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Pillar

Sexuality & Family

The second pillar of a decent society is the institution of the family, which is built upon the comprehensive sexual union of man and woman. No other institution can top the family’s ability to transmit what is pivotal—character formation, values, virtues, and enduring love—to each new generation.

A Look Inside the Endometriosis Epidemic  

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married couple

The Mystery of Marriage

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A religious attitude, even if only a general one, is essential to marriage; it is therefore no surprise that marriage is declining in the West as religiosity declines.
child at doctor's office

Evidence over Ideology: Gender-Distressed Children Deserve Nothing Less

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When it comes to children’s health, ideology should never override evidence. Children who are distressed about their biological sex need evidence-based care that facilitates their journey to adulthood, keeping them mentally and physically intact.
IVF

An IVF Primer 

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These essays are not provided out of callousness or a lack of empathy, but if we are to be responsible, we must be well-informed so that we can judge and choose in keeping with the truth of things.
mother and baby

Loving Both Mother and Child: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Case for a Maternal, Pro-Life Feminism

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We must love mother and child alike: there is no other path to true “reproductive justice.” 
family

Reflections on Israel’s Exceptional Fertility

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The enduring source of the Children of Israel’s exceptional, future-oriented natalism is their intense, equally exceptional rootedness in their shared past.
all gender restroom

Load-Bearing Walls: How Denying Biological Reality Harms Us All

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Man-made positive laws should follow the laws of nature. Americans cannot bear the load of the government’s latest attempt to defy reality. And the courts should ensure that we won’t have to.
married couple

Why Sex Matters

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Sex, while personal, isn’t private. Another person is involved, so it’s of interest to society and the state, as are children and family. The whole human dynamic, all of it, wouldn’t exist without people—to state the obvious—and the decline of marriage and fertility affects the future of everything and everyone.
babies

The Pronatalism of Silicon Valley

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The pro-family approach recognizes that marriage and family formation are the basis for overcoming the birth dearth in the United States. By encouraging family formation, we ensure that children are born into environments where they are most likely to thrive and nurture their own love for children.
expectant couple

What’s Natural (in Family Planning) Is New Again

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Women are increasingly embracing the reality that their cycles are beautiful, powerful, and healthy. This is truly, authentically, and enduringly empowering. 
ethics advice column

Ask Chris Tollefsen: An Ethics Advice Column

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All three questions raise many more issues than I’ve been able to address, and I thank my writers for their rich and thought-provoking submissions.
mother and child

What Are Children For? A Q&A with Rachel Wiseman and Anastasia Berg

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Religious conservatives should be open to the idea that progressives and liberals might be able to take their own path and still find some common ground on the essential question of the goodness of human life.
premature baby

What is an “Artificial Womb”? A Response to Katy Faust and Samantha Stephenson

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It is vital that physicians and patients alike demand that bedrock concepts of the human experience like birth remain clearly defined and our most vulnerable patients remain protected. To that end, we must be clear-eyed about the unique ethical challenges that AAPT will pose.
homemaking

When We Outsource Every Hard Thing, What Do We Lose?

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Popular culture tells us it is often more efficient to outsource routine household tasks than do them yourself. This leaves an important question unanswered, however: efficient at what? 
The Vatican

Sexual Morality, Pope Francis, and Ascetic Christianity

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Because of our fallen and finite nature, we are all burdened with the impediment of concupiscence. But we are not victims or helpless creatures determined in our actions by the imperatives of biology.
mother and baby

Giving until It Hurts: Helping Mothers Love

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The way to foster a loving bond between mother and child is to nurture a wider culture of support and love. It is not fair to children to deprive them of their mother’s womb for their life before birth. But it is also not fair to mothers to deprive them of the support they need to make pregnancy and motherhood bearable. 
father and son

Boys to Men

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These are formidable challenges. But to fully meet them we first need to know what a man is, not just an “adult male of the human species,” but a real man, a “man in full,” a gentleman. It turns out this is a most interesting question to explore—and not an easy one to answer.
abortion pill

Women Deserve to Know They Can Reverse In-Progress Chemical Abortions

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Abortion pill reversal is a potent reminder to those who profit from abortion that, if given the option, many pregnant mothers want assistance that will help them choose life.
pregnant woman

Three Abortion Stories for a Post-Dobbs America

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Dear reader, as you step away from my story, I have two requests: first, believe women when they tell you about sexual violence. And second, recognize that abortion coercion is real. 
baby feet

Artificial Wombs, Artificial Love

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When we reject suffering and seek to replace it with artificiality, we miss our invitation to submit to the conditions under which love flourishes. We also lose sight of the meaning and purpose of our existence, which is not to pursue our own comfort and convenience, but to love God and our neighbor, even when that involves sacrifice and hardship.
crib

The Cultural Roots of Our Demographic Ennui

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To get us out of the self-consuming ouroboros of frantically chasing experiences rather than investing in home and relationships will require a greater attention to virtues of thrift, local commitment, and a lower bar for what “living comfortably” looks like. Choosing to do hard things—to start a family, have kids, invest in local institutions, and put others before ourselves—requires a formation in values that lie outside the market. 
ethics advice column

Ask Chris Tollefsen: An Ethics Advice Column

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Indeed, a person in such a crisis seems like he or she has a deep need for truthful communication. Once more, not every truth needs to be communicated. But the important truths that they are loved, that their life is of value, and that they have much to live for, can only be convincingly imparted by one whose trustworthiness is manifested by his or her unwillingness to speak falsely. The beginning of a clinical relationship seems to me precisely the wrong time to lead by saying what one thinks is false.
free-range children

Free-Range Kids and the Parental Compass

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Constant supervision thwarts a child’s ability to develop important qualities such as resourcefulness, self-awareness, and perseverance. But independence with a strong inner compass, a compass that is oriented toward the safety and trustworthiness of healthy family relationships, helps children eventually carry that attached compass away from home and eventually calibrate it for themselves.
risk

Building Resilience in a High-Risk World

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Risks are essential to human flourishing. By taking measured risks—to our sanity, our financial stability, our perceived safety—we explore the limits of our ability to withstand discomfort, a posture that then allows us to care for others. In this way, well-ordered risk-taking is fundamentally others-oriented.
Family and children

What Makes America Family Unfriendly? A Q&A with Tim Carney

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The belief that childrearing is prohibitively expensive could be understood as a fruit of our collapsing civil society. Some people today don’t even consider that extended family, neighbors, churches, and other little platoons can, at least theoretically, provide real support to parents. They fall into believing that the only places to turn for help are the market and the state. Parents without community support then shift more burden onto themselves.

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