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Tearing Us Apart is just the book we need: it understands and works within our current rhetorical and political impulses. Unfortunately, it is silent on specific policies to address how to reduce abortion demand. Nonetheless, with pro-life leaders like Anderson and DeSanctis at the helm, we have every reason to believe that the future of our movement will be guided, not by ideology, but by what will best serve the good of babies, women, and families.
An important new study finds that the informed-consent process that governs “transitioning” is too often more of a box-checking exercise than a serious discussion and deliberation. The study concludes that clinicians in the rapidly growing transgender industry have gone beyond simple negligence or incompetence; instead, they are engaging in demonstrably unethical practices.
In vitro fertilization is likely more threatening to unborn life than abortion. The pro-life movement needs to recognize this reality and form a coherent post-Roe strategy for addressing both abortion and life-negating reproductive technologies.
From the whimsical to the obscure to the most dry-as-dust earnestness, reference books represent our impulse—perhaps our need—to organize the world around us, and even the worlds inside our heads, into some form of order and sharper understanding.
Matthew Continetti’s new book offers an authoritative account of the complex interplay between conservative ideas, politics, and policy over the past century. His telling of conservative history suggests that if we want to know the movement’s future, we should first look to its past.
Administrative rules don’t require broad consensus, so they don’t enjoy the benefits of a diverse group’s deliberations. Instead, they reflect the will of the president or administrators. It falls to the Supreme Court to defend Congress’s authority to legislate against the encroachment of the administrative state. Thankfully, the Supreme Court recently did just this in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency.
Though often unconventional and concerned with ideas outside the mainstream of contemporary political conversations, Michael Oakeshott’s reflections on politics and human conduct continue to provide a profound and humane source of inspiration for western liberalism. In an age in which freedom and individuality are increasingly under threat, his vision of a flourishing human life—discovering and developing individual character in the midst of traditional practices—remains more relevant and necessary than ever.
The prevailing zeitgeist of American medical education is an almost complete and unthinking acceptance of a “woke” mentality. The demonstrations at academic medical centers and medical schools throughout the United States following George Floyd’s killing led to widespread declarations of the need to purge “systemic racism” from American medicine and to adopt “antiracism” as a dominant aspect of the medical ethos.
Genuine cases of conflict between maternal and fetal health raise difficult moral questions, but a necessary starting point is to affirm both that physicians must honor their commitment to the mother’s health and that the law’s just protection of unborn human life should not interfere with that responsibility.
In Carson v. Makin, the Supreme Court held that Maine’s exclusion of faith-based schools from a tuition assistance program for students in rural districts violated the Free Exercise Clause. The case, which is in many ways the culmination of a battle for equal treatment of faith-based schools spanning more than a century and a half, has significant implications for education policy.
The right to the pursuit of happiness is coherent only in the full theological context of the Declaration of Independence.
With the overturning of Roe, if we do not take a serious accounting of our approach to disabled lives outside the womb, we stand a huge chance that the lives of unborn disabled children will remain a viable bargaining chip in state legislatures across the country.
Joseph Raz, the master of analytic philosophy of law who died in London last month, argued that law and policy should reflect a vision of the human good, with the good of personal autonomy—enabling people to be “authors of their own lives”—at its heart. He was a true philosopher, a truth-seeker: he had convictions, but he never sought to immunize them against criticism, nor did he allow himself to fall so deeply in love with his opinions that he valued them above truth itself.
Dobbs may be the most important, magnificent, rightly decided Supreme Court case of all time. It is restorative of constitutional principle. It upholds the values of representative, democratic self-government, and the rule of law, at the same time that it supports the protection of fundamental human rights. It is literally a matter of life and death. It is potentially transformative of American society, for the better. It is a rare act of judicial courage and principle. In every way, Dobbs is a truly great decision.
The past half century has seen the breakdown of institutional Christianity on which Jacques Maritain’s political project relied. Nonetheless, the limits of his thought do not vitiate the valuable insights Maritain offers for Christian politics in the twenty-first century. He reminds us that politics is about how to order our life together, not just creating ideals or defeating our enemies. He teaches us that we can order a society toward the temporal truths of Christianity, but that the temporal power of the state is no substitute for the spiritual power of the faith.
Examining the bodily autonomy argument for abortion highlights a crucial pro-life point: abortion is wrong not only because strangers shouldn’t kill each other but also and especially because parents have special obligations to their children, and it isn’t governmental overreach to require parents to fulfill those obligations.
If a post-Roe future is defined by even deeper divisions and bare-knuckle election politics, and not by a cultural shift in our thinking about how to not only protect innocent life but to support the parents who give and nurture that life, then we will have failed—again.
Beauty, properly understood, offers us a way of self-transcendence. Beauty leads us to participate in a truth that’s bigger than us. When we learn to participate in that beauty, we experience joy, and in some ways experience the true meaning of freedom.
Today, Jacques Maritain’s optimistic vision of Christian liberalism is often contested or dismissed as outdated, but a revival of his emphasis on Christian participation in society and politics is urgently needed—and is in many ways already in evidence in Christian political activity in America.
While some legal scholars have criticized the recently leaked draft Dobbs majority opinion on the basis that it is not originalist, they are overlooking two important points—originalism contains a place for stare decisis (i.e., legal precedent) and American constitutional practice is currently an eclectic mix of originalist and nonoriginalist aspects.
Finding time to read is always challenging, particularly within the context of being a new parent. Instead of conventional, and often ineffectual, time management strategies, we might consider some alternative principles to help incorporate reading into our busy lives: ritualistic reading, whimsical reading, and even acknowledging the value of not reading.
The contemporary distinction between sex and gender downgrades human beings to “biological” males or females with detached “identities.” We should reject this, and insist instead that sexual difference is a fundamental component of personality, one of its modes of being.
Metamorphosis—changing into something you’re not—used to be seen as a damaging ordeal, but it is now depicted in many children’s books as an achievement to be celebrated. To guide children away from such destructive messages, parents can turn to the wisdom of old books that promote traditional accounts of selfhood.
A Minnesota law professor’s attack on the draft Dobbs opinion seems based more on desperation than scholarship. This and other misguided efforts to demonize critics of Roe need to be refuted so we can focus our attention on the real issue of the ugly realities of abortion.