“You have raised the ethical question,” wrote William Buckley to J.P. Mc- Fadden in 1980, “whether we have sublimated privacy into the license to take life. I cannot imagine that anyone is engaged in a sustained endeavor of moral introspection more important than yours; nor conceive of anyone who might have done it better.”

Buckley’s “Letter from a Friend” (page 10) was occasioned by the Human Life Review’s fifth anniversary. This special double issue, packed with timely new articles as well as archival standouts (including co-founder Faith Abbott McFadden’s inimitable “Ghosts on the Great Lawn”), celebrates fifty years of continuous publishing.

Our longtime senior editors Ellen Wilson Fielding, William Murchison, and Mary Meehan are also here; Ellen and Bill follow Buckley’s letter with keen prescriptions for addressing the moral mayhem of the Roe era, which the Dobbs decision has clearly intensified. Mary has hung up her investigative hat, but her signature 1986 report, “On the Road with the Rescue Move- ment,” brings history and context to a special section focused on peaceful pro-life protestors currently serving long prison sentences for engaging in Martin Luther King-style civil disobedience.

Jim McFadden was felled by cancer the day after he sent the Fall 1998 issue to the printer. But his plucky voice animates nearly 100 introductions he wrote for the Review, which he hoped would outlive him. In his daughter Maria Maffucci’s capable hands it has—in fact Maria has been editor (since 2020 editor in chief) longer than Jim was. For this anniversary edition, in- stead of nutshell descriptions of featured articles—an impossible task given the amount of material we have gathered here—I chose to tap some of Jim and Maria’s earlier introductions for perspective on both the Review’s founding and its progress through the past five decades.

As you will see, the quotes that make up the following retro-duction not only do that but also aptly describe the job we are doing today. The vision Jim had of a journal that would vigorously uphold the West’s eroding sanctity of human life ethic and the formula he devised for implementing it (“run any piece—new, old, already printed elsewhere—we thought we ought to publish”) are as apparent in this issue as they were in the first one, and have earned the Review unqualified respect and loyal readership.

Yet over the years, as the once-startling 1973 abortion ruling gave rise to a “respectable” status quo, and a couple of generations grew up under its sway, a “nagging” question has confronted the editors: Are we fighting a lost cause? Malcolm Muggeridge, the esteemed British journalist and one-time Review editor at large, believed the only causes worth fighting for were the lost ones. “That wry paradox,” Jim wrote in1995, “is not dismaying . . . you can’t lose a lost cause, whereas defeat can be turned into victory.”

So while our culture is determined to keep abortion in its toolbox, callously trading duty for self-interest and truth for self-delusion, the Review’s “counter-revolutionaries,” as Jim dubbed us, stubbornly—even stoically— continue to defend life with reasoned argument and civil discourse. The “endeavor of moral introspection” which he undertook and Maria sustains has produced a 50-year-old archive that indeed attests to a broad societal “license to take life”: the embryo in the petri dish, the baby in the womb, the disabled who cannot speak or reason, the elderly and/or sick, pressured into seeking a quick exit from a life grown burdensome either to themselves or, perhaps more often, to others.

This tangible, enduring record is the Review’s raison d’etre. People will one day come to their senses about abortion and euthanasia, just as they did two centuries ago about slavery. Fifty, one hundred years from now, they will be astonished by the perversion our culture now salutes in the name of “choice” and “human rights.” And repulsed by it. And they will see that while those who championed wanton killing prevailed for decades, at the same time there were other voices—passionate, eloquent, persistent—who called out the madness, in the public square and in the pages of the Human Life Review.