Introduction

THIS ISSUE IS THE FIRST OF OUR 25TH YEAR OF PUBLISHING. It is also the first issue of the Review launched without our Founder, Editor, and my father, James P McFadden, who died October 17, 1998, after a long and courageous battle with cancer.

We have made this a special commemorative issue, in honor of my father, whose conviction it was 25 years ago (only 2 years after the Roe v. Wade decision) that the anti-abortion movement needed an intellectual journal. Since its inception, the Human Life Review has been the only publication of its kind: a quarterly collection of serious and often scholarly articles arguing for the protection of human life. Originally conceived as primarily an anti-abortion magazine, the Review's subject matter has expanded to include larger cultural questions, as well as, by unfortunate necessity, partial-birth abortion, infanticide, assisted suicide and euthanasia, and even human cloning and experimentation. It is now and will continue to be a valuable historical record of life issues in America and abroad.

As I sit to write this Introduction, my first, there is certainly sadness. I wish my father were here to write it, as always, pounding away at his Royal typewriter, passing each completed page of copy out for us to read, proof and typeset. I do miss him, in ways I don't have the words to describe. But I also have a great sense of gratitude and pride, and a welcome feeling of purpose: it's up to those of us who are here to ensure that the important work of J.P's beloved Foundation and Review will continue, as we are sure it will, into the next century.

There is a lot about my father in this issue, in the special section starting on page 27. It's fitting, because he was a giant presence in the pro-life movement. But it's appropriate for another reason as well: the life issues that we have argued about in these pages for so many years are not theoretical, nor divorced from our and our readers' real lives. Many of our families are affected now by abortion and its "progeny," including post-abortion syndrome, pressure for pre-natal testing, "genetic counseling," fertility procedures, et al. And, on the other end of life, who can now escape "quality-of-life" concerns? My own father's illness caused him to live under conditions that have been used as an argument for euthanasia and assisted suicide. More and more doctors and medical plans are buying (literally) into a "quality-of-life" ethic. None of us can afford to be ill-informed. And, as you read about my father's struggle, it is evident that even champions of life can find it difficult to go on in the face of devastating suffering, which is why the conviction that human life is sacred must be deeply rooted. For in reality, trusting that life is God's to give and take does not rule out the hard cases, but it can sanctify them.

We begin, as we often do, with our esteemed colleague, friend, and senior editor, William Murchison, who does us a great service: he sums up the fall elections from a pro-life viewpoint, and then he enlarges the picture, examining the "broad intersection where politics and morality meet." The pro-life cause in Washington has had some setbacks, yes, but it is still a strong force. The problem is that prolife politicians can only go so far without the support of pro-life Americans; the majority of Americans (often called the "mushy middle") are uncomfortable with abortion-on-demand, but the numbers shrink when it comes to legislating against it, because of moral ambivalence and the "syrupy addiction to tolerance," of other people's "lifestyle choices." Americans have largely accepted that private morality can be divorced from public morality, as is painfully evident when we are reminded daily that most Americans think President Clinton's private actions shameful, but don't believe that he should be removed from office (and his job approval rating is high!).

Because of an unwillingness to condemn the "personal lifestyles of others," Americans lack the moral consensus to back up political action. Murchison argues that the anti-abortion movement has done well in the past quarter-century to keep alive intellectual opposition to abortion, but the great challenge which lies ahead, especially now as we face the related life questions of "autonomy in death," is to "reinstill in American culture a sense of reverence for life."

As this is a commemorative issue, we searched our archives for some articles by people integral to the development of the Review, to see if what they wrote then would be relevant now. The next gem of an article, by the late great Clare Boothe Luce, author, stateswoman, and playwright, who was also a dear friend of my father and benefactor of the Review, is quite astounding in its pertinence. Mrs. Luce gave a speech in 1978 which we reprinted in our Summer issue that year, with the title "Is the New Morality Destroying America?" As we re-read it, we editors all had the same reaction: we wanted to weep at how far we've come (in the wrong direction), and yet we were gratified at how prescient and prophetic Mrs. Luce (and the Review) was.

The point of Mrs. Luce's talk was to compare the "new" morality, the nontraditional morality, with the accepted, universal morality-and to ask if there was a basis for universal morality, not tied to a certain religious ethic. She found there was, asserting: "when we study the history of human thought, we discover a truly remarkable thing-all the great minds of the world have agreed on the marks of a moral person." Chief among them is truthfulness. Traditionally, she wrote, even though habitual lying is not punishable by law (unless it is done under oath), society "takes a dim view of the habitual liar" and "punishes him . . . by social ostracism."

Today we have a habitual liar occupying the highest office in the land, and we knew he was a liar before he was elected-twice! But Luce says, "All history bears witness to the fact that there can be no public virtue without private morality. There cannot be good government except in a good society." And as Murchison argues, the concept of the good society has been largely forgotten. Instead, I fear we have the sex-obsessed society which, Mrs. Luce wrote, is the mark of "all decaying societies." It's hard to imagine that even Mrs. Luce would have believed how sex-obsessed we are today. The mantra re Clinton is "It's just lying about sex," but there is no "just" about it-our capitol has been turned upside down by one man's sexual excesses, his lying to cover it up, and the public's moral confusion about whether anything that is done "in private" can be called sinful.

Next we have our special section, for which there is a brief introduction on page 28. We pick up our articles with Part II of Mary Meehan's fascinating article on eugenics. In Part I (in our Fall '98 issue), Meehan shows how the early population control movement had its roots and gained momentum from eugenicists (like founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger and Dr. Alan Guttmacher). In the concluding section, Meehan follows the eugenics movement as it takes its population message to the government, to try and effect economic and foreign policy-- the beginning of our policies exporting contraception and abortion to the Third World. We think you will find it interesting which politicians (like Presidents Kennedy and Nixon, and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan) showed keen interest in plans to curtail the population growth of non-whites. Meehan is a skilled researcher and there is much here that may startle-even some pro-lifers may not realize how much of the pro-abortion movement came from eugenics, under the guise of concern for the poor and the new "sexual liberation."

What follows is our final article, another from our archives, by J.P. himself. As with Clare Luce, we were amazed at how pertinent his article, from 1983, is today and how depressingly prophetic. "In "Toward a New Future," J.P. talks about the alarming new precedent to justify infanticide, evidenced in a Baby Doe case in Indiana. The "Bloomington Baby" had been born with Down syndrome, and an esophageal problem that would have required minor surgery to correct. The parents and doctors decided to forego the surgery, which meant that the baby would starve to death, and he did (it took over 6 days). It stirred up quite a controversy at the time, but then we had a pro-life President, Ronald Reagan, whose Administration proposed new guidelines. J.P. introduces here one Peter Singer, an obscure professor from Australia who had written a pro-infanticide piece in the American Academy of Pediatrics journal. Our readers will recognize this same Singer as the subject of our Infanticide Chic II symposium from our last issue; he has gone from obscurity to being awarded an endowed chair at Princeton University! Unfortunately, our culture is ready to accept the likes of Singer as a moral "thinker"-he is on the forefront of the "chic" academic movement which labels persons who hold that human life is intrinsically more valuable than animal "speciesist"-in their view, a "defective" human newborn may be worth less than a healthy gorilla. So it's not surprising that what happened to the Bloomington Baby is happening probably every day now in our hospitals, where decisions are made based on "qualityof-life" ethics. J.P. finishes his article with a proposal for doctors that ought to be mandatory-but we'll let you read that for yourself.

Our first Appendix (A), is a column on the very same Peter Singer, written by our contributor William McGurn (originally for the Wall Street Journal). In "Princeton Defends Its Professor of Infanticide," McGurn reports on the university's response to the controversy over Singer's appointment. As you would expect, the university has employed Orwellian double-speak to justify Singer as an instructor of ethics at the "Center for Human Values"!

Appendix B is a tough one to read. In "54 Babies," columnist George Will reports on the grisly discovery made by two boys in Chino Hills, California-boxes stuffed with the remains of 54 fetuses (the boys of course went home and said they found "babies"). When local residents formed a group-Cradles of Love-to bury the babies, the ACLU stepped in, as Will explains.

Our next Appendix, by John Leo, discusses the painful subject of the murder of abortion doctor Barnett Slepian last October, and the accusations by the media and pro-choicers that pro-life leaders are responsible. This is a must-read-Leo, who cannot be accused of being a pro-life fanatic but is rather a first-rate, reasonable journalist-makes the case that arguments based on "climates or atmospheres" are often "simply attempts to disparage opponents and squelch legitimate debate."

We now shift our attention to the increasingly feverish debate over assisted suicide and euthanasia. We begin with a piece by Yale Kamisar, Clarence Darrow Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan Law School, who writes on the resounding failure of the initiative to legalize assisted suicide in Michigan (on the ballot last November), and explains why, with Oregon as the exception, proponents of assisted suicide have "done quite poorly in the public arena." While most voters are moved by the poignant hard cases of dying people who are suffering unspeakable pain, they are weighed down, on the other hand, by the intricacies of actual legislation that would allow for "mercy," without permitting abuse.

Perhaps the epitome of a nightmare for both sides in the assisted-suicide debate is the ghoulish Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who was encouraged by media executives at CBS to push the envelope and air a "mercy killing" on prime-time TV. As I am sure everybody knows, the "news" program 60 Minutes, hoping to boost its sweepsweek ratings, invited Kevorkian to show his home videotape of the killing of an ALS sufferer, Thomas Youk, along with an interview with Mike Wallace for Dr. Jack to air his "message." Wesley Smith, our expert on assisted suicide and euthanasia issues, wrote the next Appendix for the Weekly Standard. In it, he says that while Mike Wallace blithely (and without research) accepted Kevorkian's claim that ALS patients like Youk were scared to death of the ALS symptoms, the medical facts are that the scariest conditions-choking and suffocation-"have been virtually eliminated with proper medical care." What the unfortunate Mr. Youk won't be able to find out is that patients with ALS and many other debilitating diseases can, with the proper help, live full lives until their natural death.

Mona Charen, in our next Appendix (F), picks up on the Kevorkian death-fest, and she brings in some facts we think you ought to know, if you don't already. Dr. Jack also fancies himself an artist, a painter, and he has had shows of his "work," which are, to say the least, horrifying. Scenes of human mutilation and death, severed heads, brain and spinal cords ripped from a body-these are not the imaginings of a healthy individual. We do know that Kevorkian has in the past suggested that it would be a good idea to forcibly remove organs from death-row inmates. He also butchered the body of a recent victim, so as to "offer" the kidneys for transplant (there were no takers). He is in a sense living out his disgusting dreams, and we are not only allowing him to do it but giving him a national platform!

Finally, we end this issue with a piece we saw in The Spectator, the British weekly magazine. In "Death Becomes Them," author Philip Johnson exposes the frightening realities of "civilized" societies push towards euthanasia. In Holland, though still officially illegal, euthanasia is practiced on a broad scale, including the involuntary variety (an official committee in 1991 estimated involuntary deaths to be as many as 1,000 of the 2,300 annual euthanasia deaths). Johnson reports that the euthanasia debate in Britain has been lately re-charged, and it's likely that Britain will go in Holland's direction.

But what really haunts is what is happening to doctors: Johnson quotes a Dutch doctor as saying that you are never the same after the first time you perform euthanasia, but as you do it more "you become more positive toward it. ." and doctors become less creative about solving patients' pain and problems. "This is pulling out the cornerstone not just of palliative medicine but of all medicine."

That cornerstone was loosened long ago with the rejection of the universal morality Clare Luce invoked, and abortion, our "original" issue, has everything to do with the horrors that have followed. But, lest we end on a down note, I remember that J.P. always found a way to smile and laugh at a pun or joke, even when facing the worst, so we include some very funny cartoons here, and look forward to bringing you the best arguments we can find-for life!

Postscript: the world lost another great pro-lifer, just this past January lOth. William Bentley Ball, who was 82, was a constitutional lawyer famous for his tireless defense of the freedom of religion. He was a staunch Roman Catholic and a fervent pro-lifer; he also wrote for numerous publications, including the Review, and he was our good friend. Our condolences go to his family. R.I.P.

Copyright Human Life Foundation, Incorporated Winter 1999
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