 The accounts of Eastern European women are even blunter Natalia Russia admits I will get a million rubles after the birth about 14,500 and already now 20,000 rubles a month We want to buy a house Its our only chance to make so much money so fast p 72 Surrogacy proceeds have already gotten Natascha Russia a car A small one a Russian brand p 45 Elena Romania is the most matter of fact My price is 8,000 for the pregnancy and birth Surrogacy is a good way to earn good money to have bread on the table Of course we do it for the money Thats reasonable isnt it p 108 Money goes further overseas which is why making babies like making teeshirts is often offshored Elena points out the attractiveness of surrogacy in neighboring Moldova Moldovan women are poor but healthy they only eat good food which they produce themselves They dont smoke they keep chickens and grow vegetables Its a good place to find surrogate mothers There are lots of young women They are very beautiful p 108 They also offer pregnancy and birth starting at 5,000 Want even deeper discounts Read the tragic stories of Ujwala Dimpy and Sarala in an Indian surrogacy bio market pp 91 100 The Western women who engage in surrogacy often talk about being stiffed with medical and legal costs especially if they experience complications to their health during or after pregnancy Rob Australia details how she had to dicker over four 55 transport fees to from medical appointments p 86 Odette Australia says she has almost 15,000 in unpaid medical legal bills p 63 Kelly reveals that the Spanish couple who took the twins she carried home with them only paid up when she told them she was Madrid bound with book editor Jennifer Lahl p 80 One is tempted to ask why the law countenances what amounts to baby selling The answer is easy Some countries pretend only to allow altruistic noncompensated surrogacy i e arrangements in which only expenses are reimbursed Who is going to audit any padded claims Offshoring surrogacy reduces costs in places where the law may not have kept up or law enforcement

Winter 2021 59 The Human Life Review turns a blind eye especially when bought off When countries like Cambodia ban surrogacy or Thailand prohibits commercial surrogacy e g after Westerners abandoned a handicapped child Baby Gammy they didnt want Big Fertility just relocates to more congenial venues Its also not simply about money Surrogacy in Western countries with birthrate citizenship offers a twofer a baby and a passport In the United States surrogacy is governed by state law Some states have enacted surrogacy friendly policies others exhausted by the abortion controversy have legal codes which designed for parentage and natality questions that did not envision the splicing and dicing of genetic gestational and social parenthood are inadequate to deal with surrogacy The women who describe their experiences in this book have been exploited In a society boasting of social justice commitments the radical power inequality between gestational surrogates and those hiring them Big Fertility wealthy people lawyers indifferent to the conflicts of interest they engage in is glaring Two remaining questions struck me in reading this book The first is why surrogacy is pretty much ungoverned In order to adopt a child comprehensive home studies and fitness reviews are required but no such protection of the child exists in surrogacy even in the absence of any genetic gestational link to the intended parents The really provocative question however is how these women could believe that they would remain so emotionally detached from a child who grew and developed within their bodies for nine months that they could then deliver that baby with the indifference of a UPS courier bringing a package to your door Perhaps some succumbed to Big Fertilitys propaganda about happy families through surrogacy Others particularly when helping a relative was concerned seemed to think that they would be able to stay involved in that familys life Ever heard of Hagar Almost all of these women report experiencing a curious inversion during pregnancy While they believed they would remain indifferent to a pregnancy the commissioning parents would be totally agog about just the opposite happened The women became increasingly involved with the pregnancy and child while their employers tended impassively to await delivery Even for those women who declared upfront that gestational surrogacy was their route up the economic ladder their own self desensitizing stands out Russian Natalia says I am an incubator the vessel for this child p 73 Indian incubator Ujwala is then a strange vessel one that says My heart is hurting p 93 John M Grondelski Ph D Fordham was former associate dean of the School of Theology Seton Hall University South Orange New Jersey All views expressed herein are exclusively his own

Booknotes 60 Winter 2021 WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN THE CASE FOR THE BODY IN PUBLIC BIOETHICS O Carter Snead Harvard University Press 2020 Hardcover pp 336 Also available on Kindle Reviewed by Maria McFadden Maffucci O Carter Sneads What It Means to Be Human The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics is a vital and enlightening book an engaging dive into the history and philosophical undergirding of the public bioethics on which our jurisprudence concerning human life currently relies While the field of bioethics was developed in response to the reported use abuse and exploitation of human subjects in research like the infamous Tuskegee study on African American males in the 1930s Snead shows that Americas contemporary bioethics overwhelmingly disregards our human reality embodiment thus consistently putting vulnerable human lives in peril Snead who is William P and Hazel B White Director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture Professor of Law and Concurrent Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame writes At its foundation American public bioethics has a reductive and incomplete vision of human flourishing and identity one that defines the human being fundamentally as an atomized and solitary will relegating the natural world and even the human body itself as merely inchoate matter to be harnessed and remade in service of such projects of the will Bioethics has a fatal flaw overlooking that we are embodied beings As living bodies in time we are vulnerable dependent and subject to natural limits including injury illness senescence and death Thus both for our basic survival and to realize our potential we need to care for one another The key principle of our contemporary bioethics Snead argues is expressive individualism a term coined by sociologist Robert Bellah in his 1985 book Habits of the Heart the result of his interviews with Americans on how they see themselves Bellah found that human flourishing consists in the expression of ones innermost identity through freely choosing and configuring life in accordance with his or her own distinctive core institutions feelings and preferences This preference for individuals choices over acknowledging their dependence on others has steadily permeated law and policies in each of three main areas of jurisprudence Snead covers abortion assisted reproduction and assisted suicide euthanasia In abortion the law frames the public question as a zero sum conflict between isolated strangers forgetting that it actually involves the most intimate relationship of mother and child in the largely unregulated landscape of assisted reproductive technology prospective parents and those they turn to insist that the right to have children trumps the consequences

Winter 2021 61 The Human Life Review on the vulnerable persons affected or discarded in these procedures and at the end of life the law stubbornly clings to a vision of the patient as an atomized autonomous will as its animating premise when the embodied reality of such patients is the opposite Consider a cancer patient choosing death while in the grips of a yet untreated clinical depression The great contemporary moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre looms large among the scholars in this book as a brilliant and influential critic of modern society and its lack of virtuous care of the vulnerable Snead looks to MacIntyres virtues of acknowledged dependence McIntyre insists that to be an embodied human is to be essentially dependent on others from our earliest days to our final ones and that human beings exist on a scale of disabilities He sees the paradigm for human caring for one another at all stages as parenthood and writes Snead pointed to parents of disabled children as the pristine model of this form of care Professor Snead here not only explores the anthropological dimension of our public bioethics he also offers ways to work for better solutions suggestions perhaps not immediately palatable to either political side in our terribly divided political culture but which point to an alternate vision of human solidarity Issues and laws he writes must be reframed according to the categories of connectivity of the networks of giving and receiving that embodied beings need to survive and flourish Concerning abortion for example a legal regime for abortion rooted in the anthropology of embodiment would protect unborn children from conception and at the same time offer maximal support for their mothers providing for their health care and other needs both during and after the pregnancy Where networks of care are absent the law must intervene to protect the vulnerable from exploitation and harm and from the temptation to harm others or even themselves in the pursuit of their own desires and interests Law and policies for the vulnerable are of particular interest to me I found Alasdair MacIntyres depiction of special needs parenting as the model of care momentarily disorienting as the parent of a disabled adult I often have to fight feeling like a failure I wonder Is this because the cultures insistence on achievement and inspiring accomplishments damages our acceptance of the limits caused by physical and mental conditions We often see stories on the evening news about a disabled individual beating the odds to attain some achievement and we tear up and cheer but in celebrating them do we ignore the virtue of accepting our children just as they are which takes its own grit and perseverance More concerning What It Means to Be Human reinforced in my mind the dangers of expressive individualism for the disabled My husband and I recently attended a seminar at our sons agency regarding guardianship The message was very upbeat and client centered We were told several stories of

Booknotes 62 Winter 2021 parent guardians of disabled individuals who had obstructed their adult childs wishes to marry for example or move out or in a young womans case not be sterilized We were told that the trend was away from the guardianship process in favor of the rights of the disabled to make their own choices The agencys website thearc org explains Like their peers without disabilities individuals with Intellectual Developmental Disabilities must be presumed competent they must also be assisted to develop as decisionmakers through education supports and life experience Less restrictive means of decision making supports e g health care proxies advance directives supported decision making powers of attorney notarized statements representation agreements etc should be tried and found to be ineffective in ensuring the individuals decision making capacity before use of guardianship as an option is considered I left that session emotionally rooting for the rights and dreams of the disabled what mother wouldnt and considering a health proxy document the most important immediate need for my son But Ive since realized it is not enough If he is conscious and deemed able to advocate for himself and a doctor tells him that some treatment or lack thereof is best for him he will agree because he likes to be agreeable and because he doesnt have the capacity to understand the threats to him inherent in quality of life biases A recent story from NPRs All Things Considered As Hospitals Fear Being Overwhelmed by Covid 19 Do the Disabled Get the Same Access December 14 is a chilling example that even with the proper documents bias against the disabled renders this kind of rights talk useless Sarah McSweeney was a young woman with multiple disabilities living in a group home run by Arc Oregon who was transported to the hospital with suspected pneumonia She travelled with a legal document called a POLST Portable Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment a form for the seriously ill to take with them to inform physicians of their wishes which she had filled out with assistance from her caregivers Arc employee Heidi Barnett said We had her at full code So all treatment Because she was young and vibrant and had a great life And that was her wishes thats what we gathered from her She wanted to be alive However the several doctors who treated Sarah over the course of three weeks as well as the hospitals social workers repeatedly questioned this directive and eventually countered it by refusing her lifesaving care Nurse manager of the group home Kimberly Conger recounted that when aspirational pneumonia was discovered severely affecting one lung she and the doctor discussed the possibility of Sarah being intubated and letting that lung rest giving her time to heal and letting the antibiotics do their magic But then the doctor himself pushed to rewrite McSweeneys care document to a DNR Do Not Resuscitate saying that intubating her was a matter of risk versus quality of life Conger said I was like But she has quality of life And he looked at me and

Winter 2021 63 The Human Life Review goes Oh she can walk And talk The hospital decided that aggressive treatment would cause more harm than benefit Sarah McSweeney died of severe sepsis at age 45 a case that speaks to a warning Snead voices in his chapter on end of life decisions The temptation to alleviate suffering or disability by eliminating the patient must be resisted Sarahs story is reported in the context of Covid 19 and the strain on our healthcare system though I am not at all sure she would have been saved pre Covid but I do think that our current situation makes Sneads message in What It Means to Be Human even more urgent Indeed we can see expressive individualism vs embodiment at play in the debate over masks to prevent the viruss spread and in the anxiety about the new vaccines On the one hand people express the understandable desire to exercise their individual will and follow their own conscience about what they put on their bodies and what they put in their bodies on the other hand the realities of physical embodiment and vulnerability to disease could make this freedom to choose at odds with ones duty to care for and protect oneself and others In his important book O Carter Snead asks us to advocate with renewed conviction As embodied humans we have crucial human rights as well as inescapable vulnerabilities and a duty to care for others Our law and policies must prioritize the right to life and the duty of care for all humans no matter their age location or abilities Maria McFadden Maffucci is editor in chief of the Human Life Review

From the HLR Website 64 Winter 2021 FROM THE HLR WEBSITE Epiphany 2021 Maria McFadden Maffucci January 6 2021 would have been my brother Roberts 61st birthday He died of cancer on December 28 1994 the Feast of the Holy Innocents at age 34 Always at this time of year Robert is present in the minds and hearts of his family and friends we share memories eat his favorite beef and potato meals or raise a pint of Guinness in his honor He was an extraordinarily loving and affectionate man a huge 6 4 and ahem well fed teddy bear of a guy He was also a deep thinker and articulate writer At the time of his death he was heading up our anti abortion lobbying office the Ad Hoc Committee in Defense of Life which back then had an office in Washington DC Before he died Robert was working on an article about the pro life movement and violence There had been several shootings at abortion clinics including the 1994 killings of an abortion doctor and a clinic escort in Pensacola Florida by anti abortion protestor Paul Hill After Roberts death I wrote Why My Brother Won for the Human Life Review Spring 1995 in which I included some of Roberts unpublished work As I recall in the article Robert and I used to commiserate with each other about this how the violence allowed the media to paint us all as extremists how frustrating it was to see the harm that the Pensacola killings did to the movement I remember one day last August a few weeks after the Hill shootings I was sitting at home waiting for my then overdue baby and Robert was at home recovering from his latest round of chemotherapy Both of us had seen on separate talk shows a priest arguing for the justifiable homicide of abortion doctors As Roman Catholics we were appalled to see a man in a Roman collar espousing such views The day before Roberts funeral December 30 1994 there was more violence A man named John Salvi opened fire at two abortion clinics in suburban Brookline outside of Boston killing two employees Shannon Lowney and Leanne Nichols In the weeks since the 2020 election many Christian and Catholic friends or colleagues have written me about how they were fasting and praying for the election that the results could not be accepted we simply had to pray harder God would turn things around if only we pray hard enough But I wondered How do we know How can we be sure of Gods will And my brothers words came to mind It is never correct to say that God is on our side It is in fact quite presumptuous He is not here to do our bidding after all All we can actually hope for is that through our own choices we will put ourselves on Gods side of things Of course where we mess up is that we desire it to be the other way around and then in our minds make it so We bow to the

Winter 2021 65 The Human Life Review temptation to have God on our team with ourselves as coach Of course there were thousands of prayerful and peaceful citizens who came to Washington DC on January 6 2021 hoping that God was on their side But there is no way of getting around what happened And there are consequences This is what Robert wrote back in 1994 Public perception is a crucial element in any struggle in the public square It is so much harder to prove your position if the populace is not sympathetic to your side Currently to the dismay of many prolifers are being perceived as angry violent radicals who will hurt you if you dont agree with them This perception is unfair when applied to the anti abortion movement in toto but it accurately defines an increasing minority The answer to all this is a Chestertonian paradox In order to win this struggle we must avoid trying to win it We must do what we do against abortion not because this or that action will secure us a victory but because it is right to perform that action We can fight endlessly for good moral legislation to save unborn children but with the willingness to lose a fight rather than sacrificing principles to win We can try to remember Christian charity and compassion for those among us who are risking their chances of eternal happiness by fighting against God Instead of hating these people and trying to hurt or terrify them we should be praying for them and treating them with the basic civility Christians used to be known for We must continue to educate to provide the calm voice of reason and logic to counter the often hysterical rantings of the other side For over 45 years thousands of marchers have gathered annually in DC to protest an unjust law peacefully Though the media doesnt admit this the numbers for the March for Life are enormous And yet it is always remarkably calm and marchers are overwhelmingly considerate of the police as I have witnessed time and time again Because to respect human life is to well respect human life and abhor violence What will the March for Life be like on January 29 2021 Will our movement be scapegoated Will we be silenced Will there be violence As night fell on January 6th I thought of Robert and the meaning of Epiphany God revealing Himself to us I wondered what sort of epiphany had been revealed this awful day I dont presume to know but I trust always that God can bring good out of evil Here is how I concluded my article about Robert If I were coaching God Robert would have won his fight with cancer and be here to write this

From the HLR Website 66 Winter 2021 After January 5th W Ross Blackburn Arise shine for your light has come and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you For behold darkness shall cover the earth and thick darkness the peoples but the LORD will arise upon you and his glory will be seen upon you And nations shall come to your light and kings to the brightness of your rising Isaiah 60 1 3 Thankfully this year January 6 followed the first Tuesday of the month Yesterday we elected a man to the Senate who as a pastor claims to speak for God yet promotes the practice of killing children in the womb Today we celebrate Epiphany marking the revelation of Christ to the nations Over the last year I have been reading Fire Within by Thomas Dubay S M a long reflection on the teachings about prayer of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross This morning I read the following While the saints are citizens of their times what else could they be they have a knack for transcending the myopias and smallnesses of the concrete circumstances in which all of us live They are always up to date because their vision and love are rooted in eternity I had to look up myopia It can mean lack of vision imagination or foresight It can also mean narrow mindedness It was a good January 6 corrective to the happenings of January 5 Our problems are not small That we would elect a pastor who promotes killing children to one of the highest offices in the land is evidence enough Worse doing so has become normal After all most members of the Senate think the same way A darkness increasingly covers our land But the world is no darker now than it was in Jesus time In fact the cardinal text of Epiphany the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus records how these kings had to deceive Herod who in his effort to kill Jesus and protect his himself I and many others certainly lobbied hard for that But the worldly failure for us believers is really Roberts gain because he is with God And whether you are a religious person or not Roberts thoughts may help to make sense of setbacks in a struggle for the good When our attempts to educate the world about abortion seem to fail we have to remember that lives are saved one at a time and that successful or not we may not abandon the moral path Hatred and violence only hurt our cause and harden peoples hearts Roberts way of hope and faithful perseverance is the only way to truly win Maria McFadden Maffucci is editor in chief of the Human Life Review

Winter 2021 67 The Human Life Review own throne would mandate the killing of all infant boys This is the world into which Jesus was born This is the world he came to save The image of Epiphany is light in darkness Which means Epiphany is a matter of vision for that is what light gives us The church walks by faith not by sight We trust not in earthly rulers not presidents not senators not judges We refuse to get discouraged because the arm of man appears strong We insist that our vision embrace what we cannot see even at the horizon of death we look further to the horizon of eternity And we remember that in Christ alone is our hope For in the end the problem at the root of all our problems abortion included is sin And politicians cannot touch that Only God in Christ can Jesus who said I am the light of the world also said to the church You are the light of the world We are people who hope in Christ and who by that very hope shine in darkness We should be thankful for those who fight politically for vulnerable children and their mothers And we should not forget the real work which is prayer practical generosity and faith in the God who sent us Jesus who is now and always light in a dark world In the end like all the saints who have gone before us we are citizens of our time What else can we be The call of the church is to transcend the myopias and smallnesses of our present circumstances Christ reigns and one day he will restore all things to the way they should be Our task as we carry out our concrete daily callings is to remember that Rev Dr W Ross Blackburn who writes A Pastors Reflections for the Human Life Reviews website has been Rector of Christ the King an Anglican Church in Boone North Carolina since 2004 The Odd Couple and Abortion Culture Joe Bissonnette I was seven years old when Neil Simons Broadway play The Odd Couple became a TV series Forty five years later I still remember Oscar and Felix as perfect embodiments of the liberated and the oppressed which I suppose might reveal something about my own organizational limitations This semester for the first time in quite a while Im sharing my classroom with another teacher She is bright eyed high energy orderly and intense I think I had powdered sugar from a donut on my sweatshirt when we met I approve of orderliness in principle after all the major motif in the opening line of Genesis 1 is God bringing order from chaos But in defense of chaos God didnt start with order He could have if He had wanted to but He didnt

From the HLR Website 68 Winter 2021 God must have seen some value in amorphous ambiguity to bother beginning with chaos Then by chapter 4 the champion of order the farmer Cain slays his brother the wandering herdsman Abel because God preferred the unreserved gratitude and generosity of Abels offering over that of the prudent manager Cain who held back his best Now that parallel is a bit unfair because theres nothing terribly wrong with this nice young teacher wanting the classroom to be neat and tidy adorned with colorful posters and anodyne inspirational sayings If asked many people would probably agree with the idea that school is supposed to cultivate orderliness responsibility and conformity That a school of students should be like a school of fish mindlessly swimming together moving as one But they would be wrong The word school comes from schola which means leisure The highest thing that takes place in school is not discipline or orderliness or even the acquisition of essential literacy and numeracy skills but rather the possibility for reflection and contemplation that opens up on the far side of the acquisition of those skills Contemplation can be serene like the transport we experience in our initial apprehension of a delicate flower But for the blessed few serenity can lead to something richer which is the sublime the beautiful comingled with the tragic Think of the essential beauty of the flower But what if the flower is revealed to be artificial It is a betrayal perhaps in part because it does not have the organic complexity of a living thing breaking forth from the earth for no purpose other than beauty Mostly however the artificial flower is a betrayal because it neither lives nor dies There is no comingling of the tragic All life is mortal It is both terrible and beautiful It can be puzzling perplexing even enigmatic But apprehending this fruitful ambiguity requires an openness to the possibility of Truth and the courage to follow no matter where it leads Not just the small t truths of social utility but the capital T truths that subsist in themselves and need no justification While this habit of mind implicitly and sometimes explicitly subversive and non conformist has never been widely popular it is seen far less these days in young students whose minds I would argue are awash in the existential uncertainty unleashed by abortion culture The beautiful idea underlying school is that the young should have a good long time in which they dont have to worry about providing for themselves or surviving on their own They are given the leisure to learn and to think But imagine their pathway winding through the unmarked graves of brothers and sisters never to be born should have been friends never to be met and couldhave been spouses never to be wed The young know that we abort unborn babies and that they too would have been aborted had their mothers so chosen

Winter 2021 69 The Human Life Review They live in a lingering shadow a sad darkness They do not have the spiritual light necessary to see the sublime They exist on a diet of anodyne inspirational sayings lacking the courage because it has not been instilled in them to be flesh and blood bodies animated by immortal souls Fortunately there are ways back Mercifully there are always ways back But they are never where you expect them to be Oscar which means spear of God was a slob but he had an eye for wonder a talent for friendship and an openness to adventure Felix which means happiness could never achieve the joy and peace he yearned for because it cannot be achieved as a willed end it can only be discovered incidentally The beauty of The Odd Couple was the ongoing revelation of hidden and surprising things provoked by the clash of Oscars chaotic messiness and Felixs rage for order As a priest friend often says its our sins which save us The souls of the young are small safe spaces barricaded behind angry leftist orthodoxies Many of them are not liberals promoting liberty and they certainly are not conservatives conserving wisdom and tradition accrued over time They are that most dangerous of political animal utopians who believe in the absolute perfection of their understanding of things If the polls are right they will have their president in November and the age of the joyless Felix will be upon us But the original Neil Simon screenplay plumbed depths too dark for television The story began with Felix attempting suicide and failing because of his fussy delicate nature Utopian dreams inevitably implode Lets just hope the existential wisdom of an Oscar will find the young dreamers before there is too much damage Such strange twists and turns Joe Bissonnette is a religion teacher He grew up reading his dads copies of the Human Life Review Life Is Expensive Diane Moriarty Life is cheap is an expression usually reserved for primitive peoples or violent times be it warring tribes and clans slaughtering each other like chickens or the showdown at noon culture of the American Wild West At least drawing six shooters was between two men standing at either end of a street Now someone mows down all his co workers because hes angry with the boss or concertgoers because hes angry with the company that owns the arena or kids because hes angry with their school But these are recognizable bad guys Life is cheap is also about landlords in cities dense with renters seeing only units

From the HLR Website 70 Winter 2021 not lives or business schools teaching students that pleasing shareholders is a moral imperative Or the governor of New York State signing an executive order that sent elderly people still infectious from Covid 19 back into nursing homes where the virus spread like wildfire Issued on March 25 Cuomos order was intended to ease the burden on hospitals dealing with the most critical Covid 19 patients In other words he wanted the beds He wanted the beds old people were using for someone else Like younger people whose lives were more worthy of living Desperate times call for desperate measures Crisis mode Even though help was already on the way FEMA had been brought in on March 20 to design a medical facility in the Javits Center by March 27 the hospital ship Comfort was en route and Samaritans Purse field hospital in Central Park was up and running by April 1 But hey the old coots were probably gonna die soon anyway Maybe Cuomo was on to something Several thousand nursing home residents died and his poll numbers went up Last May while walking through my building lobby I saw a neighbor on her way out The usual greetings were exchanged hello hello how are you fine and you She told me her mother had just died I gave condolences The neighbor is no spring chicken so I knew her mom must have been very old and I empathized by saying that losing your mom is a real tough one no matter her age She nodded then said She died of Covid She caught it in the nursing home We werent even allowed to visit So you couldnt say goodbye No And she died alone How awful Was she conscious and aware She shook her head waved her hand and said with a soft rueful laugh Oh no Not for a long time now Years Awkward shrug Since then theres been a noticeable change in her body language Shes lighter Freer A weight has been lifted Im in no position to judge My mother collapsed from a cerebral hemorrhage and died five days later my father had a massive heart attack and was dead before he hit the garage floor No drawn out illnesses no long term care and no nursing home expenses Albany politicians may be pushing for commissions to investigate the role Cuomos executive order had in the death of what is now over 6,400 nursing home residents but I suspect many voters will forgive him Cuomo isnt the only one to engage in selective triage During Mayor Giulianis term there was a policy not to inform people that they were HIV positive when it turned up in any blood test that wasnt specifically requested for AIDS Such as routine pre natal blood work If doctors found HIV in the blood of a pregnant woman they were not allowed to inform her even though by that time it was known that administering the drug AZT to pregnant women could at least save the babies But no dice This policy was in place overtly anyway due to pressure from organized and well funded gay advocacy groups such as GMHC Gay Mens Health Crisis because they feared reporting policies no

Winter 2021 71 The Human Life Review matter how humanitarian would be bad for their group It wasnt until 1998 after public outrage fueled by newspaper stories exposing this callous disregard for innocent babies that regulations were drafted for New Yorks HIV Reporting and Partner Notification Law which was promptly denounced Lambda Executive Director Kevin M Cathcart warned Government lists are threatening to the poor the young women and gay men of all races undocumented immigrants and many people of color It is bad public health policy to chase people away from the health care system and worse to divert millions of dollars from prevention and treatment Why didnt Giuliani act sooner Babies were being born with HIV and dying within two years True in his second term after he left his wife he bunked in with a gay couple but would loyalty to a gay friendship override simple decency And was the gay lobby truly so powerful as to be calling the shots when it came to pregnant women Or was heeding the strident voices of a self interested clutch actually just a useful misdirect Did the powers that be acting in crisis mode survey the situation and conclude that saving the lives of who knows how many mostly black children whose fathers were already dead from AIDS and whose mothers soon would be wasnt a priority Maybe their lives were too expensive I am speculating here to be sure but lest anyone think this an impossible scenario I would remind all of the scandal several years ago in France when health officials permitted hemophilia patients to be given HIV tainted blood rather than publicly reveal that the blood supply had been dangerously compromised A good number of Americans are enamored of Marxism these days and they may look at the nursing home elderly parents burden conundrum and exclaim Aha This is why we need government run health care Im not so sure Not that long ago the newspapers were filled with stories about mistreatment of old people in state run facilities and horror stories of conditions in veterans hospitals abound Taxpayer funded nursing homes need to keep costs down and private ones need to make a profit and this often results in too many bargainbasement employees Caring for the sick disabled confused and incontinent takes the patience of a saint It requires a true vocation But all too often its just an unattractive low paying job thats a breeding ground for resentment against vulnerable people who are in need of help Perhaps the answer lies in religious orders from all denominations or non religious for that matter dedicated to this mission staffed by people with a calling and funded by tax deductible donations There is money out there Campaign contributions to the Democrats total 990 million this year so far and the Republicans have brought in 1.33 billion Even during a Covid related fragile economy The evangelical Christian relief organization Samaritans Purse headed by the late Reverend Billy Grahams son Franklin which set up a field hospital in

From the HLR Website 72 Winter 2021 Central Parks East Meadow for Covid patients is a perfect example of how it can be done And in spite of the childish yet tyrannical whining about its politically incorrect stance on gay issues no one was turned away because of it Ironically the purveyors of identity politics vilified the evangelicals because of their identity In any case I dont think the answers lie in Marxist dogma and clamorous demands that wealthy people foot the bill for everything Its not that all socialistic methods are abhorrent Social Security is socialism So are Medicare and unemployment benefits And rent stabilization which by stabilizing rents stabilizes neighborhoods local economies and the work force All are good just and needed But giving tacit approval for commandants to get rid of the weak and vulnerable in the name of making tough decisions because truth be told it brings relief and release is a siren song to be resisted And I absolutely include myself even though I had the dubiously good fortune to have both parents make their exit in a mercifully brief fashion That I can see it as in any way fortunate says something about me doesnt it I had a friend who almost died She fell down a long flight of steel steps Her first night in the hospital was one of those if she makes it through the night situations I asked her what it was like She said A night nurse sat by me the whole time It was so easy just to stop breathing So easy just not to inhale To breathe out but not to breathe in I was so so tired But every time I was about to give up to not breathe in again the night nurse would gently touch my arm and say my name Thats all she did Id feel her hand on my arm and hear her say Nancy in a soft voice calling me back All night she did that Such a thin veil there was separating her life and her death a simple human touch and a quiet human voice kept my friend on this side of it Such a thin veil separates us from the commandants Its so easy to give in so easy to go along Diane Moriarty is a freelance writer living in Manhattan

Winter 2021 73 The Human Life Review JOHN PATRICK MACKEY June 29 1942 January 1 2021 An FBI Special Agent and attorney Fordham Law John Mackey served as Special Counsel and Washington Bureau Chief for the Ad Hoc Committee in Defense of Life a pro life lobbying organization set up by James P McFadden in 1974 the year before he founded the Human Life Review Mr Mackey went on to be Deputy Assistant Attorney General under George H Bush and in his last 15 years of employment Investigative Counsel for the House Foreign Affairs Committee In the initial years of this movement when Roes act of raw judicial power made its formation its ability to strategize to plot political and cultural counterattacks anything but inevitable an immediate objective was to buy time To keep the issue of abortion as an assault on life as a thing that deeply troubled the American soul viable and roiling on the Capitol Hill radar screen while a fuller cause could gel and broaden and fight This could have been a very lost cause But it wasnt And the reason that it wasnt is due in no small part to John Patrick Mackey who armed with smarts and a temperament that was as winning as his smile conspired and lobbied and cajoled and pressured and annoyed lawmakers and bureaucrats and reporters and presidents with great success In the mid 1980s he went on to find other ways to serve the Republic but it is unquestionable that there are many people who live today who escaped the terrible fate that has befallen too many unborn children because of what John Mackey did in the hallways of Congress and the lobby of the National Press Club in the early years following the travesty of Roe Jack Fowler Vice President at National Review former director Ad Hoc Committee

Author Name 74 Winter 2021 JOSEPH SCHEIDLER SEPTEMBER 7 1927 JANUARY 18 2021 The Godfather of Pro Life Activism With the death of Joe Scheidler the pro life movement has lost a warrior champion and we have lost a dear friend Joe believed in defending the innocent lives of babies in the womb and this was a lifelong calling that he lived so faithfully to his last breath We rejoice in the truth that Joe so fully deserved to hear these words Well done good and faithful servant Tom Brejcha President Chief Counsel and Founder of the Thomas More Society

Winter 2021 75 The Human Life Review APPENDIX A Stephen Vincent writes from Connecticut This article was first published in the Spring 2003 issue of the Human Life Review Scheidlers Supreme Victory Stephen Vincent Pro life action news Mark Wednesday Feb 26 in red letters because it is one big red letter day for the pro life movement We were having a slice of cherry pie for breakfast when we got word that the U S Supreme Court had ruled 8 to 1 that we are not racketeers With these words Joseph M Scheidler announced victory over the National Organization for Women and other pro abortion forces in a case that had lasted 17 years and come to symbolize the struggle between the culture of life and the culture of death Hanging in the balance was nothing less than the good name of the pro life movement Scheidler and his Pro Life Action League are now using the victory to infuse new energy into the movement against abortion The decision written by Chief Justice William H Rehnquist not only vindicates the peaceful protests of prolifers who pray counsel or picket outside clinics It also protects social protestors and civil rights activists of all stripes from crippling lawsuits brought under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations RICO act Recognizing the threat the case posed to practitioners of all sorts of civil disobedience a number of organizations that are far from being pro life filed amicus briefs on Scheidlers side The day after the decision a Chicago Tribune editorial described it as a victory for free speech Conscious of its image as a champion of free speech and civil rights NOW long ago posted a Q A about the case on its website to appease liberal supporters The lead leading question says it all Are Scheidlers protests like those of the Civil Rights movement or the Ku Klux Klan With such rhetoric hurled at him Scheidler was proud to state after the Courts decision Its nice to know the First Amendment is still in force even for prolifers in this country A Man for Many Seasons Joe Scheidler Colorful quotable and irrepressible Joe is known among his supporters as the grandfather of the pro life movement Yet to NOW and other pro abortion forces he is not a grandfather but a godfather mobster in the mold of fellow Chicagoan Al Capone NOW brought civil charges of extortion under RICO and used images of Scheidler sporting his signature black hat and bullhorn to back up the portrayal of him as an antichoice gangster NOW also presented spurious testimony to associate Scheidler with every act of violence ever committed against an abortion clinic or an abortionist This journal has covered the case extensively with a forum on the use of RICO in Summer 1998 and a study of the questionable testimony in Fall 2000 Scheidler never let his opponents stop him although every aspect of his personal and

Appendix A 76 Winter 2021 professional life was placed under a microscope and he was threatened with bankruptcy His suburban Chicago house was placed in escrow to enable him to post a 440,000 bond while appealing a lower court judgment Throughout the legal ordeal that began in 1986 he was active at the clinics counseling praying and persuading women to turn away from abortion He even played with the mobster image continuing to wear his black hat and introducing himself at rallies as a racketeer for life In November 2002 with oral arguments before the Supreme Court scheduled for December a time when most appellants would shy away from controversial actions Scheidler was making waves in the media and abortion capital of New York helping to launch a campaign in which prolifers hold up posters of aborted babies in high traffic areas It was more than simply and literally an in your face tactic Scheidler wanted to dramatize his belief that the charges against him amounted to a phantom case that could not be taken seriously The case didnt slow us down he reflected a few days after his Supreme victory I would say that it pepped us up We didnt know how much time we had before we would be shut down by the courts We always knew though whether its by us or someone else the battle goes on because its right The biggest problem he continued was hiring people for our Pro Life Action League operations because we couldnt guarantee that wed still be in business the following year They tried to make me out as the man running all these pro life operations nationwide It was very flattering but it just wasnt true In a victory letter to friends and supporters addressed to Dear Fellow Former Racketeers he stated As much as I have enjoyed being known as a racketeer I am now happy to have been vindicated One of his regular action news updates phone hot line messages that hes been composing since 1974 put the Courts decision in perspective Abortion will end one day just as surely as the day came when slavery was outlawed Pro life attorneys think this Supreme Court victory will open new action against other unconstitutional restrictions on pro life activities The court must recognize that it is unconstitutional to have special laws against people who disagree with abortion He cited as examples the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances FACE Act passed during the Clinton years and the bubble zones imposed by local governments that keep even people who are only praying away from clinic doors The Hand of God A former Benedictine who left religious life before final vows because I wasnt cut out for obedience Scheidler attributes victory ultimately to God I saw and experienced directly the power of concerted and persistent prayer he said I knew without a doubt that God has His hand in this victory Thomas Brejcha lead counsel for Scheidlers side also assessed the outcome in very unlawyerlike terms We got not a single vote in the Chicago Court of Appeals and we get an 8 1 decision from the Supreme Court he marveled Its a remarkable a miraculous turnaround

Winter 2021 77 The Human Life Review The case was full of ironic twists Anyone familiar with the pro life movement knows that far from having centralized control and powerful bosses pro life groups are often hampered by their inability to unite Yet NOW in a sense produced what it condemned It raised Scheidler to the status of head man in legal proceedings and persuaded other prolifers to rally around him As Joe goes so goes the movement many began to think Not all to be sure In 1999 federal appeals judge David Coar slapped Scheidler and the other defendants Andrew Scholberg and Timothy Murphy with a nationwide injunction With the loose wording of this injunction anyone working with Scheidler or adopting the methods outlined in his book Closed 99 Ways to Stop Abortion could have been touched by it Many prolifers shied away for fear of later being collared as cooperators in Scheidlers network But enough others came to Scheidlers side including brave donors who helped him pay his mounting legal fees Pro life leaders who had stood by him from the start were quick to applaud his victory This litigation was clearly an attempt by NOW to eliminate pro life voices from the public square said Dennis M Burke staff counsel for Americans United for Life also based in Chicago Judie Brown of American Life League called Scheidler a good friend who has fought valiantly for years This decision is a tremendous victory for those who engage in social protests said Jay Sekulow chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice which filed a brief for Operation Rescue A related case Operation Rescue v NOW was included in the decision although Operation Rescue has effectively been out of business for years The ruling clearly shuts the door on using RICO against the pro life movement Abortion is not just a legal procedure To groups like NOW it is a sacred ritual said Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life Their efforts have hit the brick wall of our nations sacred right of protest Long live that right Francis Cardinal George of Chicago who led a prayer vigil with Scheidlers group outside a Planned Parenthood facility shortly after the decision stated If the courts had been used to stop organized sit ins at lunch counters in the Sixties there would have been no civil rights movement Columnist John Leo pointed out that the American Civil Liberties Union had opposed the passage of RICO from the start but they didnt fight it when it was used against prolifers Editorials in conservative and liberal papers alike applauded the decision The Wall Street Journal said it upholds the right of all Americans left or right to protest under the First Amendment The Chicago Tribune stated No matter where they stand individually on the divisive issue of abortion all Americans should applaud There were 74 amicus briefs filed by groups ranging from labor organizations to tree hugging environmentalists to nuclear weapons protestors to the Seamless Garment Network Also joining were high profile Catholics more commonly associated with other issues Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois founder of the School of the Americas Watch death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean Jesuit Father Daniel Berrigan and Martin Sheen known to millions as the President on The West Wing Craig M Bradley who wrote the brief for PETA summed the issue up nicely Scheidler Company wanted to shut the abortion clinics down They didnt want to

Appendix A 78 Winter 2021 take them over Just like PETA protestors might want to shut down an animal rendering plant not take it over The High Court agreed Obtaining a Decision In the end the 17 year case that made two trips to the Supreme Court was shockingly simple To violate RICO one must commit a series of specified acts or conspire to commit these acts Scheidler and his colleagues admitted that they had broken the law though only laws against trespassing and related minor offenses which dont qualify under RICO and that they did so in concert with others with the express intent of shutting down abortion clinics NOW claimed that by depriving or attempting to deprive clinics of their right to do business Scheidler et al were engaged in extortion one of the criminal acts specified by RICO The Court stated But even when their acts of interference and disruption achieved their ultimate goal of shutting down a clinic that performed abortions such acts did not constitute extortion because petitioners did not obtain respondents property They may have deprived or sought to deprive respondents of their alleged property right of exclusive control of their business assets but they did not acquire any such property Petitioners neither pursued nor received something of value from respondents that they could exercise transfer or sell The Court concluded that Scheidlers tactics more nearly constituted coercion a lesser crime not covered by RICO If the distinction between extortion and coercion which we find controls these cases is to be abandoned such a significant expansion of the laws coverage must come from Congress and not from the courts The implications of the case of course go beyond semantic distinctions Although Scheidler was barred from raising a First Amendment defense and NOW tried to narrow the case to anti abortion activism alone Scheidlers legal team succeeded in portraying pro life protestors as being in the mainstream of civil disobedience During oral arguments some justices raised the First Amendment themselves wondering aloud whether the right to free expression would not be violated by a wide application of RICO When we heard these statements in defense of our position we were thinking that maybe we could win this thing Scheidler recalls Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Steven Breyer joined the majority with their own concurring opinion They noted the chilling effect that NOWs application of RICO could have on all social protest while at the same time keeping their pro abortion credentials in order In the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994 Congress crafted a statutory response that homes in on the problem of criminal activity at health care facilities Thus the principal effect of a decision against petitioners here would have been on other cases pursued under RICO In other words since we can get prolifers on FACE why risk weakening PETA NOW attacked this position in its rants after the decision We will work to ensure that the FACE act is enforced But that is not enough read a press release FACE is too limited and doesnt reach the organizers of the violence We are looking at every avenue available to us to protect women doctors and clinic staff from these ideological terrorists

Winter 2021 79 The Human Life Review Mood Swing In 1994 the Supreme Court allowed the proceedings against Scheidler to continue by ruling 9 0 that he did not need to have an economic motive to be accused under RICO Why did the Court now rule 8 1 in his favor The technical explanation is that a slightly different legal point was under consideration the larger implication is that the mood of the Court and the nation has shifted slightly toward life America I believe is on the brink of a new appreciation for the value of human life especially unborn human life Scheidler said We are on the cutting edge of a subtle but very clear shift in our attitudes Characteristically Scheidlers victory celebration in June was not only for pro life advocates but for all Americans Joe is a patriot who loves his country and the freedoms proclaimed and protected by the Constitution There were U S flags as well as prayers at his rally to Bring America Back to Life Alongside Scheidlers populism NOW and its sister organizations come off as angry and anti American The National Abortion and Reproductive Rights League showed a certain Brave New World arrogance in changing its name to NARAL Pro Choice America With polls showing increasing numbers of citizens opposing abortion on demand and more young people coming out against killing unborn babies at any stage NARAL thinks that by proclaiming America to be pro choice it can make it so Yet the liberal tower of choice constructed in the Seventies is beginning to totter as the support base ages and thins Try as they may to refashion themselves according to the findings of Madison Avenue focus groups the fact is that the pro abortion forces are increasingly outsiders whose language and tactics do not resonate with most Americans A NOW leaders argument against bringing double murder charges to include Laci Petersons unborn baby is a perfect example of how NOW style rhetoric has confounded common sense and left pro abortion forces talking mostly among themselves It is far too soon to sound the death knell of the abortion mindset Yet it may be time to define a new category of American malcontent that has yet to be recognized by the mainstream media To go with the angry white male we now have the angry white female The poster girl hands down would be Fay Clayton NOWs lead lawyer She demonstrated her graciousness on The OReilly Factor after the decision She attacked Scheidler and repeatedly cut off Bill OReilly saying in a dozen different ways that the decision was really not a defeat that NOW is really not finished and that FACE gives abortion forces all the power they need to keep anti choicers at bay Huff and puff as she may the Supreme Court decision speaks for itself The name of the case itself symbolically marks a change in momentum Though usually called by its original name NOW v Scheidler the case heard by the Supreme Court was in fact the appellate version Scheidler v NOW The tables have been turned on the pro abortion movement Theyve gone from bringing suit to defending Generating Life The future looks bright Against Roe and its progeny come Scheidler and his seven children and so far 10 grandchildren Two of his children Eric 36 and Annie 26 work full time for the Pro Life Action League And they are NOWs worst nightmare

Appendix A 80 Winter 2021 educated energetic erudite and fully as determined as their dad Eric whose wife recently delivered their sixth child handles communications and the web Annie heads Generations for Life which educates and mobilizes young people on abortion and a range of other issues including chastity Such a complete victory in answer to so many prayers is a tremendous encouragement to our peaceful pro life activism Eric Scheidler writes NOWs long effort to thwart our pro life work has never stopped us from saving babies and helping women but now we are prepared to redouble those efforts You can defend life and love well into the future Make the Human Life Foundation part of your legacy Join the Defender of Life Society today For more information call 212 685 5210 today Or e mail defenderoflife humanlifereview com

Winter 2021 81 The Human Life Review APPENDIX B Stacy Trasancos who holds a PhD in chemistry is the Executive Director of the St Philip Institute of Catechesis and Evangelization in Tyler Texas The following article was originally published by the National Catholic Register Stacy Trasancos 2020 EWTN News Inc Reprinted with permission from the National Catholic Register www ncregister com How Aborted Children Are Used in Medical Research in 2020 Stacy Trasancos You dont need to go undercover and follow around employees from Planned Parenthood like David Daleiden at the Center for Medical Progress to find out how the remains of aborted children are used in research All it takes is a look at scientific reports The methods are detailed in the words of the scientists themselves who depend on abortion to design experiments With the focus lately on the use of aborted fetal cell lines in vaccines I thought it would be helpful to walk through what is really going on to show why some prolife Catholics are so concerned about the passive acceptance of aborted children in research We are not denying that vaccines serve a common good We are however encouraging Catholics to unite a protest against the evil of abortion to demand that university government and industrial scientists stop using the remains of electivelyaborted children in the research of anything vaccines or otherwise Actually vaccines are only the beginning In the last few decades scientific literature has reported new technologies such as single cell transcriptomics humanized mice and organoids to name a few What follows is a summary of three new research reports published in just the last half of 2020 There are many more Fetal Scalps and Back Flesh Grafted Onto Rats and Mice In September researchers at University of Pittsburgh published their work on the development of humanized mice and rats with full thickness human skin Human skin protects an individual from infection but there is no way to study the effects of pathogens on individuals without subjecting them to disease Full thickness human skin from fetuses was grafted onto rodents while simultaneously co engrafting the same fetuss lymphoid tissues and hematopoietic stem cells from the liver so that the rodent models were humanized with organs and skin from the same child These human Skin and Immune System hSIS humanized mouse and rat models are meant to aid the study of the immune system when the skin is infected To make the hSIS humanized rodent models full thickness fetal skin was taken from humans aborted at the gestational age of 18 to 20 weeks of pregnancy at the Magee Womens Hospital and the University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences Tissue Bank The mothers provided written consent for the fetuses to be used in research From the aborted fetuses thymus liver spleen and full thickness skin were transplanted and grafted onto the rodents and allowed to grow Then the rodent models were

Appendix B 82 Winter 2021 given a staph infection on the skin to study how the internal organs responded The human skin was taken from the scalp and the back of the fetuses so that grafts with and without hair could be compared in the rodent model Excess fat tissues attached to the subcutaneous layer of the skin was cut away and then the fetal skin was grafted over the rib cage of the rodent where its own skin had been removed The grafts lasted up to 10 weeks post transplantation Multiple layers of human keratinocytes and fibroblasts were observed in the grafts and the human skin grew blood vessels and immune cells Human hair was evident by 12 weeks but only in the grafts taken from the fetal scalps In the scalp grafts fine human hair can be seen growing long and dark surrounded by the short white hairs of the mouse The images literally show a patch of baby hair growing on a mouses back The work was funded by the National Institute of Health NIH and supported by the National Institutes of Health NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases NIAID the same branch that Moderna collaborates with for the Covid 19 vaccine Fetuses Used to Study Racial Differences in PBDE Exposure In July also in the journal Scientific Reports a team in the United States published their findings on racial differences in fetal exposure to flame retardants Polybrominated diphenyl ethers PBDEs are flame retardants and they are a public health concern because they interfere with hormone activity immune function and fetal brain development during pregnancy In North America high flammability standards correlate to high PBDE exposure especially in California where safety regulations are highest The fetus becomes exposed to PBDEs as the chemicals transfer through the placenta from the mother but since their liver cannot metabolize the chemicals as readily PBDEs collect in the developing child and continue to build in infancy and childhood all critical times for the development of the endocrine immune and neural systems To assess exposure in unborn children researchers at the University of California and the California Environmental Protection Agency conducted a study from 2008 to 2016 In four study waves they recruited a total of 249 women scheduled for a secondtrimester abortion The women gave written or verbal consent for their blood the placenta and the childs liver to be dissected from the dead body so scientists could make mother child comparisons of PBDE levels The authors note that until this study sample collection had been largely constrained to labor and delivery rather than earlier in gestation when the chemicals transfer and begin to build up during critical prenatal windows of vulnerability The work was funded by the U S Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute of Environmental Health Services All study protocols were approved by the University of California San Francisco UCSF institutional review board prior to recruitment of women scheduled for abortions The aborted children were collected by the clinical staff at the San Francisco General Hospital Womens Option Center

Winter 2021 83 The Human Life Review This is the largest study of its kind to date As expected fetal levels of PBDE were higher than that of the mothers The evidence also suggested that Black women may be disproportionately exposed to the chemicals in flame retardants The paper emphasized the need for further study of fetuses in this gestational range These second trimester fetuses essentially lived their short lives in utero as analytical machines and then were used to provide information to keep children living in society safe Fetal B Lymphocytes Used to Study Autoimmunity In July a team at Yale Universitys Department of Immunology reported in the journal Science on the development of immunities in newborns When bacteria and viruses attack the body it fights back by producing three types of white blood cells macrophages B lymphocytes and T lymphocytes It has been assumed due to competing biochemical mechanisms among lymphocytes that antibody production is limited in early fetal development leaving newborns vulnerable to infection However newborn blood samples show abundant auto antibodies To investigate this unexpected immunity the team at Yale dissected the bodies of aborted children to remove their liver bone marrow and spleen Then they collected B lymphocyte cells and produced hundreds of antibodies The 15 fetuses all of whom were aborted in the second trimester of pregnancy were obtained from the Birth Defects Research Laboratory at the University of Washington Blood bone marrow and stool samples from healthy adults were compared to assess antibody production and gut microbiota The study found that incomplete B lymphocyte tolerance mechanisms in fetuses favor the accumulation of similar cells that also have the properties to bind bacteria and promote colonization in the gut thereby encouraging an alternative development path for antibodies in newborns This work was funded again by the NIH a fellowship at Yale and Pew Charitable Trusts Biomedical Research Ought to Preserve Human Dignity In his encyclical Evangelium Vitae Pope St John Paul II declared that the use of human embryos or fetuses as an object of experimentation constitutes a crime against their dignity as human beings who have a right to the same respect owed to a child once born just as to every person 63 At a fundamental level life saving research ought to preserve human dignity The fetal specimens described in these scientific papers the children who were killed and dissected like the best kind of lab rats all deserved to be named and counted in the human family They were more than a statistic in a table of chemical exposure levels or a chart of PBDE levels across maternal placental fetal biological matrices or a chunk of scalp grafted grotesquely onto a rodent They were unwanted children who were killed by an industry that exploited them to make the lives of the wanted humans better Catholics have a duty to demand better from scientists

Author Name 84 Winter 2021 APPENDIX C David Mills is a senior editor of The Stream https stream org where the following column was published on January 14 2021 Reprinted with permission How Abortion Disappears Children A Lesson From Argentina David Mills It depends on who gets disappeared The grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo had worn white headscarves when they risked their lives to protest the Argentinian dictatorships disappearing of their grandchildren writes Ella Whelan in Spiked Argentinas pro choice movement chose as its symbol green scarves which she called a moving nod to those brave women The countrys legislation just approved abortion until the fetus is fourteen weeks old and in special conditions after that Public hospitals will provide abortions for free The worlds pro choice movement cheered A large nominally Catholic Latin American country had essentially chosen a liberal secular view of things over Christianitys The New York Times declared it a milestone in a conservative region A Milestone The generals who overthrew the government in 1976 with Americas support tried to suppress any opposition They didnt just harass or imprison dissenters They took them away and murdered them It was called the Dirty War Dropping them into the sea from airplanes was a method they enjoyed Their families never knew what happened to them or even knew if they were alive or dead The dictators acted brutally even for dictators The mothers and grandmothers in their white scarves risked their own lives to demand news of their children They kept it up for decades because even after the dictatorship fell the government hid the story The nations pro abortion movement chose green scarves to symbolize their demand that the legislature legalize abortion So a symbol that had represented courageous life risking resistance to taking unwanted people away became a symbol of a movement that advocates taking unwanted people away The major news sources left out the fact that the majority of Argentinians opposed the law It was less an expression of the popular will and more the effect of very organized focused movement A Libertarian Site Spiked is a libertarian site It was created by a once hard left academic named Frank Furedi Hed founded the Revolutionary Communist Party in the 1970s which was as batty as it sounds He drifted right over the last couple decades Furedis actually a very interesting sociologist The patriarch of conservative thinkers the late Roger Scruton has written admiringly of his writing Stream readers would appreciate and often agree with most of the sites articles It speaks up for liberty and denounces almost anything a government does to restrict it

Winter 2021 85 The Human Life Review But Furedi has a darker side Or rather a darker better half His wife Ann runs BPAS the euphemistically named British Pregnancy Advisory Service Its the British equivalent of Planned Parenthood and the major abortionist in Great Britain In her writing for Spiked she treats legal abortion as a necessity and a good Its an obvious easyto access solution for a crisis pregnancy she writes Her 2016 book The Moral Case for Abortion argues as sophisticated a case for terminating a pregnancy as youll find She sees the problem Denuded of a focus on values based on individual freedom she writes pro choice movements risk social engineering Furedi engages the objections though I dont think she sees their force the way she should She does treat the main objections as based on faith and doctrine which prochoicers use as a way of pushing the objections out of the debate Faith and doctrine mean sectarian It doesnt matter how many times pro life people note that we object to killing because its killing Furedi and Whelans Case Furedis case depends as such cases must on giving the pregnant woman a greater right to do what she wants than giving the unborn child a right to live Women do not have abortions to demonstrate their philosophy or to make a statement she writes in a recent article on Spiked These women avail themselves of a clinical procedure to end their pregnancy because they do not feel it is right to have a child To deny a woman access to a safe legal means of abortion is to cause her real harm Women need the right to abortion to have autonomy and self determination she writes in her book And that claim depends as it must on treating the unborn child as less fully human than his mother After telling how she explained to her four year old son that sheep dont know theyre going to be turned into a meal she writes Not all lives are the same and not all minds are the same It is human knowing about situations and ourselves that shapes our thoughts and feelings and fears and makes us the persons we are In her article Whelan argues that the new Argentinian law doesnt go far enough It still restricts abortion She has the same view as Furedi Legalising abortion only under certain conditions is always going to be a block on womens freedom she writes Decriminalising abortion on the other hand is the only way to grant women full autonomy over their bodies She wants the government to treat abortion like any other medical procedure That would grant women the ability to make full and free decisions about when and if they want to become mothers Disappearing Children And that is how you disappear children You just dont talk about them At least for long You depersonalize them un personize them as Furedi does Then as both Furedi and Whelan do you shift the conversation to the mother as if the unborn child was just something she had to deal with Its a medical problem that should be treated with a medical procedure In no substantial way different than a cyst

Appendix C 86 Winter 2021 or a tumor Finally as both writers do you do this to serve an abstract goal treated as an obvious necessity They dont need to ask who is being aborted Only the goal matters Freedom requires bodily autonomy which requires abortion That for them is that This is how despite its name Human Rights Watch can call the Argentine vote a gigantic victory that protects fundamental rights and will inspire change in Latin America Because the children who will lose their lives have been disappeared

Winter 2021 87 The Human Life Review APPENDIX D Madeleine Kearns is a staff writer for National Review The following article appears in the January 25 2021 print edition of the magazine Copyright 2021 by National Review Reprinted by permission Where the Disabled Have a Right to Be Born Madeleine Kearns Since Polands constitutional court outlawed eugenic abortion in October churches have been vandalized and tens of thousands have flouted social distancing rules to attend protests Liberal journalists in Europe and North America have been quick to complain about the shock and cruelty inflicted on Polish women by the Law and Justice Party which as one Guardian editorial alleged had acted at the behest of the most influential Catholic church in Europe As in the United States the stuff of memes and feminist fiction that old white male Jesus freaks are condemning women to reproductive slavery has inexhaustible virality the kind capable of preventing serious debate from ever occurring Though the Catholic Church in Poland is no stranger to opposition this brazen ferocity is new in one sense Even the Communists didnt disrupt our Masses explains one Pole who grew up in the 1950s under Soviet rule He is referring to the young women who storm into parishes at prayer and demand unlimited abortions Draped in Handmaids Tale inspired hoods they brandish posters that depict a red lightning bolt against a black silhouette of a woman Older Polish Catholics find the activists signage particularly unnerving because it resembles the double lightning bolt used by the Nazis and its colors recall those of Soviet symbols The young possess no such memories while the history they inherit is too often selective Take for instance the New York Times report that the banning of eugenic abortion signaled the hijacking of Polands judiciary and a chipping away at the hard won freedoms of the post communist era This is odd to say the least Even the quickest glance at world history would reveal that permissive abortion laws are a legacy not of post Communist free societies but of communism Lenin introduced abortion on demand in 1920 It was only after abortions in the Soviet Union began to outnumber live births that Stalin reversed this policy from the mid 1930s to the 1950s Cuba decriminalized abortion under Castro Vietnam has had abortion on demand since the 1960s The Chinese Communist Party coerced abortions through its one child policy which spurred a mass gendercide of unborn girls Now the CCPs primary targets are Uyghur women In June the Associated Press alerted the world to the grave humanrights abuses against Muslim minorities in China including forced abortions sterilizations and family detention camps where pregnant women have reportedly been beaten and kicked in the stomach In Poland abortion for social reasons i e any reason was not introduced until 1956 but the eugenic element began earlier under the Nazis who made it a serious offense to abort the offspring of Aryan women and encouraged abortions of the deformed the

Appendix D 88 Winter 2021 disabled Jews Gypsies and Poles These flagrantly discriminatory policies applied to individuals outside as well as inside the womb As early as 1939 Hitler implemented the T4 program in Germany which mandated the involuntary euthanasia of those deemed to have a life unworthy of life The disabled were rounded up and carted away from their families to be starved gassed or injected with poison in mercy killings Some brave doctors along with the Catholic Church openly protested The bishop of Mster Clemens August Graf von Galen made it clear that it was the duty of all Christians to oppose the taking of innocent human life even if that meant making the ultimate sacrifice themselves When Pope Francis compared eugenic abortion in the 21st century to Nazi atrocities the atheist biologist Richard Dawkins protested Abortion to avoid birth defects is not about eugenics Its about the avoidance of individual human suffering The moral philosopher Peter Singer has extended the same logic to justify selective infanticide for the disabled since their condition can pose a threat to the happiness of the parents and any other children they may have The Nazis saw the disabled as a threat to economic productivity and racial purity whereas Dawkins and Singer see them as a potential threat to personal and familial happiness Yet they arrive at the same disturbing conclusion The disabled owing to the difficulties they and others allegedly endure because of their existence are inferior hence disposable The most powerful voices against abortion for defects are not clergymen but the disabled and those who care for them On October 19 the High Court of England and Wales agreed to hear a challenge to the United Kingdoms abortion law which permits abortion at any time up to birth if there is a substantial risk of any disability The challenge is being led by Heidi Crowter a 25 year old with Down syndrome Appearing on a news show with her mother Crowter told the interviewer that she found the disparity in treatment deeply offensive When asked what she thought about the argument that it is the right of women to make the choice Heidis mom replied That really isnt the issue that were here for today It is about the discrimination In Britain a baby can be killed right up to the point of delivery even for conditions as manageable as Down syndrome club foot or cleft lip In 2013 a parliamentary inquiry found that most people representing the interests of the disabled thought that the policy contravened the spirit of anti discrimination law Sally Phillips an English actress comedian mother to a son with Down syndrome and campaigner with the disability rights charity Dont Screen Us Out has said Given advances in medical care and quality of life for people with Downs syndrome the different right to life is beginning to look not just dated but barbaric Polling consistently suggests that most people remain opposed to late term abortions Ultrasound technology has made the humanity of the unborn more difficult to deny the further one gets into the pregnancy Since most disability testing cannot be confirmed until at the earliest the second trimester this raises a question not Should the state permit abortion but more immediately Should the state permit the abortion of a baby because it is disabled The answer has consequences that go well beyond any individual If those with disabilities are targeted and killed before birth the relationship to society of the disabled who have already been born is also undermined With a diminished right

Winter 2021 89 The Human Life Review to life the very existence of the disabled becomes suspect The medical professions ethical standards are infected with eugenicist tendencies whereby abortion for disability becomes a best practice and mothers and families are pressured to devalue the worth of their child upon discovering that he or she has a disability Even proponents of legal abortion will admit that it is damaging for a mother to be encouraged to choose the death of her disabled unborn child The cover story of the November 2020 issue of The Atlantic written by Sarah Zhang brought this point home albeit indirectly In her heavily reported piece Zhang explored how prenatal testing for defects means that choice can feel like a burden She also noted that each choice whether to test for disability whether to abort or to keep the child puts you behind one demarcating line or another The result is that having a baby with the disease is no longer a simple misfortune because nothing could have been done Instead it can be seen as a failure of personal responsibility When given a diagnosis of disability parents who in the face of this news typically feel overwhelmed disappointed scared confused and ambivalent look to doctors for guidance But what happens when that guidance becomes skewed heavily in favor of abortion The numbers speak for themselves Last year 98 percent of legal abortions in Poland 1,074 of 1,110 were carried out for disability Across Europe prenatal testing means that people with Down syndrome are heading for extinction Moreover there is a subtle but significant difference between the moral reasoning required to justify abortion for an unwanted baby and that used to justify abortion for a disabled baby With an unwanted pregnancy the personhood of the unborn individual is denied not because of but in spite of him But in choosing abortion after being acquainted with a defining aspect of your childs biology the motivation is not I dont want a baby but rather I dont want this baby Similarly where communism debases human life equally fascism establishes a tyrannical hierarchy of worth Its understandable that many Poles having suffered the effects of both within living memory want neither Since the 1990s Polands struggle to protect democratic principles has been made all the more difficult by the lingering shape shifting influence of leftist ideology In 1993 a compromise was struck in which the permissive abortion laws of the Soviets were scrapped but exceptions were retained for fetal defects risks to the womans health and incest or rape Finally after a decades long political struggle the Constitutional Tribunal intervened last October ruling that abortion for disability does indeed violate the Polish constitution which guarantees equal dignity under the law The court also required greater state assistance for disabled people and their families In 2000 Pope John Paul II the Polish pope spoke on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Disabled Addressing an audience of disabled people and their families in St Peters Square he said that their presence reaffirmed that disability is not only a need but also and above all a stimulus and a plea a challenge to individual and collective selfishness an invitation to ever new forms of brotherhood and a questioning of those conceptions of life that are solely concerned with satisfaction appearances speed and efficiency

Appendix D 90 Winter 2021 As Karol Wojtyla Pope John Paul II had grown up under both Nazi and Soviet control and played a critical role in the Solidarity movement with which the Polish Catholic Church worked tirelessly to secure basic democratic freedoms for all He understood that the case against aborting the unwanted and the disabled was not about imposing Christian morality on others but rather about offering a humane vision of universal rights and protections He understood that the public defense of the right to life of the vulnerable would to be effective have to come from a nonpartisan laity acting in solidarity with all people of good will Leftist memes and sound bites about choice and compassion look shriveled and embarrassing when met with the kind and courageous advocacy of Heidi Crowter and her family As for the eugenicists their chilling arrogance cant help but slip in with the breeze If no one with Down syndrome had ever existed or ever would exist is that a terrible thing I dont know Laura Hercher a genetic counselor said to The Atlantic Why not ask this instead If no one had ever become a eugenicist or ever would would that be a terrible thing

Winter 2021 91 The Human Life Review APPENDIX E Matthew Hennessey is associate editorial page features editor at the Wall Street Journal The following article was published in the January 2021 issue of First Things firstthings com and is reprinted with the magazines permission Magdalena Matthew Hennessey Magdalena loves potatoes Doesnt matter what kind Red yellow Idaho Irish boiled baked or mashed French fried is best but shell eat potatoes any way you make them and any way you dress them up Magdalena loves potatoes so much shell even eat them with the skins on Not every kid can handle that Potatoes make Magdalena smile She loves them Its good that Magdalena loves potatoes because its good to love something in this life and the list of things she doesnt love at the moment is long She doesnt love loud noises or broken promises She doesnt love waiting Most people suffer from mild to moderate impatience but most people dont break down in tears and screaming when the shower takes a minute or two to warm up Magdalena doesnt love rice If she sees rice on her dinner plate shell flip the dish across the room But the main thing Magdalena doesnt love is laughter For Magdalena laughter is the worst sound in the world She panics and shrieks Its worse than nails on a chalkboard Its like a bad dream Laughter is the sound of Magdalenas nightmares This is a problem because her older sister is sixteen which in case you didnt know is the Age of Constant Giggling Magdalena is fourteen Her three younger siblings are also known to laugh from time to time It comes up and out of them suddenly the way laughter is supposed to during invigorating play or in involuntary response to an epic dad joke In our house when things are building toward laughter and Magdalena is around someone must intervene We do our best to co opt or redirect laughter before it starts because for her it is frightening It makes her crazy It makes her cry Its not that Magdalena has no sense of humor She can be quite funny herself when she wants to be She does a pitch perfect Kermit the Frog voice for instance but Im always careful not to laugh when I hear it I just smile I like that Mags I say It makes me want to laugh She squints her eyes in warning as if to say You better not This aversion to laughter is not normal a word I use with care because normal is considered unspeakable in our world Among those who love people with disabilities and special needs the guardians of propriety banned the word long ago insisting instead on defining all differences of learning and behavior in relation to the typical world What is normal after all But the invocation of normality in this case is justified and I must claim the privilege to use it as Magdalenas father that is to say as the father of someone with Down syndrome Its correct to say that her reaction to laughter is not normal Nor is it normal for

Appendix E 92 Winter 2021 parents to train teenagers not to laugh nor for people to suppress their natural urges because someone else in the house might pitch a hysterical fit It goes against every impulse In our neighbors houses nobody does this When our friends visit the way we tiptoe around laughter is viewed with uncharitable suspicion They are right It is abnormal So much of our life with Magdalena is not normal Im sensitive to the pain caused by the careless use of words that have aged out of acceptability I understand why inclusive language is the order of the day But normal is the right word here I need access to it Laughter is the sound that makes all the hard work and low pay of being a parent bearable Laughter is the undiluted happiness of children made manifest For parents laughter is a brief relief from the constant motion the many disturbances of the peace the frequent late nights and early mornings the ever present feeling that you are nothing but a grumpy lumpy old scold who doesnt want anyone around here to have any fun We have to laugh Its our only hope For fourteen years weve had counselors and therapists visiting us and trying to help Magdalena Weve done behavior charts and reward plans Weve tried ignoring the problem Weve tried talking it out and weve tried walking it out In a laboratory perhaps we could scientifically isolate the cause of Magdalenas issues identify a therapeutic plan of attack and neutralize them Then maybe things could go back to the way theyre supposed to be We could be a loose and laughing household We could experience what typical people typically call normality Alas we dont live in a laboratory We live in a family of seven people each with appetites each with moods Its often unruly occasionally chaotic We cant always have potatoes Sometimes we are going to have rice People are going to laugh Were not always sure that Down syndrome is the source of Magdalenas considerable challenges some of which youd call personality quirks in a person who doesnt have what she has Magdalena has obsessions Some of the people who come into her life become objects almost of worship Even long after they stop visiting she talks to them while shes talking to herself as she does while decompressing almost every day These one sided conversations if you heard them would strike you as repetitive They play in loops This is common behavior among people with Down syndrome Its typical One person who comes up regularly is a bus aide from the time before we pulled Magdalena out of school Shed drop everything to hang out with this person whom we havent seen since the bus people called the cops on Magdalena It was the second time Both times Mags had been on a crying and screaming jag that wouldnt let up So the bus driver and this person about whom Magdalena obsesses called the cops They came and took Magdalena to the hospital where the doctors determined that she wasnt sick or injured or in need of any medical assistance She had only been crying and couldnt stop I wasnt there so I dont know for sure but if I had to guess Id say someone on the bus was laughing If it sounds like an unnecessary cruelty to call the police on a little girl with Down syndrome because she has auditory sensory issues that are triggered by laughter or to suspend her from school three times because three suspensions is the only way to instigate

Winter 2021 93 The Human Life Review a bureaucratic process to get her transferred to the districts most special school bear in mind that the people who did those things were just doing their jobs They were following protocols They were sorry Mr Hennessey there was nothing else they could do It wasnt personal it was procedural If you wanted to be a wise guy you might even call it normal The second bus episode was the end of the road for us and the public schools so often portrayed as the normal option in a society that really cant figure out how to handle a kid like Magdalena We hold big grudges against everyone involved Magdalena doesnt Shed love to see them all again Magdalena eats her meals separately from her siblings It doesnt seem fair to ask them not to laugh or joke with each other at the table We want them to love their sister or learn to love her and its hard to feel affection for someone who tosses a plate full of food at you every time you laugh The first time you could forgive The fortieth time you might decide that Magdalena is not a nice person It would be a reasonable conclusion Though Magdalena can be hard to like she is easy enough to love I am her father We are her parents Our love is not contingent Well never know how much of what we observe about Magdalena should be chalked up to Down syndrome and how much is attributable to the song of her soul written by an all knowing all seeing God It can be hard to disaggregate this stuff Like her siblings Magdalena inherited habits and traits from her parents Some are weird Some are totally normal I love potatoes too

Author Name 94 Winter 2021 APPENDIX F Timothy Cardinal Dolan is the Archbishop of New York This column appeared on January 13 on the website of Catholic New York www cny org and is reprinted with the Cardinals permission Why We Catholics Are So Hung Up on Abortion Timothy Cardinal Dolan Why are you Catholics so hung up about abortion this rather well known political leader asked me Well let me tell you I happily replied For one thanks for acknowledging how urgent this matter is for us I dont mind at all agreeing with you we Catholics are hung up on abortion I went on Actually were obsessed with the dignity of the human person and the sacredness of all human life Yes the innocent helpless life of the baby in the womb but also the life of the death row prisoner the immigrant the fragile elderly the poor and the sick I wasnt done And its not just you Catholics who are very upset about the unfettered abortion on demand culture in which we live Most Americans of any religion or none at all report they are as well As a matter of fact this is not a uniquely Catholic issue at all but one of human rights We didnt learn that abortion was horrible in religion class but in biology and in our courses on the inalienable rights tradition in American history By now he probably regretted he had asked But on I went How can we sustain a culture that recoils at violence exclusion suicide racism injustice and callousness toward those in need if we applaud allow pay for and promote the destruction of the most helpless the baby in the womb Did I change his mind I doubt it Did I answer his questions as to why we are hung up on the civil rights of the baby in the sanctuary of her mothers womb I hope so All this comes to mind as we prepare to observe the somber anniversary of the tragic decision by the Supreme Court on Jan 22 1973 to allow abortion on demand Dont worry the pro abortionists reassured us forty eight years ago Youll learn to accept this We dread taking the life of the little infant in the womb too Abortion will be kept safe legal and rare It would be limited to the earliest weeks of pregnancy and only resorted to in extreme cases like the endangerment of the mothers life And wed never force people whose conscience disagrees with us to perform or pay for one So much for the reassurances We have hardly gotten used to it Abortion remains the hottest issue in our politics with polls showing that most Americans want restrictions on its unquestioned use and do not want their taxes to pay for it Now the pro abortionists no longer call abortion regrettable but celebrate it and brag about it No longer do they argue that the question about the viability of the fetus is one impossible to answer Readily do they admit its a baby Its just that for them the desire of another trumps the babys right to life

Winter 2021 95 The Human Life Review Rare Forget about it Now its an unfettered right at any time during the pregnancy up to and including the very birth with demands that sincere health care professionals whose consciences rebel at the grizzly procedure be forced to perform them that tax money pay for them that our foreign policy insists other countries promote them and that the freedom of employers who abhor them still offer insurance to cover them Were even more hung up now as our new president whom we wish well and who speaks with admirable sensitivity about protecting the rights of the weakest and most threatened ran on a platform avidly supporting this gruesome capital punishment for innocent pre born babies As Pope Francis observes We defend and promote all legitimate human rights But what use are they if the right of the baby to be born is violated Were all still cringing from the disturbing violence last week in Washington This upheaval was made the more nauseating as it was seemingly encouraged by the one sworn to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law and because it trashed the very edifice designed to be a sanctuary of safety reason civility and decorum the arena of our freedoms the U S Capitol President elect Biden was eloquent last week in reminding us that the rampage we saw was not America whose citizens are renowned for their decency observance of the law and the respect we show each other In the renewal and rededication that usually accompanies the inauguration of a new president can we hope that violence will subside that civil discourse will again become the norm for all sides that a respect for the sacredness of all life and the dignity of the human person will be revived and that the sanctuary of the womb will be offlimits to violent invasion

Author Name 96 Winter 2021 Congratulations to Supreme Knight Carl A Anderson On his Pro Life Legacy Award given by the March for Life 2021 President Ronald Reagan once encouraged us not to tire on what he called the Long March for Life From the first March for Life to this one every one of us has understood what Rev King meant by the arc of history We understand that it bends when people like you and me bend it Bend it toward justice Toward compassion Toward Life And what is more each of us way back from the beginning of the pro life movement has known we are on a lifetimes journey The direction of that journey does not bend It does not waver though sometimes it may slow down But in the end our pro life journey has a destination And that my friends is victory Remarks Virtual Rose Dinner Gala January 29 2021 Carl A Anderson

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