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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.

It’s Time for American Elites to Rediscover Human Nature: Lessons from United States v. Skrmetti

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Public Discourse

Intention, Choice, and the Right to Life: A Response to Nigel Biggar

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“Intention” and “choice” are complex concepts, but we must achieve clarity about them in order to protect human life and upright willing, as we should never choose to damage or destroy human life by intentionally killing a person.
Public Discourse

Who is Ayaan Hirsi Ali?

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has based her conclusions on her own and other Muslim women’s experiences of trauma and torture, forces us to confront uncomfortable facts. Brandeis’s treatment of Ali represents a troubling trend that limits freedom of speech on college and university campuses.
Public Discourse

Ayaan Hirsi Ali & Brandeis University: A View from Campus

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Civic freedoms come hand-in-hand with responsibilities. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has the right to criticize Islam, but she fails to fulfill her responsibility to do so without resorting to sensationalism and overgeneralizations.
Public Discourse

Health Regulations and Roe: The Fifth Circuit got it Right in Planned Parenthood v. Abbott

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In staying out of the legislative fray, the Fifth Circuit humbly recognized the limits of its due process jurisdiction. Now it’s up to the Supreme Court to do the same.
Public Discourse

Abortifacients, Emergency Contraception, and Terminating Pregnancy

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If there is any plausible reason to believe that emergency contraceptives cause—even occasionally—the death of embryo, then they are morally equivalent to abortifacients.
Public Discourse

Conscience and the Moral Status of the Fetus

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The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists claims that mothers and doctors have a moral obligation to take care of fetuses—unless they want to terminate them.
Public Discourse

Lady Edith and Pregnancy Dilemmas

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For many men and women, the multi-faceted realities of pregnancy pose complex questions about moral responsibility that defy rigid characterizations.
Public Discourse

“Is This the Upshot of Your Experiment?” Hawthorne and Bioethics

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By revealing the agonizing human cost of scientific obsession, Hawthorne reminds his reader that potential good must never override basic consideration of one’s fellow man.
Public Discourse

If a Company Can Be African American, Can’t It Be Religious?

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A business owner brings his values and his entire self—his faith no less than his race—to his daily work. The government shouldn’t force him to violate his conscience.
Public Discourse

We Are Not Just Our DNA: The Ethical Dangers of Three-Parent Embryos

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The creation of three-parent embryos is not an innocuous medical treatment—it is a macabre form of eugenic human cloning.
Public Discourse

Stanford, Marriage and Abortion Controversies, and the Mission of a University

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Trying to silence others because one fears what they might say is no way to learn. And it is no way for a university to be a university.
Public Discourse

Lady Edith and Abortion Rights

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For many women, the social, practical, and personal reasons for having an abortion simply trump the life of their child.
Public Discourse

The Culture of Dishonesty: Abortion, Divorce, and Obamacare

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Americans’ acceptance of President Obama’s lies reveals how dangerously comfortable we have become with dishonesty. It will take a profound renovation of our culture to restore truthfulness to its proper place and establish political freedom on a more secure foundation.
Public Discourse

Dorothy, We’re Not in Kansas Any More

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Legislative battles are heating up across the United States on the issues of surrogacy contracts and the regulation of assisted reproduction. If we are truly concerned for the welfare of women and children, we must oppose such practices.
Public Discourse

What’s at Stake at the Bakery: How Property Rights Got Sexy

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State lawmakers should make it clear that religious and moral reasons are rational and legitimate, and that property owners may act or refrain from action in obedience to conscience.
Public Discourse

The Rights of Children: Biology Matters

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Every child has a right to be loved by his or her biological parents. Third-party reproduction violates this right by intentionally conceiving a child in a way that will alienate that child from at least one of her biological parents.
Public Discourse

Politics, Art, and Love: A Lesson from Dante

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Valentine’s Day is usually associated with romance, but love matters in politics, too. In working to change our culture, we must remember that our opponents, like our allies, are human beings whose individual conversions can only be wrought through a combination of love, truth, and free will.
Public Discourse

Why Easy Stem Cells Raise Hard Ethical Questions

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A surprising new method for making stem cells offers scientists an easy alternative to destroying human embryos. But there is a disturbing possibility that the technique may create not stem cells but actual cloned embryos.
Public Discourse

On Abortion Rates: Good News and Cause for Reflection

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American abortion rates are falling significantly. Although the Guttmacher Institute tries to hide the chief causes of this trend, cutting through the spin reveals that pro-life laws and attitudes help reduce the abortion rate and the abortion ratio.
Public Discourse

Women and Children First

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Men and women struggling with infertility know real heartache. However, as citizens of a country founded on the struggle for rights and freedom, Americans have a civic and moral duty to confront laws that marginalize the already marginalized and threaten to create a second-class citizenry.
Public Discourse

Abortion: A Public Issue

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Contrary to the judgment of the Supreme Court, abortion is not a private issue. It snuffs out the existence of a member of the human community—a person like us with a radical capacity for reason and freedom.
Public Discourse

The Pro-Life Movement, Forty-One Years After Roe

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The pro-life movement has won a great battle by convincing the American public that an unborn child is a person. But that is not enough. Now, we must make an ethical argument against the horrific injustice of abortion.
Public Discourse

The Mother-Free Money Tree

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If we believe that human beings should not be for sale and should not be trafficked or manufactured like products, and if we believe that women deserve better than to be treated as mere baby machines, then we must oppose third-party reproduction.
Public Discourse

We Need a Real Women’s Agenda, Not Government-Funded Abortion

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By passing HR 7, the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, Congress could settle the matter of federal funding for abortion once and for all, and start addressing the real needs of American women. Adapted from testimony delivered before the House Judiciary Committee on January 9, 2014.
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