Public Discourse

Kermit Gosnell was not sentenced to life imprisonment for sloppiness, for insensitivity, for bad keepsakes, for a backed up drain, for fleas, or even for making women suffer. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering three babies.

It is neither the impossibility of writing clear laws nor our inability to witness abortion that stops us from making it illegal. Instead it is the will to kill for convenience that drives some people to sustain the fiction that human life begins at birth.

Kermit Gosnell has been the equivalent of the American slave-dealer—someone who has done work rendered absolutely necessary by the twisted laws of his regime, but who has nevertheless been ignored or regarded with unease, and even repulsion, by his fellow citizens.

We don’t need a new resolution from Congress to address the wrongs of clinics like Kermit Gosnell’s—the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act already serves that purpose, and we should restore the civil penalties originally attached to it.

The Gosnell case shows us that a society’s laws teach, and if they teach a lesson of injustice they will corrupt its people over time. Indeed, contemporary abortion jurisprudence undermines the very notion of natural rights and constitutional government.

President Obama’s recent address to Planned Parenthood’s National Conference sweepingly mischaracterized abortion restrictions and pro-life views as culturally inaccurate and outdated.

A new documentary on late-term abortion providers shows us that the abortion debate is much more about why life is valuable than about when human life begins.

When intellectual arguments against abortion fail to persuade, recourse must be had to images and strategies that awake what David Hume considered our “moral sense.”

True doctors and abortionists are different kinds of persons because they perform different acts as they carry out different proposals: the one, a proposal to remove a non-viable child to save the mother; the other, to kill that child for the mother’s benefit.

Radical pro-choice rhetoric attacks the most basic facts of our human existence: that the human body comes in two different but complementary types, male and female. They cannot forgive women who embrace femininity rather than neuter themselves.

Pro-lifers and pro-choicers alike should consider a constitutional amendment that would allow, but not require, states to ban abortion in the second trimester.

As we recognize the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, pro-lifers should consider supporting a constitutional amendment to abolish abortion forty years from now.

The Roe Court’s suppression of a foundational question—who is the law for—means that the decision could be overturned by any of several feticide cases that could reach the current Court.

Pro-lifers need to better understand the history of the pro-life movement and what Roe did to it.

Forty years after Roe v. Wade, the promise that legal abortion would guarantee fewer out-of-wedlock births, less child abuse, and lower crime rates remains unfulfilled.

A feminism that promotes abortion as the key to women’s freedom does not help us flourish, preserve our dignity, or protect us from evils. We must support women so that the “choice” between life and abortion is no longer difficult because life is the natural choice.

Witness to the truth matters for its own sake, but persistent, winsome witness also tends to bear good fruit, even if it takes 40 years and counting.

A recent argument that abortion providers deserve the same legal protection as pro-life medical providers is philosophically flawed and ignores legal and popular consensus on the evil of abortion.

Two points can best persuade young people about abortion: our need for laws that protect the weak and vulnerable and the deadening of conscience that often accompanies pro-choice sentiment.

By discarding its support for life, marriage, and religious freedom, the GOP, contrary to what some party members think, will doom itself to minority status.

From the beginning of its existence a human being is always already a person because personhood belongs to it essentially as an instance of that natural kind. The second of a two-part series.

Pro-choice philosophers err in their criticism of the pro-life position because they do not understand potentiality in terms of a being’s essential properties. The first of a two-part series.

Richard Mourdock’s comment didn’t imply that God wills rape; instead, it reminds us that God wills a great good in the coming-to-be of any human life, regardless of the evil circumstances surrounding its conception.

A pilot program in New York City to give minors emergency contraception in school without telling their parents is an ineffective response to a non-existent “epidemic” of teen pregnancy.

A recent address encouraging Democrats for Life to re-elect President Obama is marked by flawed reasoning and misleading statistics.

Rape is tragic, awful, horrible, gut-wrenching—an unspeakable crime of great emotional harm—but rape is essentially irrelevant to the morality of abortion.

Criticism that Republican justices have only hurt the pro-life cause is misguided, because Republican presidents from Reagan onward have deliberately tried to advance judicial conservatism through federal court appointees—a commitment that has brought victories both for judicial conservatism and the pro-life cause. The second of a two part series.

Legalized, unrestricted abortion can’t be blamed on conservative judicial policy just because Republican justices voted for it. Judicial conservatism as we now understand it came after Roe. The first of a two-part series.

Ellen McCormack’s 1976 presidential campaign offers today’s pro-lifers a valuable example of incrementalist strategy.

Calling fetuses defective if they are prenatally diagnosed with genetic conditions foreshadows a dangerous path toward eugenics.

A faulty understanding of conscience as an instrument of subjective preferences and feelings is fueling efforts to undermine conscience protection for doctors who oppose abortion and provision of contraceptives.

Since Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the pro-life movement’s incremental strategies—strengthening parental consent laws, advancing legal protection on the basis of fetal pain, and defunding Planned Parenthood—give us reason to be optimistic about the future of the pro-life movement.

The lesson of Casey is that the nomination and confirmation of judges with a sound judicial philosophy is an essential foundation stone of a culture of life.

Casey is not a sound exposition of the Constitution, and its authority should be repudiated by all other actors in our constitutional system The second in a two-part series on the deadly significance of Planned Parenthood v. Casey

In its effects, methodology, substantive doctrine, conception of the judicial role and of judicial authority, and conception of what constitutes the rule of law, Casey is terribly significant and terribly wrong. The first in a two-part series on the deadly significance of Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Unlike civil rights advocates of the 1960s, pro-life and pro-choice activists can be ambivalent about their causes because they are torn between their reason and their sentiments.

We should pass Unborn Child Protection Acts and begin the conversation about the pain of the unborn.

The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act does not deserve the support of the public because it is unconstitutional and represents poor public policy.

National Down syndrome organizations should partner with medical organizations and testing laboratories that develop and profit from prenatal testing even while they fight for their accountability.

If advocacy efforts surrounding prenatal diagnosis focus only on the goal of informed decision-making, and the majority of even well-informed parents still decide to terminate, can we really deem that advocacy successful?

The libertarian commitment to free markets and limited government is best preserved within a broader conservative context.

In her memoir, long-time abortionist Merle Hoffman wages a war against nature’s decree that only women can keep the human race going by bearing children.

All citizens should support Pain-Capable Child Protection Acts because the unborn can feel pain prior to birth, and laws protecting them from pain are constitutional.

Social activists opposed to the use of HEK-293—a kidney cell line derived from an aborted baby—in PepsiCo products should not respond with shareholder activism, because it wreaks political and economic havoc.

The Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (CIANA) isn’t "mean-spirited," "constitutionally suspect," or "callous." It is a popular commonsense proposal that is fully constitutional.

Unless regulations and laws are changed, there will be fewer people with Down syndrome to celebrate on future World Down Syndrome Days, making this year the high water mark of lives with Down syndrome.

Whether we call it infanticide or after-birth abortion, ending the life of newborns kills human beings who are moral persons because they are rational beings.

The challenge in preventing abortion of Down syndrome fetuses is not convincing mothers that their child is a human being with a right to life, but of assuring expectant mothers there will be support for their children after they are born.

If marriage is to be preserved in the present struggle, our task is to sort through the influential kinds of arguments about same-sex marriage and abortion that have been introduced by Justice Kennedy.

No one can be rightly coerced by the state to be directly complicit in the commission of a wrong. This goes for any businessman, employer, insurance company, or individual, regardless of faith.