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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.

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While the medieval world was enchanted, the modern world in which we dwell is disenchanted. A disenchanted age is not necessarily characterized by complete repudiation of the supernatural. Rather, it is characterized by a fundamental shift in the function of the supernatural. At the heart of this disenchantment for Charles Taylor is not the traditional science-versus-religion narrative. Instead, he sees the key as being a transformation in the way in which the self is understood.
We will never offer our beloved sisters the ghoulish pseudo-compassion of the abortionist’s knife. We will offer, instead, the healing balm of genuine compassion, compassion born of love, compassion that offers, not a quick and easy, but deadly, “solution,” but rather an open-ended, open-hearted, self-sacrificial commitment.
Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen’s The Way of Medicine shows how doctors who are committed to the Way can practice medicine in a manner that restores them to this vocation of healing, even in our pluralistic age.
Advocates must remain clear about the moral stakes of abortion. But the non-violent ethic of life will reinforce the witness of conscience that drives objections to killing innocent human beings. By refusing to retaliate with violence or indignant rhetoric, pro-lifers will enhance their moral witness.
Aquinas’s argument is not that killing an offender is always lawful, much less that it is mandatory. It is lawful upon a condition, namely, that it is necessary to protect the common good from a threat. Absent that condition, Aquinas does not argue or even suggest that killing a malefactor, including one who has committed murder, is lawful.
It’s very rewarding to practice excellent women’s health that is collaborative, integrated, holistic, and listens to their bodies. Children are not STDs. Fertility is something to be collaborated with rather than suppressed.
We already know that ChatGPT’s coding is biased. But even ChatGPT recognizes that logic is logic, and it is willing to admit the contradiction in the pro-choice position. If only our human interlocutors would be so honest.
A national demonstration like the March reminds politicians that pro-life voters don’t intend to take the Dobbs victory as an opportunity to pack up and go home. Pro-lifers should push for change at the state level. But if pro-life Americans wish to remain an influential interest group at the national level, they would be wise not to send the message that federal politicians can brush abortion policy aside indefinitely as a matter for state lawmakers to sort out.
For the most significant choices of our lives, we only learn what the decision entails after we make it. This creates something of a dilemma. We only get the information needed to make a well-informed decision after we have committed to a particular choice. We are confronted with choices whose outcomes, potential goods, and impact on our lives we cannot fully anticipate.
As our dependence on technology reshapes the moral imagination of our culture to see human beings as psychological wills that need not respect material limitations, so the old order that was built upon the vision of human beings as both body and soul will become increasingly implausible. The things that make Christianity stand out from the wider culture—belief in the incarnation, the resurrection, and embodied human nature as a real, universal thing with moral consequences—are antithetical to the terms of membership in the emerging world order.
While the digitized promises of meta-man may entice us, they are ultimately false promises based on a rejection of fundamental aspects of human embodiment. There is an integrated wholeness to man that requires both resting in the givenness of human identity and actively engaging with the world.
Scripture and tradition tell us something astonishing about our embryonic brothers and sisters currently being kept in frozen storage: they are a vulnerable population that perhaps demands our attention the most. Indeed, embryo adoption appears to be smack-dab in the center of the demands of the Gospel.
Amid the heat of the debate and the fear over the future of women’s health, what’s often overlooked are alternatives to abortion that are both ethical and safe for the mother. And, with Dobbs’s legalizing abortion restrictions, clinicians and researchers will have new opportunities to consider treatments aimed at both the mother’s and baby’s well-being.
We must resist the sense that gratitude has no place in this era of frequently justified outrage. In fact, gratitude may be exactly what can help us distinguish justified from unjustified outrage. And, in any case, gratitude is the proper disposition toward all the good we have been given that we have done so little to earn.
No particular terminology that is adopted in medicine or law determines the moral issues of abortion, nor does any common usage of the word. Pro-life and pro-choice advocates alike are capable of recognizing that a range of medical interventions can end an unborn human being’s life. They differ, often radically, about the justice of most such interventions.
Moral differences over abortion need to be understood as differences of vision. While pro-life advocates rightly appeal to fundamental human equality, they also must respond to those who have difficulty seeing early human life as fully amongst us. Overcoming this difficulty requires developing a sense of awe and reverence before the sheer fact of human existence, as well as addressing common ways of looking away from the full moral reality of abortion.
Based on the Bible’s prohibitions against killing, its teaching about the sanctity of human life, and its penalties for negligence that lead to miscarriages, it is clear that the Bible by no means condones abortion—and indeed even condemns it.
Gender dysphoria needs to be acknowledged and treated as a psychological illness. I understand the resistance to language of disorder and pathology, motivated by a fear that such language is stigmatizing. I understand, but I disagree. To reclassify disorder as order forecloses the possibility of recovery. I think of my own battles with anxiety, depression, self-harm. I don’t want someone telling me those things are normal and good. I want to be healed.
The term “humanist” is disputed because what it means to be a human is itself disputed. But much of the world has forgotten this dispute. It defaults to secular humanism, which doesn’t look beyond the self; it is a self-referential philosophy of life. The heart of Catholic humanism, by contrast, is knowing that human beings can only be understood in relation to God.
The suffering you’ll see as a physician can either harden you and make you into a burned-out machine, or you can allow the vocation to soften you. It can help you cultivate compassion, love, justice, and mercy. Let medicine do the latter of the two for you.
In light of the controversy generated by law enforcement’s response to the Uvalde shooting, the question of courage and cowardice has been the subject of intense debate in recent weeks. A western novel published in 1940 might offer some helpful and surprisingly relevant ways to navigate this complex moral territory.
In vitro fertilization is likely more threatening to unborn life than abortion. The pro-life movement needs to recognize this reality and form a coherent post-Roe strategy for addressing both abortion and life-negating reproductive technologies.
Genuine cases of conflict between maternal and fetal health raise difficult moral questions, but a necessary starting point is to affirm both that physicians must honor their commitment to the mother’s health and that the law’s just protection of unborn human life should not interfere with that responsibility.
Articulating and responding to common misconceptions concerning the ethics of abortion will help to clarify and advance the debate, moving past misleading slogans to engage in a forthright and respectful public dialogue in the wake of Dobbs, and seeking to build a genuine culture of life that supports the needs of both women and children.

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