fbpx
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Pillar

The Human Person

The first pillar of a decent society is respect for the human person, which recognizes that all individual human beings have dignity simply because of the kind of being they are: animals whose rational faculties allow them to know, love, reason, and communicate. It also recognizes that human beings are persons, members of the human family who flourish in a community that respects their fundamental rights and who long to discover transcendent truths about the nature of reality.

John Henry Newman, Ida Görres, and the Power of Hagiography: An Interview with Jennifer Bryson

By and
Read More

Learn more about the Human Person: get your free eBook today!

Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
Public Discourse

Michel Houellebecq and the Islamist Future of Europe

By
A best-selling new novel taps into an angst that has become an obsession in Europe.
Public Discourse

Commercial Surrogacy: Stop It or Just Regulate It?

By
When motherhood becomes a mere avenue to a paycheck, both the woman and the child she carries are wronged. Surrogacy undermines the dignity of both women and children.
Public Discourse

Mind the Gap: Neuroscience, Transhumanism, and Human Nature

By
Before we rush to embrace transhumanism, it is crucial to ask what it means to be human.
Public Discourse

Ultrasounds and Ultimate Moral Choices

By
By pointing out the ways in which prenatal ultrasound alters our fundamental familial relationships, philosopher Peter-Paul Verbeek makes us more aware of its moral effects.
Public Discourse

Medicine, Health, and Sexual Liberation: Friends or Foes?

By
It is a grave mistake to distort medicine for ideological purposes.
Public Discourse

The Public Case against Human Cloning

By
A new report from the Witherspoon Council on Ethics and the Integrity of Science forcefully makes the case against all forms of human cloning. Below is an excerpt from the report on the moral case against cloning-to-produce-children and cloning-for-biomedical research.
Public Discourse

On Abortion, Medical Science is Still Waiting to be Heard

By
Judicial overreach and badly flawed constitutional reasoning were not the worst offenses committed by the Roe court. Far worse was its contempt for facts and truth, which left a cultural wound that continues to fester.
Public Discourse

Keeping the Spotlight on Planned Parenthood

By
Do not be distracted by misdirection. Do not let the horror of abortion be the main issue. Stick to the pertinent facts: Planned Parenthood is profiting from the sale of fetal parts. Planned Parenthood is routinely violating federal law. Planned Parenthood does not care about women.
Public Discourse

Joys, Struggles, and Scare Tactics: On Down Syndrome and Abortion

By
It’s tempting to make neat calculations based on what we know in the abstract about Down syndrome. But once an actual child enters into the equation—with all of his strengths and foibles, quirks and habits—we don’t get the answer we expected at all.
Public Discourse

Assisted Suicide and Our Society of Autonomy

By
The individualism required by a society of autonomy shuts down love, dependence, and self-sacrifice. To extinguish grief, we are told, we must extinguish the grieving.
Public Discourse

Give Me Liberty and Give Me Death: Belgium’s Brave New Euthanasia Regime

By
Belgium has the most permissive euthanasia laws in the world, and one of every twenty deaths in Belgium is now deliberately caused. Suicide is becoming a moral obligation in a culture that promotes euthanasia as a dignified exit that offers relief to caregivers.
Public Discourse

Is Lying Ever Justified?

By
A new book powerfully examines the most important questions surrounding lying and argues that to assert falsely is to commit an act of self-induced practical schizophrenia.
Public Discourse

Why the “Catholic” “Pro-Life” Case for the Bomb Fails

By
No one who claims to be pro-life can say that women, children, the elderly, and indeed, the unborn of a nation may be legitimately targeted with death for the sake of the consequences, however beneficial.
Public Discourse

Marco Rubio Is Right: The Life of a New Human Being Begins at Conception

By , and
Senator Rubio is on the firmest possible scientific ground when he says that science shows that the child in the womb, from the very point of successful fertilization, is indeed a human being.
Public Discourse

For Baby, #AnotherBoy, and Millions More: Why I’m Speaking Out about Miscarriage and Abortion

By
Having carried life in my womb, I cannot look away. I cannot cloak reality in another name: early pregnancy loss is death, and willful termination is killing.
Public Discourse

Planned Inhumanities: From Roe to Obergefell

By
Consider the intellectual consequences of the foundational belief that humanity can be “planned.” Such a belief means that humans can be edited and arranged; it makes children into objects rather than subjects.
Public Discourse

The Dark Side of Third-Party Reproduction

By
Third-party reproduction is pitched as a victory for all, a vehicle for creating beautiful families. But the process requires enticing marginalized women to undergo harmful procedures. Moreover, children are created, with no regard for the rights that other children enjoy, to satisfy the desires of wealthy adults.
Public Discourse

Rethinking the Conservative Approach to Transgenderism

By
Conservatives do not take the introspective reports of transgendered people seriously, but there are good scientific reasons for supposing that subjective experience of gender is legitimate, even when it contradicts apparent biological sex.
Public Discourse

Surrogacy and Same-Sex Marriage: A Tale of Two Countries

By
As skeptics in Ireland feared and the naïve in the United States are now realizing, “marriage equality” inevitably leads to the push for “family equality” through third-party reproduction.
Public Discourse

The Case of the Pro-Life Movement: On Demography and Marriage

By
The future of marriage in the United States may look grim, but so did the pro-life cause look forty years ago. Embattled social conservatives should find hope in the demographic shifts that trailed the legalization of abortion.
Public Discourse

Transgenderism: A Pathogenic Meme

By
The idea that one’s sex is a feeling, not a fact, has permeated our culture and is leaving casualties in its wake. Gender dysphoria should be treated with psychotherapy, not surgery.
Public Discourse

An African-American Woman Reflects on the Transgender Movement

By
Supporters of transgender ideology believe that they are freeing people from restrictive understandings of gender. In reality, the more our society tries to free itself from gender stereotypes, the more it becomes enslaved to them. By saying that people can be born in a body of the wrong gender, transgender activists are saying there is a set of feelings that are only allocated to women and another set for men.
Public Discourse

Are We Ready for an Honest Conversation about Abortion?

By
If we really are pro-women, and if we really want a cultural conversation on abortion, we owe it to post-abortive women to say, “You are not alone, and you deserve healing.”
Public Discourse

Stop Surrogacy Now: Why We Must Unite

By
None of us can stop surrogacy on our own. I’m pro-choice and support extending legal marriage to include same-sex couples, but I know that if we are to succeed in ending the exploitation and abuse that comes with surrogacy, we must work with others with whom we may have vehement disagreements.
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Public Discourse © 2025 | All Rights Reserved

Get your free eBook for The Human Person

"*" indicates required fields

Get your free eBook for Sexuality & Family

Get your free eBook for Politics & Law

Get your free eBook for Education & Culture

Get your free eBook for Business & Economics