Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton is normally a media darling, especially when it comes to her clothes. Entire articles are written about how she “nailed it” with her look at galas, charity events, and parades. She can literally do no wrong in the fashion department. So it was with some surprise that I saw an [...]

Any guess as to the leading cause of death? Heart disease… cancer… smoking… obesity? Not even close. At over 56 million deaths annually, the worldwide loss of life from abortion exceeds that of the top ten leading causes of death combined. Half of those—roughly 28 million deaths—are from legal abortions. Twenty-eight million people. That exceeds [...]

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, And before you were born I consecrated you.” (Jeremiah 1:5) “Upon You I was cast from birth; You have been my God from my mother's womb.” (Psalm 22:5) Last week fourteen Catholic senators joined those who voted against the proposed law that would have prohibited [...]

Catholics and pro-lifers who were shocked at the “knighthood” of Dutch politician and abortion activist Lilianne Ploumen into the Vatican’s Order of St. Gregory the Great by Pope Francis, shouldn’t have been. True, Ploumen’s militant support of abortion and homosexual rights (which includes raising $400 million for a “reproductive health” NGO she helped launch) is [...]

“Sticks and stones may break my bones / but names will never hurt me.” So goes the old children’s nursery rhyme. We know, of course, that the claim is not exactly true: CBS produced a documentary in 2011 about the effects of bullying in a digital age, “Words Can Kill.” What is less talked about [...]

Once in a while there is an article that defends the practice of Muslim women covering her hair. If they really want to be insulting, there is a picture of a nun in a habit right next to a beautiful woman in hijab. “What is the difference?” they ask. “It is the choice,” I answer. [...]

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment Of all that you have done, and been; the shame Of things ill done and done to others' harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue. ∼  T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding, in Four Quartets Author and culture critic par excellence, Mary Eberstadt, has chronicled the shift among [...]

Recently in Ireland a body called the Irish Citizens’ Assembly took steps long feared by supporters of the right to life. The assembly is not a regular constitutional component of the Irish government. Rather it is a body called into being by the government to make suggestions as to potential constitutional amendments for the legislature [...]

Like unsuspecting characters in an Agatha Christie novel, we are all witnesses to the commission of a murder still in progress, carried out in slow motion. It is happening so slowly, and its ongoing occurrence is so protracted, so pervasive, and so familiar that we haven’t sensed the magnitude of the violence being done or [...]

On the Saturday following Trump’s inauguration the capital was clogged with another mass rally—the Women’s March on Washington. At first described as “spontaneous” by the media, it gradually leaked out that the whole thing had been planned—by Planned Parenthood, NARAL, CAIR, Move-On, and approximately fifty left-wing groups infused with cash from rich Uncle Soros. Reliance [...]

After Hillary Clinton defended partial-birth abortion at a presidential debate, a poet promised that late-term abortion could unleash a mother’s “compassion.” Her sheeny New York Times essay about aborting a wiggling son whose name meant “heart” is heartbreaking. He’d need a heart transplant one day if he survived delivery; he’d face “horribly painful obstacles” and [...]

A study published last week in the journal JAMA Psychiatry claims to show that women facing an unwanted pregnancy do not suffer any negative impact on their mental health after abortion. Carried out by the ANSIRH (Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health) program at the University of California, San Francisco, the study sought to respond to [...]

The state of Texas recently enacted a set of rules pertaining to the handling and disposing of fetal remains. The new rules require that healthcare facilities dispose of fetal remains by burial or cremation, and bans the facilities from disposing of the remains via industrial garbage disposals. The rules, expected to be passed into law [...]

Arguments based on rights seem irresistible today. Unlike arguments based on natural law, let alone those based on revealed religion, everyone seems to understand them without further explanation. So if someone wants to say abortion is bad he says it violates the right to life, and if he wants to oppose the current deconstruction of [...]

The age of Jenner, Obergefell, and #BlackLivesMatter puts issues of identity at the center of public life. As Catholics and citizens we need to understand what that means. Personal identity orients us in the world. As such, it has both individual and social functions. It enables us to order our lives by telling us what we [...]

Social liberals consider traditional moral restrictions cruel in their very essence. Each of us, they believe, should be as free as possible to pursue his happiness as he sees it, consistent with the equal ability of others to do the same. To reject that position, as Catholics and other moral traditionalists do, is either intentionally [...]

The 1960s were intended as a rebellion against the materialism, mindless conformity, soullessness, and general inhumanity and immorality of commercial and bureaucratic (“corporate and militaristic”) America. The answer, it was thought, could be found in freeing ourselves from a society gone wrong by rejection of social forms, pursuit of intense experience, and “doing your own [...]

Standing in front of a famous 1964 photo of Father Theodore Hesburgh locking arms with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, honored Father Hesburgh at a party on Capitol Hill celebrating the retired president of the University of Notre Dame’s 96th birthday in late May.  During her celebratory remarks, Pelosi [...]

Jean Bethke Elstain, an author I greatly admire, made an astute observation when she remarked that “much that comes parading through town under the banner of ‘choice’ is actually a new set of constraints and compulsions.”  “Parading” is an appropriately descriptive word since this new attitude toward choice does not come to us through a [...]