Introduction

THIS DOUBLE ISSUE celebrates over 25 years of continuous publication of the Human Life Review. We are thankful to be going strong, more than a year and a half after the death of our founder, editor and my beloved father, J.P. McFadden, who published our first issue in the winter of 1975. Now as then, the Review is unique: it is the only intellectual journal dedicated to combatting abortion and its related progeny.

We lead with a powerful article, titled The Ex-Abortionists: Why They Quit, by our valued long-term contributor, Mary Meehan. Be warned: this is a brutal expose of the abortion business, largely from the mouths of those who know it best-abortionists, nurses and clinic workers. It is not for the faint-hearted. And yet, as Meehan writes, these first-person accounts offer hope for the future: "if people whose livelihoods depended on abortion can turn around, then certainly there is hope for everyone" who is "pro-choice." Most of Meehan's material comes from a series of conferences organized by Joe Scheidler, Executive Director of the Pro-Life Action League (and a defendant in the notorious RICO case, NOW v. Scheidler) called "Meet the Abortion Providers." The speakers were doctors, nurses, administrators and clinic staffers who had become disillusioned with the abortion business and got out. Many of them are now passionate defenders of unborn life.

We go from the raw truth of abortion practice to abortion politics, in which the bloody reality of the "procedure" is buried under a barrage of slogans, euphemisms, and "rights talk." In A Moral Muddle, Senior Editor William Murchison does his usual superb job of exposing hypocrisy. This time, he focuses on a now fashionable political cause: "The hue and cry is out for America to stop, in the name of mercy, the precipitate killing of death row inmates." Capital punishment has become a major issue in the 2000 presidential race. What Murchison can't figure out is: "Why does a certain kind of American get wrought up about capital punishment but not about abortion?" Who could be more innocent than a baby in his mother's womb? What America needs, he says, is "A good, consistent theology of human life."

Another "hot" rights issue today is the animal "rights" movement (also inconsistent: one is hard-pressed to find an animal rights advocate who is not also pro-abortion). Dr. David Oderberg, a professor of philosophy at Reading University, provides a welcome clarification as to why animals do not have "rights," and that grasping the all-important difference in the natures of animals and humans is precisely what's needed to understand "why the killing of even the tiniest, youngest member of the human species is an unspeakable crime." (Oderberg also emphasizes that animals' lack of rights does not mean they should be targets for cruelty.)

We come next to a very special section, a collection of tributes to the late Cardinal John Joseph O'Connor, a hero of the pro-life movement. It has its own introduction (p. 46). One piece I'd like to highlight as of special significance to the Review is Father Frank Pavone's A Consistent Ethic of Love (p. 58). The "consistent ethic of life" has been mis-used to relativize the importance of abortion, by casting it as "only" one in a series of life issues. For example, when Cardinal O'Connor died, his firm opposition to abortion was, for the liberal press, mitigated as a politically-correct sin by his opposition to the death penalty, and his concern for the poor. Father Pavone explains that in the true consistent ethic, "all the issues are linked but not equal"-a failure to defend life at its most vulnerable casts doubt on one's defense of life in any other circumstances. Cardinal O'Connor preached and practiced a true seamless garment: the integral sanctity and dignity of every human life.

What follows is a gem of a piece by our good friend Jo McGowan, who lives and works in India. Readers of the Review were first introduced to her adopted daughter Moy Moy in 1990 (Mini Moy Moy, Fall, `90). Just for Being is a shining story of love and a powerful testament to the great gifts the disabled bring to our lives.

We go next to The Zygote and Personhood, in which another professor of philosophy, Donald DeMarco, considers that, before abortion became an "issue," unborn life was a subject of great interest and awe, and one didn't argue that the zygote wasn't human. Ironically, today, when science knows so much more about the development of human beings, some "philosophers" claim that a zygote "has no rights at all because its degree of complexity is similar to that of insects" (Peter Wenz). Yet as DeMarco argues, a zygote has "all the DNA and all the genes that a human being will ever need" and it "exerts biochemical and hormonal influences on the mother as it begins to control and direct the process of pregnancy, a power amplification, considering its size ... that is utterly astonishing." And he or she is utterly human!

We proceed with two articles that discuss current crises in social mores, both here and in Britain. First, our "British correspondent" Lynette Burrows writes, in her customary lively style, about the social policies promoted in her native country in the name of "feminism," but which really smack of Marxism. She leads into this by discussing a new book, The Sex Change Society and the Neutered Male, by British columnist Melanie Phillips. One of the policies Burrows deplores is government incentives for cohabitation, which in Britain is "vastly more economical" than marriage. Our esteemed contributor Father Francis Canavan's article follows, in which he also discusses cohabitation, but in the light of the homosexual movement and the sexual revolution from which it resulted, and the collapse of the true understanding of marriage. As Canavan argues persuasively, the modern attack on marriage comes from a "dying of the mind": we live increasingly in a culture that relativizes truth, one which is "brilliantly successful in the natural sciences and technology, but at sea in its moral judgments because it lacks any substantive knowledge of the good."

On to more disturbing social policy: Oregon's 1994 assisted suicide law. Wesley Smith writes, in Under Oregon's Iron Shroud: Real People, Real Deaths, about how the law is actually being used, and how much of what is really happening is being covered by "an iron shroud of secrecy." Otherwise, rightto die proponents fear, other states won't be keen to follow Oregon's lead. As Smith makes clear, the conditions laid out by the law for assisted suicide are being deliberately mangled: for example, it seems that none of the deaths reported in 1998 involved patients suffering intolerable pain, and many did not have the cooperation of a physician with a long-term relationship with the patient. Instead, when the family doctor refused to write a lethal prescription, the patient went "shopping around" for any physcian who would (and the willing doctor sometimes had ties to assisted suicide advocacy groups). Most disturbing, some cases seem to satisfy the wishes of the patient's family over his own.

What follows is another special section, on the Oscar-winning movie about abortion, The Cider House Rules. This too has its own introduction, on p. 24.

Our final article is a fitting look-forward. Professor Stephen J. Heaney anticipates the November 2000 elections, and has written a perceptive essay about pro-life voting. This is a piece to read and pass on before election day: we all know good people, firmly against abortion, who nonetheless vote for prochoice candidates, citing a certain politician's concern for the poor, his position against capital punishment, etc. Here Father Pavone's argument is echoed by Heaney, who writes that abortion and related life issues like euthanasia are not "single issues": "It would be more accurate to call them `singular issues'that is, issues foundational to human dignity and human rights, to the meaning of law and the common good." He also establishes the importance of voting as "not something which happens to the voter, but it is rather something he does-a human action-he is personally implicated in the outcome."

We have lost another great pro-lifer this spring: Robert P. Casey, former governor of Pennsylvania. He was, like O'Connor, a feisty Irishman, true to his working-class roots, who never wavered in his defense of the unborn. We've reprinted a stirring tribute by Matthew Scully, published first in the Wall Street Journal, to open our appendices section. It includes this wonderful observation about Casey: "Abortion, he said, is not a question of when life begins. It is a question of when love begins."

Casey fought for the soul of the Democratic party, convinced that it had "lost its way, abandoned its calling to protect the weak and forgotten and powerless." He also took on the Supreme Court: in the 1992 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, he fought to uphold Pennsylvania's Abortion Control Act, which placed some restrictions on abortion. It was widely expected and hoped by pro-lifers that Casey would revisit Roe, and-with six Republican appointees on the bench-find it an unconstitutional decision. In a staggering disappointment, the justices reaffirmed Roe, on the somewhat bizarre principle of stare decisis, saying in effect that whether or not Roe had been rightly decided, women had been depending on it for nearly two decades to plan their reproductive lives, so the Court would not overrule itself. It was not total victory for the pro-abortion forces, however: Casey did uphold most of the abortion restrictions under the Pennsylvania law, and also ruled that the states "may express profound respect for the life of the unborn."

In Appendix B, Professor Hadley Arkes (A Season for Chameleons: Abortion and the Court) opens with a trenchant look at the Casey decision. The three justices who were understood to be pro-life-Justices O'Connor, Souter and especially Kennedy-"defected" and "weighed in . .. to confirm Roe, to entrench it even further and to abjure ordinary citizens to . . . cease their agitation over the issue," an action which Arkes insists was nothing less than "treachery." Arkes explores "the change of Kennedy's colors," the moral relativism that has pervaded the court, and he writes about the future, and what hope we might have for change (such as Justice Kennedy experiencing "the quiet joy of meeting again his better self").

Unfortunately, the future is now. As we are going to press, it has been announced that the Supreme Court has dealt us another staggering blow, striking down a Nebraska law banning partial-birth abortions (Stenberg v. Carhart). In the first major abortion ruling since Casey, the justices said the Nebraska law violates the constitution by imposing an "undue burden" on women. The vote was close (5-4), and this time Kennedy joined the dissent-could he be feeling the stirrings of his better self already? And yet the partial-birth procedure is so horrifying that many who tout a woman's "right to choose" find it beyond the pale.

The Nebraska law before the court was one which forbids "an abortion procedure in which the person performing the abortion partially delivers vaginally a living unborn child before killing the child and completing the delivery." This describes the D&X procedure (dilation and extraction, i.e., partialbirth), and those supporting the bans insist that only the D&X method would be prosecuted. The court countered that this language could criminalize another common late-term method, the D&E (dilation and evacuation). This is the subject of Appendix C, written by Professor Richard Stith last April. Stith discusses previous appellate court judges who argued along these lines, yet in doing so they had to describe in graphic detail the methods of abortions they were defending, admitting, for example, that in a D&E, while part of the fetus (a limb) is grasped outside the mother's body, "the rest of the fetus remains in the uterus while dismemberment occurs, and is often still living." Honesty about late-term abortion methods has now been forced into the courts-the Supreme Court certainly had to face the gruesome details. Stith was hoping that "facing for the first time a candid lower-court description of its handiwork, perhaps even the Supreme Court might begin to change its mind about abortion." That hope has been dashed for now: nevertheless, the vote was too close for comfort for abortion activists, and, as George Will has written in response to the verdict, "Al Gore's approving Wednesday's decision, and George Bush deploring it, affirm strikingly different understandings of constitutional reasoning and elemental morality. With the court and the culture in the balance, let no one say this is an unimportant election."

Our final Appendix (D) relates a bizarre story that takes us right back to where we started-how the abortion business affects those whose hands are bloodied. In "She's Not Doc's Only Victim," New York Post columnist Maggie Gallagher writes about a doctor who lives with his wife and two children in Chappaqua, the affluent New York City suburb where Hillary Clinton now "resides." On discovering that the nurse with whom he has been having an affair is pregnant and refuses to have an abortion, he says he will give her one and attacks her with syringes of the abortifacient methotrexate! The mother did not miscarry, but it remains to be seen whether the baby was harmed.

Stories as strange as this one do make the headlines; nonetheless, every day (hour, minute) unborn babies are being killed, often brutally. With the recent Supreme Court decision, we have entered, it seems to me, a new era of abortion extremism. We have come a long way from arguing about "blobs of tissue" and "potential life"-we have gone steadily down the slippery slope, to a place where the Supreme Court can coldly describe a partial-birth abortion with concern only for how the mother is affected and whether or not the "doctor" will be prosecuted. Casey's allowance that states may "express profound respect for the life of the unborn" is mocked: 30 states have indeed expressed such respect in attempting to ban a procedure many find not less than infanticide.

It remains, however, that we cannot afford to despair. Hope for the unborn lies with individuals: every abortion kills a unique child and every mother who turns away from this "choice" saves an irreplaceable person. The Review will continue to try and sway hearts and minds to the truth by publishing the best material we can find in defense of life. A warm thanks to our faithful readers who have made it-and will make it-possible. Finally, thanks to Nick Downes, whose cartoons help lighten our hearts.

MARIA McFADDEN

EDITOR

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