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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.

Why Have Children? The Global Population Decline and Human Happiness 

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Public Discourse

Abortion and the Constitution in Another Forty Years: A Right to Life for 2053

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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.
Public Discourse

The Paradox of Persons Forty Years After Roe

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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.
Public Discourse

The Real Reason to Criticize Roe

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

Abortion Promises Unfulfilled

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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.
Public Discourse

Forty Years Later: It’s Time for a New Feminism

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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.
Public Discourse

On the 40th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade: A Public Discourse Symposium

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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.
Public Discourse

Conscientious Abortions? We Don’t Need New Laws Protecting Abortionists

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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.
Public Discourse

Law’s Logic at the End of Life

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To its detriment, Howard Ball’s new book on end-of-life law focuses more on the emotions and biases of the law’s defenders than on law’s history and content.
Public Discourse

Bringing Marx into the Abortion Debate

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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.
Public Discourse

Science and the Politics of Personhood

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Science can and should help determine sound public policy on matters that involve basic human rights.
Public Discourse

The GOP and Social Issues: Sophomoric Arguments at the Wall Street Journal

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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.
Public Discourse

Medicine’s Dance with Death

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A physician-philosopher argues that modern medicine is oriented toward the dead body because it is no longer informed by an ultimate purpose for human existence.
Public Discourse

Potentiality Rightly Understood

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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.
Public Discourse

Potential Misunderstandings

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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.
Public Discourse

Rape, Conception, and God: Why Mourdock Was Right

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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.
Public Discourse

Promoting Women’s Equality in Pakistan

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An assassination attempt on a 14-year-old girl reminds us that we need to promote better education and equality for women in Pakistan.
Public Discourse

The Right to Do Good

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Two incompatible conceptions of rights are at stake in the debate over the HHS mandate.
Public Discourse

The Religious Liberty Case Against Religious Liberty Litigation: Non-Universal Exemptions and Judicial Overreach

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Current lawsuits against the HHS contraceptive mandate may undermine religious liberty in the long run. Not all religious objectors to the mandate are likely to be exempted even if the lawsuits are successful, and judges violate the core meaning of religious liberty when they assess plaintiffs’ religious character. The first in a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Emergency Contraception Won’t Decrease Teen Pregnancies

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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.
Public Discourse

The New Sexual Predators

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Young women now have to defend themselves not only from stereotypical sexual predators, but also from older women and gay men who seek their eggs.
Public Discourse

Poverty, Abortion, and Budgets: Democrats for Life Need Better Arguments

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

The Right to Life and the Irrelevance of Rape

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

The Surrogate Uterus: The AGR Case and Melissa Brisman

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The question of surrogacy has always been more about us than about the participants in the relationship. Will we use the power of the people to take a child from the arms of her mother when the mother is perfectly fit, loves her child, and desires to discharge her duties to her child?
Public Discourse

The Surrogate Uterus: Baby M and the Bioethics Commission Report

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Governor Christie’s recent veto of a “gestational” surrogacy bill should prompt us to look at the legal history of surrogacy and the terrible injustices that it causes.

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