A controversial abortion case reaches the Supreme Court, and men in black robes impose their religious views on the country. Counter to the justices’ expectation, a diverse movement rises up in protest. Civil disobedience leads to tens of ­thousands of arrests. It may take many years, but the decision will be reversed.

This is a description not of some future American Gilead but of the past. Daniel K. Williams’s important history of abortion politics explains how Roe v. Wade enshrined liberal Protestant assumptions in American law. Far from being a bulwark of secularism (as many on the right and the left have supposed), Roe v. Wade was the expression of a religious establishment that overestimated its legitimacy and staying power.

Religious divides over abortion emerged in the first part of the twentieth century. Up to that point there had been a broad consensus in favor of American laws, which banned abortion except when it was necessary to save the life of the mother. But under the influence of the Social Gospel, which stressed societal reform over individual salvation, many mainline leaders came to see contraception and abortion not as individual vices but as potential solutions to overpopulation and poverty. Liberal Protestants also placed a high priority on individual freedom, which they sought to respect by loosening abortion laws.

At the same time, liberal Protestants continued to believe that the unborn child possessed moral worth, which had to be balanced against the value of individual choice. In 1961, the Christian Century called for the repeal of laws that compelled “women to bear ­unwanted children forced upon them in criminal acts.” But it also warned that complete ­liberalization “leaves to the unborn no rights at all.”

This attempt to balance individual freedom, social reform, and the rights of the unborn was distinct from the Catholic position, which prioritized unborn life while drawing on natural law. It also differed from the approach of conservative Protestants. Williams puts to rest the frequently repeated claim that evangelicals did not oppose abortion until they were led to do so by the post-Roe culture wars. In fact, conservative Protestants were generally opposed to abortion—and for distinctively evangelical reasons.

Whereas liberal Protestants stressed individual freedom, conservative Protestants exalted family life. Their belief in the importance of childbearing reinforced their moral objections to the taking of unborn life. The same was true of their focus on individual sin and salvation, which made them comfortable with calling the choice to abort a sin and a crime rather than a social problem for which no one in particular could be blamed. It is true, Williams notes, that ­evangelicals were willing to support the availability of abortion “for a few carefully defined medical reasons.” But they rejected elective abortion outright.

In 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, it was still possible to imagine that liberal Protestant views could govern the country. Twenty-eight percent of Americans were members of mainline churches, the institutional home of liberal Protestantism. So were sixty-­five of the Senate’s one hundred members and eight of the nine justices on the Supreme Court. Today, by contrast, only 11 percent of Americans, twenty-seven members of the U.S. Senate, and one Supreme Court justice are mainline Protestants.

Only in retrospect is it ­possible to see how distinctive—and ­fragile—the liberal Protestant approach to abortion was. The court’s decision in Roe was drafted by Harry Blackmun, a liberal Methodist who regularly attended church and occasionally preached. During the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, he wrote, abortion could be undertaken at the discretion of the mother. In the next twelve weeks, the state could regulate the procedure in ways consistent with maternal health. In the last trimester, the state could prohibit abortion outright, except where it was necessary to protect the life of the mother. This framework sought to balance individual choice with the value of unborn life. But by stressing the medical reasons for abortion, it also assumed the authority of doctors—92 percent of whom were male.

This balancing act reflected liberal Protestant concerns and tracked with specific policies proposed by liberal Protestant bodies. In June 1968, the American Baptist Convention proposed a trimester framework that sought to honor “the freedom of persons and the sanctity of life.” The woman would be free to choose in the first trimester, but after that she could procure an abortion only with the approval of a medical professional. A similar approach was proposed by the United Church of Christ in 1971. The parallels were clear enough that in 1973, after Roe was decided, the writers Mary Ellen Haines and Helen Weber noted that the UCC’s statement was “virtually identical with the Supreme Court ruling.”

Because of the decision’s soft paternalism and qualified concern for unborn life, feminists had reservations about Roe. They preferred the approach championed by Congresswoman Bella Abzug, who proposed a law to repeal all restrictions on abortion nationwide. Feminists rallied to Roe, though, when they realized that a determined movement was seeking to undo it. Blackmun was surprised by the intensity of the response. “The mail has been voluminous and much of it critical and some of it abusive,” he told a friend. “I suspect, however, that the furor will die down before too long. At least I hope so.”

It was not to be. Catholics, joined by evangelicals, led the resistance to Roe. They were joined by a formidable body of dissenters within the Protestant mainline. Charismatic Christianity also played an important role. In 1986, Randall Terry, a Pentecostal minister, founded Operation Rescue. The group adopted sit-in tactics from the Civil Rights movements to dissuade women from seeking abortions and obstruct the operations of clinics. By 1992, 40,000 volunteers had been arrested in one of the greatest waves of civil disobedience in American history.

Far from settling the ­abortion question on liberal ­Protestant grounds, as Blackmun hoped, Roe  contributed to the decline of liberal Protestant hegemony. As Williams notes, it “set in motion a process that would polarize both national politics and Christianity in the United States.” Debates over abortion contributed to splits within mainline churches and powered the emergence of the religious right. It also led to the rise of a feminist movement that would, in time, win over the Democratic Party to an unambiguous defense of abortion as an act that should be not questioned but praised.

By tracing this history, Williams answers a question that has often troubled people with moderate instincts: Whatever happened to the idea that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare? The important thing to realize is that this formulation was not a compromise between the antithetical positions of pro-lifers and feminists. It was an expression of a distinctive viewpoint that enjoyed demographic and institutional backing within the Protestant mainline. As the mainline declined, so did this distinctive form of moderation—to be replaced by pro-abortion secularism on the one hand and a religiously conservative pro-life movement on the other.

Though the pro-life movement has succeeded in reversing Roe v. Wade, it has failed to achieve a new settlement that protects unborn life. Many abortion opponents, notably including the Catholic bishops of the United States, have sought to present opposition to abortion as part of a broader “ethic of life” or “seamless garment.” Their proposals seek to build a new center that protects the unborn by appealing to the political intuitions of the left as well as the right. They aspire to be nonpartisan, just as the drafters of Roe imagined they were being. But their success has not matched their ambition.

Indeed, over time, some of the most important advocates of the seamless garment have abandoned the cause. The evangelical Jim Wallis and his magazine, ­Sojourners, were important progressive voices for life. They cast the protection of the unborn as part of a broader liberal defense of the downtrodden. But sometime during ­Donald Trump’s first term in office, Williams notes, Sojourners began to defend abortion as a human right—succumbing to the process of polarization that had been working itself out since Roe v. Wade.

Williams’s history has implications beyond Roe v. Wade. If religious views inevitably inform court decisions in such sensitive cases, what views informed Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court ruling recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex ­marriage? A clue can be found in ­another recent book, ­Anthony ­Kennedy’s memoir, Life, Law & ­Liberty. Kennedy describes how his upbringing in the ­American West imparted to him a notion that each person is ­entitled to “basic dignity.” Dignity was to become the crucial concept in his jurisprudence. As Kennedy puts it, “Constant study . . . led me to a greater appreciation of the primacy of human dignity in constitutional analysis.”

Kennedy’s insistence on dignity marks him as part of a distinctively Catholic tradition of political reasoning. As the legal scholar ­Samuel Moyn argues in Christian Human Rights, the notion of individual dignity was first taken up in the early twentieth century by Catholics who sought a middle course between the secularist legacy of the French Revolution and anti-democratic forms of Christian politics. Recognizing individual dignity often meant placing limits on the state’s ability to coerce. As Moyn observes, the term’s eventual popularity was “essentially due” to Pope Pius XI’s employment of it in the anti-­communist encyclical Divini Redemptoris.

Catholics on the Supreme Court adopted this language. As Adeno Addis has noted, “Justices ­Kennedy, Brennan, and Frank Murphy, the three Justices for whom dignity has played an important role in understanding humanness and its vulnerability to debasement and humiliation, all adhered to the Catholic faith.” Kennedy used the notion of dignity to fashion a liberal Catholic jurisprudence that reached its culmination in ­Obergefell. Not unlike Harry Blackmun’s opinion in Roe v. Wade, Kennedy’s opinion in Obergefell advanced a progressive change while retaining certain conservative instincts—notably, a belief that recognition of the dignity of same-sex couples must be ­balanced against respect for religious liberty.

Today Catholics are as dominant on the Supreme Court as mainline Protestants once were. But most of these Catholics are political conservatives and textual originalists who have little use for the language of dignity. Kennedy’s liberal Catholic jurisprudence is likely to be subjected to the same crosscutting pressures that Blackmun’s liberal Protestant jurisprudence once was. If the fate of Roe is any indication, the compromise Kennedy struck in Obergefell will be looked back on as a temporary settlement. Either Obergefell will be reversed, or religious liberty for objectors will be stripped away.

The reversal of Obergefell would be an undoubted conservative victory. But its effect would be limited unless conservatives can articulate a religiously informed jurisprudence that commands broad assent. Anyone hoping to do this has much to learn from the liberal Protestant and Catholic attempts to shape our nation’s laws.

Image by Ted Eytan, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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On April 1, 2025, Trump’s Health and Human Services froze just over $65 million worth of Title X grants to family planning clinics, citing concerns with “possible violations” of federal civil rights law. HHS said it would investigate clinics for “widespread practices across hiring, operations, and patient treatment that unavoidably employ race in a negative manner” as well as “taxpayer subsidization of open borders”—for example, conducting programs in a way that “overtly encourages illegal aliens to receive care.” 

The funding in question had been for sixteen grantees in seven states—California, Hawaii, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, and Utah—including nine Planned Parenthood state affiliates, and affecting roughly eight hundred abortion sites across the United States. (The total number of abortion clinics in the United States is unknown, but most estimates suggest roughly eight hundred are currently in operation.) Other states that receive grants under Title X, such as Texas, received partial funding during the freeze. 

Within weeks, the American Civil Liberties Union and National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents most Title X grantees, sued the administration for “unlawful” withholding of the grants. In the ensuing months, affected abortion clinics provided materials to HHS in response to the concern that they violated federal rules for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. That lawsuit was dropped last Monday, after the Trump administration began releasing frozen funds on December 19, citing a completed review of the grants in question.

Pro-abortion activists have said that the lack of Title X funding caused many clinics to shutter, though the total number of brick-and-mortar abortion shops had already begun dropping before the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Supreme Court decision, following the prevalence of mail-order mifepristone. At least two shops in Utah did close during the freeze, one on the northern border near Idaho, where abortion is banned, and the other on the southern border near Arizona. Apparently, the demand for Planned Parenthood’s services was not significant enough to sustain a clinic, absent heavily subsidized and free options for low-income clients. 

Veteran pro-life strategist Tom McClusky, director of government affairs at CatholicVote, called the move to return the grant money strategically necessary, since the Trump administration was “virtually certain to lose the lawsuit, forcing them to repay the full amount plus interest and cover attorneys’ fees,” he told the Daily Signal.

One reason for this is that HHS withheld the money before amending 42 U.S. Code Part 300, a rule that governs family planning grants. As currently written, the rule allows HHS to grant and contract with public or nonprofit private entities to establish voluntary family planning services, including “natural family planning methods, infertility services, and services for adolescents,” with additional memoranda from Biden in 2023 to explicitly protect abortion access and promote mifepristone availability in the wake of the Dobbs decision. 

At its inception in 1970, Title X of the Public Health Service Act was championed by President Richard Nixon and incoming President George H. W. Bush, as it sought to improve access to family planning services to low-income women. It was an easy sell because, in its original form, the Title X program expressly prohibited grant recipients from using the funding to provide abortions, as aborting an unborn child was not considered a legitimate form of “family planning” at the time. Yet since then, Title X has been subject to a match of political volleyball, with Democratic presidents ordering HHS to use the funds for abortion clinics, while Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan onward have instated the Protect Life Rule, which prohibits the funding from being used in the same facilities where abortions take place. 

The Protect Life Rule, neutered by President Joe Biden, has yet to be reinstated by Trump during his second term. Yet, as the pro-life research organization Charlotte Lozier Institute has pointed out, the rule is ultimately a mere stopgap for more sturdy congressional action: “A bill that explicitly amends Title X to prohibit abortion referrals in Title X projects and requires strict separation between the projects and abortion businesses would avert threats to this federal program by future administrations.” In other words, Republican congressmen can defund Planned Parenthood themselves, and more permanently than Trump ever could. One has to wonder what they’re waiting for, with a Republican majority in both houses and a Republican in the Executive Office. 

Despite their political strength, Republicans are still sheepish on national abortion legislation, perhaps habitually so. This is somewhat understandable: Multiple state-level pro-life ballot initiatives have failed (though few have been exceptionally strategic), and the fearmongering from the left about a national abortion ban has yet to let up since 2022. Truly, there is nothing a Republican loves less than proving a Democrat right, even for the sake of an objectively good policy. 

Yet, Trump was re-elected after his judges overturned Roe. This says something, however ambiguous, about the moral compass of the American people. Abortion turned out to be a lot less of a rallying cry for either side in the 2024 election than expected, which means now could be exactly the moment to gently roll the ball forward. There is much room between banning abortion and saying the government may not, in fact, subsidize organizations that profit from killing low-income, minority children. 

In any case, the dismissal of the Title X lawsuit clears the way for a more successful fight against Planned Parenthood funding, which rumors on Pennsylvania Avenue suggest could be coming soon. At the very least, reinstating the Protect Life Rule would seem an easy win for pro-life voters on the eve of the March for Life in Washington, D.C.

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Last year the United Nations Population Division predicted that global population will peak in approximately sixty years, at around 10.3 billion people. After that, the number of human beings will begin to fall. Population decline has already begun in sixty-three countries, including China and Russia. The cause is persistent low fertility. At the world scale, the number of children being born is already below the levels required for a stable population, generally considered to be 2.2 per woman in rich nations and a bit more in poor ones. More than half of all countries today have sub-replacement fertility rates. Japan, Canada, and most Western European countries have been below replacement for fifty years. Today, not only rich countries but even middle-income ones such as Mexico, the Philippines, and Iran are below the levels required to stave off future population decline.

And these are the optimistic forecasts. UN population predictions typically overshoot reality. A 2020 paper published in The Lancet forecast that global population would peak in the 2060s at around 9.7 billion, twenty years sooner and 600 million people fewer than the UN proposed. Population decline will only accelerate after this peak. By the end of the century, countries such as China, Japan, Thailand, and Spain are expected to be reduced to half their present size. The result will be some combination of rapid societal aging, the abandonment of rural areas and small towns, and perpetual mass migration, the implications of which are only now beginning to be contemplated.

Conservatives have been writing about this topic for decades. Phillip Longman published The Empty Cradle in 2004, and Jonathan Last’s What to Expect When No One’s Expecting came out in 2013. Liberals, by contrast, have been wary of admitting that low fertility and population decline exist, much less that they are problems. They fear that simply discussing population will normalize racist and patriarchal ideas. Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, two economists at the University of Texas at Austin, aim to break the silence. In After the Spike, the authors advance what they call “the case for people” from a perspective rooted in economic, political, and philosophical ­liberalism.

In that After the Spike is of, by, and for liberals, this approach is a good thing. After all, it is liberals who need to be convinced that global depopulation rather than overpopulation is coming, that low fertility is a social problem, and that human existence is good. And if Spears and Geruso can convince liberals to support political, social, and cultural changes that encourage increased fertility, more power to them. Outside the liberal bubble, however, After the Spike falls well short of a convincing analysis of the population problem. Yet it fails in an interesting way that tells us a good deal about liberalism, why contemporary Western liberals have such a difficult time becoming pronatalist, and why liberal prescriptions for the problem are unlikely to succeed.

This is not to say that conservative pronatalism is guaranteed to work either. The headwinds of global low fertility are strong. As Spears and Geruso inadvertently show their readers, history gives little cause to believe a major fertility turnaround is possible, especially an engineered one. Though fertility policy can tweak the margins of human population, and every little bit helps, it will almost certainly fail to stabilize global population levels. Instead, the youngest readers of this book will live to see the first global decline in human population since the Black Death nearly seven centuries ago. The case for people should be made. At the same time, we must prepare for that case to fail.

After the Spike has two central goals. The first is to convince the reader that global population decline is coming. On this score, the book is a clear success. Spears and Geruso show that every country in the world today has either declining or sub-replacement fertility; even India and China, which together make up more than one-third of the world population, are, respectively, below and well below replacement. There are no “automatic stabilizers” guaranteed to keep fertility rates up and the global population stable. What produced the “population bomb” of the twentieth century is wholly incapable of producing similar growth in the twenty-first.

The book’s second goal is to convince the reader that global population decline is bad. Here simple demography will not suffice. To make the “case for people,” Spears and Geruso must choose economic, political, and philosophical arguments that they believe in and expect will resonate with the reader. Their arguments are rooted in core liberal values: equality, choice, progress, humanity. If the reader doesn’t agree to privilege these values, or finds the authors’ unwavering commitment to them impractical or ­naive, he will quickly tire of this book. After the Spike makes a lengthy and serious effort, however, to sway the liberal reader. Fully half its ­pages are devoted to convincing liberals that there is no contradiction between reversing fertility decline and contemporary liberal commitments.

The authors argue, for instance, that depopulation will do nothing to help the climate. On development, they show that the quality of life in poor countries has improved despite tremendous population growth. They also argue persuasively that past technological, economic, and social progress has been dependent on population growth. As “progress comes from people,” a future of population decline will be a future without progress.

Here Spears and Geruso run into a contradiction that troubles their entire book. They admit that progress has been driving down fertility rates “for several hundred years”—for at least as long as we have reliable records—because “a better world, with better options, makes parenting worse by comparison.” Children increasingly compete against careers and consumption and leisure and self-actualization for space in adults’ definition of the good life. This is economists’ now-standard “opportunity cost” explanation of low and declining fertility. As much in India as in the U.S., today there are just too many ways to spend time and money other than on children. Because Spears and Geruso are so dedicated to the value of free choice, they shrink from any suggestion of changing people’s preferences. So they present no case for nudging behavior by increasing the benefits of having children or the costs of not having them. The only thing to do, in their view, is to keep reducing the “burden” of having children among people who currently want them, in a constant race against (and yet for) progress.

One is led to wonder how low both actual and opportunity costs can go. Can they go so low that “enough” children will be born to stabilize global population? The authors have nothing to say on this point, because they don’t take the social contradictions between fertility and progress seriously. The book faces this problem especially in its discussion of fertility and feminism. Spears and Geruso insist that gender egalitarianism is perfectly compatible with replacement-level fertility. In fact, they venture that gender “fairness might be the only way to stabilize the population.” Yet their evidence is spare and unconvincing. The authors offer the United States between 1975 and 2010 as a “proof of concept.” During this period both gender equality and the fertility rate rose together. Rising female employment, a falling gender wage gap, more female education, more female professionals and leaders, more legal equality, and more babies! Yet Spears and Geruso conveniently ignore the preceding and following periods. Rising gender egalitarianism in the 1960s and early 1970s coincided with the steepest fertility fall in U.S. history. Progress in gender egalitarianism since 2010, whether in wages or educational attainment or seats on the Supreme Court, is likewise concurrent with falling fertility.

The authors also ignore the key question of population stabilization and how to reach it. Over the thirty-­five years in question, only two (2006 and 2007) saw above-replacement fertility rates—and that was due less to feminism than to unusually high fertility among young Hispanic women, particularly recent immigrants. “Fairness” also has a poor fertility track record internationally. The four large Nordic countries, the most gender-­egalitarian in the world, now have total fertility rates in the “very low” range, below 1.5. Excepting two years in the early 1990s in Sweden, they have not been above replacement rate in more than fifty years.

Though progress and gender egalitarianism are values Spears and Geruso are keen to defend, the authors’ most basic commitment is to individual choice. Not only is it their supreme value; in their view, it is also the fundamental cause of human fertility. The authors demonstrate, with good evidence, that “population control has never controlled the population,” at least not significantly over the long run. Neither communist China’s attempts to drive fertility rates down nor communist Romania’s attempts to drive them up accomplished anything more than short-term effects, at the cost of tremendous human suffering. Thanks to universal “socioeconomic development,” from urbanization to modernity to the waning of patriarchy, no power can change population at mass scale against the combined choices of billions of individual women. The authors are so careful not to tread upon free choice that they repeatedly affirm the freedom not to have children as much as the freedom to have them. Thus, all we can—and, in their view, should—do is “make it easier to choose children.”

Who will do this work of easing? According to Spears and Geruso, “humanity” will. Throughout After the Spike there are only two actors: the individual, who chooses; and humanity, which is tasked with enabling individual choice. Not even states—much less families, schools, clubs, religious organizations, neighborhoods, voluntary organizations, the media, or political parties—are tapped for a meaningful role. There is only “humanity,” the great “we” who hold “shared responsibility” for the future, because “responding to global depopulation is going to have to be something that people do together.”

This is a deeply unsatisfying answer. Humanity is not an actor. There is no global polity with an ability to aggregate and express the collective will of the entire human population. Of course, it may be that the appeal to “humanity” is not meant to be persuasive. It allows the authors to cultivate an aura of doing something, without engaging in a discussion of politics. They thus avoid questions of the exercise of power through strong cultural norms, taxation, regulation, or law—all of which would entail a violation of free choice. At the end of the book the authors cannot even muster a call for a personal commitment to reversing population decline by getting married, starting a family, or adding one more child. Instead the reader is offered vaguely social-policy-oriented slogans to “aspire bigger,” “join the conversation,” and “get started.”

But can the bearing and raising of children be made cheaper than all the possible low-fertility adult lifestyles that, thanks to progress, are now on offer? What if driving down the opportunity cost of having children simply isn’t enough? After all, Spears and Geruso have given us good reason to believe it isn’t. Fertility rates have been declining for centuries, and there is no invisible hand guiding human populations to a stable equilibrium. Being liberals, the authors simply assume that nature and tradition will drive the reproduction of society. But as the sociologist Anthony Giddens has argued, contemporary Western societies live after nature and after tradition. We no longer accept either necessity or fate. We refuse to believe we are the subjects of any power beyond the reach of individual or collective human choice. From a liberal perspective, of course, this is progress, born of our technologies, from airplanes to genetic engineering to birth control. As such technologies spread across the globe, all people come to live with the same autonomy from nature and tradition. And with nothing compelling us to choose children, the evidence strongly indicates that we won’t. At least, we won’t choose enough of them to stop the global population from running down the steep slope of the spike as rapidly as we ran up it.

The way in which humanity addresses low fertility and population decline will be much the same as the way we have already addressed climate change. The great projects to stop atmospheric CO₂ concentrations at 350 parts per million or limit temperature increases to +1.5°C from pre-industrial levels have already failed. Instead, individual governments and industries have pursued their own divergent interests while working at the margins to develop “green” alternatives—even as global fossil fuel consumption, thanks to technological progress, continues to increase. As low birth rates persist, some governments will lean heavily on immigration, while others will choose capital investments to compensate for labor shortages. Many policies for radically lowering the cost of bearing and raising children will be tried. Some will succeed on the margins, but most will not. Societies will adapt to their own distinctive combinations of rapid aging, mass immigration, urban population concentration, and peripheral area depopulation.

This process won’t continue forever. Our future is not extinction. Low fertility and population decline contain the seeds of their own destruction. Spears and Geruso show that “progress comes from people.” A future of fewer people will therefore produce a future of less progress. If population decline is steep enough, progress will halt, thus eliminating the force that undermines human fertility. Five billion humans—half the number at the top of the spike—won’t build lunar bases, use room-temperature superconductivity, reverse aging, or merge with AI. We might even lose many technologies, institutions, and cultural practices that are dependent on complex global systems. Then nature and tradition will return, and with them the individual motivation and social organization necessary for human reproduction.

No one can say when it will occur. All we can know is that that world will be quite different from our own. It will likely be a world that sees its own future not in the advancement of individual autonomy, but in the fruitfulness of its people. 

Image by theodoritsis, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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Yes, the administration has been ostentatious about performing aspects of religiosity. But its top policy priorities have tended not to display any real commitment to the concerns raised by people of faith. Old-guard concerns about the institution of marriage, single parenthood, drug use, gambling, vice, and, yes, abortion have all tended to be back-burnered.

Put aside prudential concerns raised by some about the White House’s application of just war theory, the expansion of marijuana availability, or its chaotic foreign aid cuts. On the issue of life alone, the second Trump administration has defended Biden-era regulations around the abortion pill, expanded federal support for fertility technology that destroys embryos, and approved a generic version of the abortion pill. Now, just this week, the president directed Congressional Republicans to be more “flexible” in allowing taxpayer funding to partially subsidize insurance coverage of abortion. 

To be sure, the pro-life segment of the coalition has not been left empty-handed: The traditional reinstatement of the Mexico City policy, the pardons issued to imprisoned pro-life activists, and Congress’ temporary defunding of Planned Parenthood should all be counted as positives. But overall, the policy wins have mostly stacked up on the “cultural”—or, if you prefer, “secular”—side of the ledger, compared to conservatism’s more socially traditionalist or religious wing. 

Politics will always require some measure of strategic alliances. The ultimate goal for pro-lifers remains convincing more Americans that we have the best interests of pregnant women and the children they carry at heart and can be trusted to enact laws that take seriously both of their claims on justice. That work won’t be accomplished according to the timetable of a midterm election cycle. As EPPC president (and my boss) Ryan Anderson wrote for First Things in the heat of the 2024 election, “we are all incrementalists now.” 

The problem, as Ross Douthat replied in his New York Times newsletter, is that “nobody can yet fully agree on what incrementalism means.” Talk to pro-life leaders about the right priority for the next three years and you’ll get a half-dozen ideas: We should investigate abortion pill residue in the groundwater; push to make birth free; double down on preventing Planned Parenthood from ever receiving any federal dollars; fund a national abortion pill reversal hotline; focus on making state laws ever-more restrictive.

These ideas, and more, have at least some merit. But if everything is a priority, nothing is. And without the galvanizing goal of overturning Roe, or pushing for a signature federal piece of legislation, the pro-life movement runs the risk of having too many targets at which to shoot, and too little coherence to do so effectively. 

So what, then, should be the focus of federal energies during the remaining years of President Trump’s second term in office? I propose pro-life organizations and actors train their fire on two goals.

Above all else, pro-lifers should be uncompromising in continually upping the pressure on the Trump administration around the abortion pill. The Biden administration’s decision during the pandemic to allow women to receive a prescription without meeting with a doctor in-person dramatically expanded access to abortion pills. Not only has that led to an uptick in abortions post-Dobbs, it has also produced horrifying cases of men mail-ordering abortion drugs and covertly administering them to wives or girlfriends. At a bare minimum, a nominally pro-life White House should restore the in-person requirement. Anything other than a reversal of the Biden administration’s mifepristone regulations should be seen as rank political cowardice and a betrayal of the movement that helped get the president elected. 

The next goal will require a little bit more of a stretch—but it’s far from outside the realm of political reality. Pro-life groups should put their energies behind a concerted push to get cash assistance into the hands of new parents shortly after childbirth, commonly known as a “baby bonus.” 

In its ideal form, a “baby bonus” would arrive right around the same time as the child’s Social Security Card, either via direct deposit or as a physical check. A $2,000 or $4,000 upfront payment to new parents would not be intended as a way of lifting America’s birth rates or improving maternal and infant health outcomes—though those may be happy side effects. It would, however, be intended to recognize the costs associated with having kids, in terms of both new expenses and income foregone, and a visible signal that America proudly stands with new parents who choose to bring their child to term. 

Ideally, such a provision would recognize the importance of having two married parents in the household, and give both mom and dad more flexibility to take time off of work around the birth of a child. This could easily be done by ensuring a “baby bonus” provides a baseline of support for single parents (who are most at risk of choosing abortion) while doubling the amount for married parents. Crucially, it would need to be salient and accessible—not tucked in to the next tax filing season, or a savings plan that won’t provide assistance for decades hence. There are plenty of other policy goals that could fit into a pro-life policy schema, but none are as compelling as up-front cash assistance for new parents. 

Standing staunchly against pro-abortion moves, whether from the other political side or within one’s own party, will require tenacity and courage. But concentrating the financial power, political engagement, and prophetic witness of the pro-life movement on two discrete goals could give the movement some much-needed definition during the waning years of a lame duck administration. 

Pro-lifers must be prudent. But prudence should not excuse cowardice. Plenty of governors have signed pro-life legislation in red and red-purple states and paid no political price. The lesson is not that pro-life moves are popular across the board, but that acting on pro-life convictions need not be an albatross if a governing coalition is also delivering wins on economy, inflation, and the border. If a political party is failing on pocketbook issues, however, no amount of social issues fecklessness will save them.

Perhaps a future Republican president will be more willing to expend political capital on the pro-life cause. For now, many within the GOP, including the current president, would prefer the issue fade quietly from view. If the pro-life movement can agree on an intra-squad compact around two goals—one offensive, one more defensive—it has a better chance of ensuring its victory in Dobbs was merely the end of a chapter, and not the beginning of the end of its story.

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Anyone who raises a question about the legitimacy of IVF and surrogacy is vulnerable to accusations of being meanspirited or even of denying the humanity of the children born through these methods. My answer to such criticism has always been that I do not deny the humanity of such children but, ironically, the procedure itself encourages society to think of children as commodities. In the eyes of the law, they necessarily become analogous to pieces of property, to things, as the law must intervene in the many complicated situations that arise as a result of divorcing reproduction from its traditional context. When the surrogate child has Down syndrome, for example, who has parental responsibility? Those who donated egg and sperm, or the woman bearing the child in her womb? If the people paying for the process want the child aborted, do they have the right to demand the surrogate does as they desire? And as we move in the (near?) future toward the commercial creation of children from other body cells, the questions will only become more complicated. 

I have never denied the humanity of a child born through IVF or surrogacy. Indeed, it is not the critics of the processes but the processes themselves that are shifting the cultural imagination toward seeing children not first and foremost as persons but rather as things, as pieces of property to be defined and disposed of by the law of the land, not the law of nature.  

But is reproductive technology the source of the problem or rather something made plausible by longstanding shifts in other areas of our culture? A friend who read my manuscript in advance has raised an interesting point: Did the advent in the West of no-fault divorce effectively set this whole process of objectification in motion? In retrospect, it seems obvious how its redefinition of marriage as a sentimental, utilitarian contract paved the way for gay marriage. But what of its effect on how society treats children? No-fault divorce has made into a routine part of our cultural imagination something that previously applied only in extreme cases—the consideration of children as pieces of property whose relationship to parents is necessarily a matter for the courts to decide.

The point is a pungent one and a reminder that marriage is part of the ecology of what it means to be human. Alterations in its definition or function cannot be confined to the domestic sphere but necessarily have a transformative effect on the broader anthropological question. The practical definition of marriage in any given society is connected to how that society understands what it means to be human. Make marriage a sentimental, contractual bond and you have to revise the relationship between the children that are its fruits, and thus parenthood. In short, you have to revise the most basic of human relationships—and therefore the concept of humanity itself—at a foundational level. In a no-fault divorce world, all relationships become contractual, even that between parent and child. And given that the Christian (and Jewish) view is that human beings are made in the image of God, such basic revision of what it means to be human has religious significance. Revise the image of God and you revise the nature of God. 

The next decade looks set to bring a cascade of novel moral challenges into the lives of many people, not least in the area of reproduction. The Protestant churches will find the challenge of fertility treatment to be particularly acute. That is not to say that Catholicism faces no difficulties. The routine and unchecked practical rejection of the Catholic Church’s teaching in the area of reproduction by vast numbers of her adherents is an ecclesiastical scandal, while the annulments of marriages that have produced children look, to this Protestant at least, just a little too culturally convenient when compared to Christ’s own rather more stringent teaching on the matter. 

But those huge problems are for Catholics to address. My Protestant world has problems of its own. It has largely lost its sense of human teleology as a whole and it has bought into a pragmatic, utilitarian view of reproduction. How many pastors even know where to begin when it comes to IVF and surrogacy, let alone what conclusions to draw? Further, and to return to my friend’s comment, its casual acceptance of no-fault divorce many years ago not only altered the ecology of marriage but also of anthropology itself. The churches’ longstanding desecration of man is bearing fruit, not least in the way it accepted divorce laws that pressed us all toward seeing children as things. And that makes clear thinking about reproductive technologies such as IVF impossible, short of a willingness to take unpopular, distressing, and counter-intuitive positions.

The post When No-Fault Divorce Turns Children into Commodities appeared first on First Things.

As traditional birth tourism—traveling to the United States late in pregnancy to give birth and secure U.S. citizenship for a child—began to wane under increasing scrutiny and FBI enforcement, a new form of high-tech birth tourism emerged. While most developed nations prohibit international commercial surrogacy, the United States, along with Ukraine, supports a thriving reproductive tourism industry. It allows foreign nationals to have children through American surrogate mothers and return home with a baby and U.S. citizenship in hand. Once the child turns twenty-one, the entire family can apply for citizenship through a green card application—a method, one surrogacy agency notes, that is a “cheaper alternative to the American EB-5 visa.” 

I stumbled upon this phenomenon in 2022. Given the misguided U.S. interpretation of birthright citizenship, a growing number of Chinese nationals were coming to the U.S. to have babies. Some were couples—beyond their own childbearing years—who wanted more children once China’s “one child” policy was lifted. Others were single men who were unable to find a female partner willing to have children, as Chinese women increasingly prioritized career over families. Still others are in same-sex relationships, and, wanting to please their parents, go abroad to have children. Given that surrogacy is illegal in China, the U.S. was an alluring alternative for wealthy Chinese citizens. 

The problem is far worse than I initially imagined. Not only does the United States lack any federal law governing domestic or international surrogacy, but recent reporting suggests the industry is being scaled in ways that defy even its own justifications. An unsettling Wall Street Journal investigation found that a growing number of ultra-wealthy Chinese nationals are using American surrogates to have as many children as possible—sometimes dozens at a time, and in extreme cases, more than a hundred.

The motivations vary. Some view surrogacy as a way to secure heirs or build dynasties amid China’s collapsing birthrate. Others openly describe plans to marry daughters strategically, consolidate wealth, or raise large cohorts of children groomed for leadership in business and technology. In a striking reversal of the male preference that once defined China’s one-child policy, some intended parents now deliberately select for girls, citing industries they believe increasingly favor female leadership.

The Wall Street Journal illustrated this phenomenon through the case of Xu Bo, a reclusive Chinese videogame billionaire who has become a symbol of surrogacy’s excesses. Xu, who lives in China, sought legal recognition as the parent of multiple children born through American surrogates. In 2023, as the Journal reports, a California judge denied his request—an unusual move in a system where parentage orders are typically routine—leaving several children in legal limbo. At the time, some of the children were being cared for by nannies in Southern California while awaiting documentation to travel abroad.

When asked about the number of children Xu Bo had, the “Duoyi Network said the 300 figure was wrong but confirmed a stunning fact: ‘After many years of effort’ through surrogacy in the U.S., Xu has ‘only a little over 100’ children.” Only one hundred children. 

Cases like Xu’s are not occurring in isolation. The New York Times also recently published a harrowing account of women from Asia trafficked into illegal and abusive surrogacy arrangements that often involved forced egg retrieval and exploitation so severe that some victims said it was worse than prostitution, because “they really had no idea what had been done to their bodies. Sex work was self-explanatory, but white pills, injections and suppositories could be anything.” Together, these stories expose an industry that treats both women’s bodies and children’s lives as commodities that can be sold on the international market. 

All of it is governed by contracts and legal frameworks designed to normalize what is, in effect, baby-selling. Indeed, the only legal distinction between baby-selling and a “legitimate” commercial surrogacy agreement is timing: whether the contract is signed before or after a child is conceived. A child born through this process can have as many as six adults involved in his or her creation—the egg donor, sperm donor, intended parent or parents, surrogate mother, and IVF physician—yet no law or contract is designed to represent the child’s best interests. When disputes arise or arrangements unravel, it is the child who bears the ultimate cost: through abortion, abandonment, or neglect.

These stories illustrate what recent studies have long shown. In 2024, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s journal Fertility and Sterility published an article examining international commercial surrogacy contracts between 2014–2020. Not only did the number of foreign surrogacy agreements in the U.S. nearly double during that time frame, but the report found that the international “rent-a-womb” industry is disproportionately fueled by Chinese nationals (41.7 percent).

The most common demographic overall? Asian men over the age of forty-two. Such persons were also far more likely to use embryonic genetic screening tools to select the ideal human embryo. With 75 percent of these contracts taking place in California, it appears the Silicon Valley pronatalist’s dream of not merely having more babies, but more babies of a certain kind, lives on in these Chinese billionaires—many of whom cited Elon Musk as their role model. 

Thankfully, lawmakers are beginning to respond. Sen. Rick Scott recently introduced the SAFE Kids Act, which would bar foreign nationals from adversarial countries such as China from accessing the U.S. commercial surrogacy industry. While narrowly targeted at the most egregious cases, the bill reflects growing recognition that the current system is rife with abuse. Similarly, President Trump’s executive order “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” signaled renewed scrutiny of birthright citizenship, particularly when it is obtained through legal loopholes rather than genuine ties to the country. Yet it remains unclear whether the order’s current language would deny citizenship to children born via surrogacy or egg donation to foreign nationals.

Within days of the executive order, surrogacy organizations published guidance to preserve that loophole. Immigration lawyers and agencies have closely parsed the executive order’s definitions of “mother,” “father,” and “progenitor,” arguing that if a U.S. citizen surrogate gives birth, the child should automatically receive citizenship, even when the intended parents are foreign nationals. Some agencies have gone further, advertising procedural workarounds such as a “two-step birth certificate process” designed specifically to secure U.S. citizenship for children of international clients. 

Americans recognize that something has gone wrong. In a J.L. Partners survey earlier this year, 33 percent of respondents said the U.S. should ban non-citizens from accessing commercial surrogacy services, 29 percent said there should be strict regulations and limitations but not an outright ban, and 12 percent said that clinics should be required to report and track foreign clients. 

With public opinion so clearly aligned amid mounting evidence of citizenship arbitrage, large-scale child production, and systemic disregard for child welfare, lawmakers face a choice. They can continue pretending this is a private transaction between consenting adults, or they can confront the reality that international commercial surrogacy in the United States has become a market in babies and passports. If citizenship is to mean anything at all, it cannot remain for sale.

The post The Wealthy Chinese Buying Babies and American Citizenship appeared first on First Things.

There is a connection between the twenty-first-century abortion wars and the Inklings of Oxford. Owen Barfield, the philosopher, novelist, and a key influence on both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, was one of the fifteen founders of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children. SPUC holds the distinction of being “the first group anywhere in the world formed to campaign against legalized abortion”—at least in the twentieth century—and served as a countermovement during the parliamentary discussions leading to the passage of the 1967 Abortion Act.  

Barfield is not as famous as his Inkling counterparts, but his influence permeates some of their most famous works. Lewis credited him with the ideas behind his Space Trilogy and dedicated The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to Barfield’s daughter, Lucy, Lewis’s goddaughter. Barfield’s philosophy also shaped Tolkien’s Middle Earth languages through his book Poetic Diction; the same work also informed the perversion of language in Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, an essential read for our times.

Unlike Lewis and Tolkien, both of whom died before the abortion debate began in earnest, Barfield addressed the subject directly in his writing, as Barfield scholar Landon Loftin detailed in a 2023 paper in the Journal of Inklings Studies. In a 1967 letter to the editor of Anthroposophical Quarterly titled “The Abortion Bill,” Barfield detailed his contribution to the launch of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, called on readers to join SPUC and to write to MPs to oppose the 1967 Abortion Act, and summarized his own view on abortion:

It is not for one human being to decide, even on compassionate grounds, that another human being had better not live. If it is not wrong to destroy an unborn baby because it may very probably be deformed, it must be even less wrong to wait and see, and then destroy it after it is born because it certainly is deformed. But nobody wants that . . . yet!

“Because of this,” Barfield wrote, “and because very few people are in the least aware of what is going on, or for that matter, of what abortion practice involves in way of discreetly suppressed horrors, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children was formed.” 

In “The Politics of Abortion,” a 1972 essay in the Denver Quarterly, Barfield observed that both sides of the abortion debate were essentially arguing past each other, with communication breaking down to the point where there was (and is) fundamental disagreement on what terms like “right,” “human,” “health,” and even “life” meant. Even terms describing different stages of human development are used as tools of dehumanization: “For some people an embryo is an actual or potential human being and they do not easily forget when they read of one that cried for half an hour before it was consigned to the bucket. For others (the easy-abortionists) it is not a human being in any sense; it is a ‘foetus,’ and that is all there is to it.”

Barfield’s warning that the lack of common or shared language prevents genuine debate is truer now than when he wrote it; it is also true that abortion activists actively seek to subvert language to justify these “suppressed horrors.” When American states began to pass “heartbeat” bills, banning abortion at six weeks when an unborn child’s heartbeat can be detected, abortion activists insisted that the media instead refer to “fetal pole cardiac activity” bills. “Heartbeat” is too humanizing, and to humanize the unborn leads to obvious and inconvenient moral conclusions. 

Abortion is also the norm in Barfield’s 1975 dystopian science fiction novella Night Operation, set in a society that has taken to the sewers beneath ruined cities, driven underground by fear of terrorist attacks. The protagonist Jon, Barfield writes, had escaped being aborted by pure chance: “It was simply that the gynaecologist’s prognosis had indicated no special reason for aborting him and his mother’s distaste for the messy business of childbearing had not been quite strong enough of itself to make her opt for it. Somehow or other he had slipped in.” Barfield saw the “easy-abortionists” coming a long way off.

Barfield lived long enough to see many of his predictions come to fruition. He died in 1997, aged ninety-nine, the “first and last Inkling.” His anti-abortion advocacy can be seen as an extension of the Inklings’ collective worldview into the post-Christian era that Lewis so presciently predicted. The work of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children continues, exposing the “discreetly suppressed horrors” that have become horrifyingly common since the Abortion Act, speaking not just for the vulnerable, but carrying on the legacy of the Inklings of Oxford.

The post The Inkling Who Fought Abortion appeared first on First Things.

That scheme burst into public view this summer when California authorities raided a sprawling mansion in Arcadia, removing fifteen children from the home of Guojun Xuan, sixty-five, a former Chinese government official, and his partner, Silvia Zhang, thirty-eight. Among the children was a two-month-old with a severe head injury. Authorities ultimately discovered twenty-one children, all with American birth certificates naming the couple as parents. Most were born to American women recruited online through “Mark Surrogacy,” an agency the couple secretly owned.

Neighbors said the mansion resembled a business, with a reception area and rows of nursery-style rooms. Investigators soon traced the couple’s network beyond surrogacy. Properties linked to Xuan were tied to narcotics, gambling, and firearms trafficking. His business partner, Haoren “Dragon” Ma, is a convicted felon who served time for orchestrating more than eight hundred fraudulent asylum applications for Chinese nationals. Xuan himself is a prominent pro–Communist party figure, part of a larger network extending Beijing’s reach abroad. For more than two decades, he also served as a senior official in Xinjiang province, where China has waged a campaign of repression and genocide against the Uyghur people.

The Arcadia story was no surprise to those familiar with the surrogacy industry. In the last year alone, a Chicago veterinarian was arrested on child pornography and abuse charges just days before he and his male partner were set to collect their surrogate-born son. In Pennsylvania, a registered sex offender was exposed online after posting videos with the child he and his partner obtained through surrogacy. YouTubers Shane Dawson and Ryland Adams welcomed a son the same way, sparking outrage after past videos surfaced of them joking about pedophilia and child rape. These cases reveal a simple truth: In much of the country, there are virtually no barriers to buying a child.

Surrogacy in the United States is governed almost entirely at the state level, and many states have adopted permissive frameworks that treat surrogacy as a private contract rather than a public concern. No states, for example, legally require intended parents to undergo background checks or home visits, which are standard practices in adoption.

It was a welcome development, then, when Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, released a report warning that “the practice of surrogacy is characterized by exploitation and violence” and urged governments to begin “tak[ing] steps towards eradicating surrogacy in all its forms.”

These cases reveal a culture willing to turn children, mothers, and even American citizenship into commodities that foreign powers can use for access and influence. In doing so, they hollow out the meaning of family, nation, and human dignity.

America’s surrogacy laws are underwritten by an absolute commitment to bodily autonomy. In practice, this commitment entails a simple syllogism: It is within a woman’s rights to do as she pleases with her body, even consent to a surrogacy contract. But that logic collapses under scrutiny. Consent is not a shield against exploitation, and an agreement on paper can conceal far deeper pressures at work.

In the United States, it is estimated that only 2 percent of contracts are altruistic, or unpaid, suggesting that lower-income women are attracted to surrogacy for financial reasons. (Surrogate-mothers can make up to $75,000 in the United States.) When New York legalized commercial surrogacy in 2021, for example, altruistic surrogacy was already legal, but very few women volunteered without pay. Legalizing commercial surrogacy was championed as “necessary” to recruit enough surrogates—an implicit admission that money, not altruism, drives supply. Across the U.S., laws prohibit the sale of organs and criminalize prostitution precisely because there are some things that should be safeguarded from market influence. Renting reproductive capacity belongs in that category.

Even if money were no factor, there is another problem. True consent requires an honest understanding of risk, and surrogacy is far riskier than the industry acknowledges or is required to disclose. A 2024 population-based study of nearly one million singleton births in Ontario found gestational carriers had the highest rates of severe maternal morbidity compared to IVF and natural births (7.1 percent vs. 4.6 percent vs. 2.4 percent). Postpartum hemorrhage and hypertensive disorders were also markedly higher among surrogates. Other analyses show surrogacy pregnancies are up to three times more likely to end in C-section and five times more likely to result in premature birth. Moreover, postpartum recovery is harder without breastfeeding or skin-to-skin bonding; oxytocin levels remain lower, with downstream effects on recovery and mental health.

Finally, when things go awry, surrogacy contracts can reveal mismatched expectations between the purchasing parents and the surrogate-mothers. Take Melissa Cook, who conceived triplets after signing a surrogacy contract. She was horrified to discover that the purchasing father—a single man who was deaf—was unable to care for three children and wanted her to abort one or two. When she refused, he threatened her legally. 

Similarly, Brittney Pearson was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer a few months into her surrogacy pregnancy. She delayed her treatment until the child was twenty-five weeks old, to give him a chance at life. When the intended parents, a male same-sex couple, found out the child may have health complications, they asked her to have an abortion. She refused, but in the end, they denied the child life-saving care at birth. Bodily autonomy may give surrogate-mothers absolute control over the baby during pregnancy; but they lose all rights over the child the moment he is born. 

Surrogacy contracts are written by and for adults, yet the one most affected has no voice. Indeed, the only distinction between a legal commercial surrogacy agreement and an illegal baby-selling arrangement is the timing of the contract. It’s a difference of degree, not kind, and doesn’t change the underlying reality: Money is exchanged, and a child is transferred.

Defenders of surrogacy often claim that surrogate-born children experience no psychological harm. That conclusion rests entirely on a single longitudinal study led by Professor Susan Golombok. The U.K.-based study began in 2003 with forty-two surrogate-born children and ended at age fourteen with only twenty-eight children left in the study. Golombok’s study relied mostly on mothers’ self-reports, combined traditional and gestational surrogacy, and operated in an altruistic-only regime unlike U.S. commercial practice. 

At age seven—often when children learn of their origins—surrogate-born and donor-conceived children did worse than naturally-conceived peers, echoing adoption literature’s age of realization. Despite the clear methodological limitations, this single study is repeatedly cited by lawmakers and researchers to justify surrogacy. But there is a crucial difference between no harm and no known harm. Ultimately, such children have no legal representation and bear the greatest risk. 

While appeals to bodily autonomy have overshadowed legal efforts to regulate or reduce commercial surrogacy as a moral issue, a different set of concerns has begun to capture the public’s attention: international cross-border surrogacy, citizenship fraud, and national security concerns. 

When I began researching international commercial surrogacy—a practice banned in most developed nations—I was struck by how little oversight exists in the United States. Foreign citizens can contract with American surrogates, and under the current reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, surrogate-born children gain and maintain the full rights of U.S. citizenship, including a birth certificate, Social Security number, and passport, even if the intended parents are foreign nationals who plan to raise the child abroad. Worse still, authorities do not know who these children are, where they live, or how many exist.

A 2024 report in the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s journal Fertility and Sterility found that U.S. international surrogacy cycles nearly doubled from 2,758 cycles in 2014 to 4,905 cycles in 2019. (A single cycle refers to the process of implanting an embryo(s) into a surrogate-mother in hopes of conceiving a child.) Of all foreign nationals purchasing surrogate-born children, 41 percent are from mainland China, with France (9.2 percent) and Spain (8.5 percent) next in line. The study noted that the most common demographic taking advantage of this industry are Asian men over the age of forty-two. This isn’t exactly the crowd you picture knitting booties and singing lullabies.

“As long as you know what you want and you have money, having children in the U.S. will always bring advantages,” one Chinese case worker at a surrogacy agency told NPR. Those advantages are substantial. Once these U.S.-citizen children turn twenty-one and meet residency requirements, they can sponsor their parents and siblings for immigration. Some agencies even advertise surrogacy as a “cheaper alternative” to investor visas.

The surrogacy industry itself openly markets this outcome. As one  admits, “For international intended parents, the certainty of their child obtaining U.S. citizenship at birth is a significant factor in choosing the U.S. for surrogacy.” In plain terms, citizenship has become a product for sale alongside the child.

The scandals that opened this essay show what happens when a nation turns reproduction into a marketplace and reduces women to their wombs. That is why the U.N. Special Rapporteur has urged an end to surrogacy altogether, and why the United States must act to stop cross-border arrangements before we keep selling children for citizenship, or something worse.

California, where many of these surrogacy abuses took place, has some of the most detailed state laws regulating the industry. It’s not a question of more or better regulations. What we need are courageous leaders who boldly declare that some human goods—mothers, children, citizenship, and the bonds between them—are too precious to sell.

The post The Surrogacy Exploitation Crisis appeared first on First Things.

The broader question of reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization (IVF) creates real tension within the Christian and pro-life communities. Just last week, the Trump administration announced initiatives to make fertility treatments more affordable, including a deal to reduce the cost of IVF drugs. While our culture often insists that children are burdensome, Christians must continue to resist that narrative. We recognize that raising children is one of life’s greatest blessings and affirm that life begins at conception; that each human being bears a soul before being fully knit together in the mother’s womb. Yet within the pro-life movement, debate continues over which technologies align with biblical ethics. IVF has allowed many couples to have biological children when they otherwise could not, but it also raises deep moral and theological concerns.

Millions of embryos—human lives—are now frozen in storage around the world, often referred to as “babies on ice.” The process of creating and selecting embryos introduces troubling ethical issues: Embryos are often genetically screened and discarded or indefinitely frozen. Even the collection of sperm and eggs involves morally and medically questionable practices. IVF severs the intrinsic connection between marital intimacy and procreation, reducing conception to a laboratory procedure, and ultimately, to the commodification of human life itself.

In the United States, IVF operates with minimal federal oversight compared to nations like the United Kingdom, where every clinic is licensed and monitored by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. By contrast, U.S. fertility centers are largely self-regulated; about 10 percent fail to report outcomes to the CDC, and there are no federal limits on the number of embryos created, frozen, or discarded in the process. This lack of oversight only compounds the ethical problems, opening the door for further exploitation.

The prospect of turning ordinary skin cells into eggs, and eventually into embryos, takes this one step further. It transforms human life into a product that can be easily created, bought, and sold. Such technologies, rather than dignifying life, further commodify it and deepen the fractures in marriages, family, and society.

While the administration’s intent to make family-building more accessible may appear aligned with pro-family values, it also exposes a deep inconsistency. One cannot champion life while simultaneously embracing practices that bring about its destruction at the earliest stage. This moment invites Christians to consider what it means to be fully pro-life, where conviction outweighs convenience.

It is tempting for Christians to celebrate any policy framed as “pro-family.” Yet Scripture reminds us that children are not manufactured goods but divine gifts. “Children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward” (Psalm 127:3). God’s design for family life is not arbitrary; it reflects his character and the relational nature. From Genesis onward, we see that human life springs from the union of man and woman; a creative partnership that mirrors the image of God himself (Gen. 1:27–28). Technologies that bypass or distort that design risk placing human ambition above God’s thoughtful design.

The White House’s announcement should prompt sober reflection among Christians, even those who have long supported this administration. To be pro-life means to defend human dignity at every stage and in every context, even when it challenges our preferred political leaders. We can celebrate the desire to support families while refusing to accept the destruction of embryos as a price of convenience.

This is a moment for the church to model integrity; to affirm good where it exists, to call out what is wrong, and to remember that our ultimate allegiance is to the Author of life himself. As James 1:17 reminds us, “Every good and perfect gift is from above.” Children are not owed to us; they are entrusted to us. To pursue parenthood apart from the moral order God established is to confuse gift with entitlement, creation with control.

The post Children Are Gifts, Not Products appeared first on First Things.

But least bad is still bad. 

The entire thrust of the policy is to make something unethical (IVF) more widely practiced. Such a policy is itself unethical. So while Americans won’t be required to violate their conscience, our public policy will promote IVF more now than ever before.

None of this is necessarily to cast aspersions on those pushing for IVF. President Trump, in his remarks at the White House on Thursday, showed compassion for the many Americans who struggle with infertility, and he clearly has real affection for children. He wants to be a pro-baby, pro-family president. His motivations are good.

But there is a stark contrast between these motivations and the ethical challenges with IVF—challenges that most Americans know little, if anything, about. And that contrast was on vivid display during the White House policy announcement. Sen. Katie Britt called President Trump the most pro-IVF president in history. An IVF industry representative praised the president for the new policy, showing crony capitalism is alive and well. RFK Jr. told President Trump that Trump “was doing God’s work” in promoting IVF. Falsehoods were repeated about the Alabama court ruling that initiated this most-recent wave of IVF frenzy. And no attention at all was paid to the ethical concerns with IVF, or to the medical reality that IVF doesn’t actually treat infertility.

When a reporter asked President Trump what his response was to pro-lifers with concerns, he seemed unaware that there were concerns: “I don’t know about the views of that . . . I think this is very pro-life. You can’t get more pro-life than this.” But IVF as practiced today entails massive killing and freezing of embryonic human beings. IVF doesn’t treat underlying causes of infertility and doesn’t respect the dignity of the human person in his or her creation, where people should be begotten, not made. 

Many couples experiencing infertility ache to start a family. Doctors don’t always impress on them the human costs of IVF. For one birth, doctors might create ten to twenty embryos, transfer several of the “most promising,” freeze the rest, and if more than one implants, abort the others. So the typical IVF cycle results in multiple dead and frozen embryos. And unlike in European nations, there are almost no laws in America regulating how many embryos can be created or destroyed, or how frozen embryonic human beings can be treated.

To some, this casual disregard is no accident, because IVF itself treats children as products of technical manufacture. It thus fails to respect the equal dignity of human beings in their very origins. Children are to be welcomed as the fruit of an act of marital love. Relating to a child instead as a producer relates to a product is the seed of all the abuses of the IVF industry—the casual creation and destruction of “spares,” the filtering out of “defectives,” the selection for sex and other specs (such as eye or hair color), the commodification of (often poor) women’s bodies as incubators. 

The fundamental moral concerns about IVF are not sectarian. While today the Catholic Church most prominently teaches that IVF itself is wrong, the three most prominent moral thinkers who opposed IVF’s introduction in the 1970s and ’80s were non-Catholic: the University of Chicago’s Leon Kass (Jewish), Princeton’s Paul Ramsey (Methodist), and Oxford’s Oliver O’Donovan (Anglican). The arguments stand or fall on the merits, not the religious identity (or lack thereof) of those making them. 

Alas, the White House event displayed no sensitivity to—or even awareness of—these concerns. But it wasn’t an outlier. Most Americans are unaware of these concerns. Indeed, truth be told, most church-attending Christians are blissfully unaware—because the Church has done such a poor job of teaching these truths. 

Which makes the White House’s concern to not burden the consciences of the Americans who do oppose IVF all the more laudable. I personally met with many high-ranking White House officials to express these concerns, and I know I wasn’t the only one. I appreciate that the president’s team engaged widely throughout this policy process and not only heard but responded to at least some of the concerns expressed. That said, instead of making IVF more affordable and accessible, the Trump administration needs to take steps to address our current state of unregulated embryo fabricating, freezing, and destroying. Embryonic human beings deserve the law’s protection.

The bulk of the Trump IVF policy entails two main features: lowering the prices on IVF and other fertility treatments by lowering the costs of key drugs through Most Favored Nation (MFN) pricing, and creating a new optional employer fertility insurance benefit. One aspect of this insurance benefit that was not highlighted during the Oval Office announcement but was explained to me by White House staff deserves mention: The new optional employer fertility insurance benefit is fully customizable, so that an employer could opt to offer a benefit only for ethical fertility treatments like restorative reproductive medicine. Indeed, restorative reproductive medicine is both ethically and medically superior to IVF, as it actually addresses the root causes of infertility, potentially allowing couples to conceive naturally through marital love instead of via technical manipulation in a petri dish. As the White House rolls out the details about this optional employer-sponsored fertility benefit, I know I’ll be looking into offering an ethical plan at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

All of which is to say that it could have been worse, and there are some real bright spots. But it’s ultimately a misguided policy. It highlights the reality that there is a lot of work yet to be done for those of us who believe in sound reproductive ethics.

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The approval of the chemical abortifacient, which raises the number of legal American mifepristone manufacturers from two to three, met immediate disapproval from pro-life leaders. Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, claimed the ball Biden set in motion was impossible to stop, but many in Washington seemed to agree with Sen. Josh Hawley when he said FDA Commissioner Marty Makary had “broken trust and faith.” Peter Laffin at the Washington Examiner described the debacle as a shattering of Trump and Vance’s “pro-life facade.” 

In reality, the Trump-Vance ticket was never pro-life, though rather less pro-abortion than the alternative. As Laffin notes, Vance committed to keeping mifepristone accessible before the election, and Trump affirmed he was “very unlikely” to limit access to it immediately after. Trump has since ordered the Justice Department to protect mail-order abortion pills, as though he felt the need to reassure his critics on the left that he will not be using the Comstock Act. 

Trump himself is only haphazardly pro-life; Vance, despite his Catholicism, seems almost eager to liberalize the abortifacient drug. Moreover, with the Covid-era federal provision for mail-order abortions, it would be difficult to overstate just how easy accessing mifepristone already is. It is available by mail from countless worldwide sellers, legitimate or otherwise, making state-level abortion bans largely meaningless at preventing chemical abortion. To understand this is not to say the second Trump administration has been a failure, but to recognize the reality of politics at play. A full 63 percent of Americans favored keeping mifepristone available in 2023, according to Gallup. Banning mifepristone might matter to the president of the United States, but not before it begins to matter to the American people.

Medically, there are very good reasons to reconsider manufacturing mifepristone. Mifepristone caused sepsis or other life-threatening side effects in 11 percent of women who used it in at-home abortions, according to an Ethics and Public Policy Center review of insurance claims related to some 865,000 mifepristone prescriptions between 2017 and 2023. It may contaminate water supplies, too, though the Environmental Protection Agency seems reluctant to study this; former EPA employees voiced fears that traces of the drug might be tracked in water pipes and used as legal evidence against women who ingest mifepristone in states with abortion bans. (EPA had no such qualms using the same surveillance technology during the Covid-19 pandemic, to identify which communities had the greatest rate of infection.) Both of these pale in comparison to the main effect, of course. Mifepristone results in death in 95–99 percent of unborn children who are exposed to it before ten weeks of pregnancy. 

It is strategy, more than chemistry, however, that drives FDA approval of generic drugs. Approving more generic mifepristone is another way of saying market economics will be given freer rein in the abortion industry: Increased supply results in decreased demand for the name brand drug, Mifeprex, and therefore decreased prices across the board. Once a handful of generic brands are allowed to circulate, the drug in question—like acetaminophen (Tylenol) or hydroxychloroquine—becomes unremarkable. That is, expanding access to mifepristone is not only fashionable, it is ideal to the politician who is tired of being asked about it. It is easier for everyone if the question of when life begins becomes irrelevant amid the onslaught of cheap products. 

Like many Americans, Trump has a natural distaste for the concept of baby killing. Also like them, his instinct is not half so strong when applied to first trimester abortions, when the human person hidden within the womb is so much harder to envision. Without a Christian ethic of human value, it is hard to make a convincing case for protecting the invisible child. Chemical abortions, which typically occur at or before ten weeks gestation, only make the occasion feel more private, an isolated decision that a woman may imagine involves only one person, herself. The question of violating a doctor’s conscience, for example—what Erin Hawley sought to press before the Supreme Court in FDA v. Alliance—is limited to the scenario of an emergency botched abortion; otherwise, all agency and responsibility is put in the hands of the mother. 

No one actually wants abortion to be a truly private act, of course. Generic mifepristone demonstrates this well. As the abortion pill becomes more common, it will more commonly be the source of lawsuits and horror stories, as that 11 percent of women who experience deadly side effects represents a more sizable number of victims. All of modern medicine has side effects, and medical malpractice insurance exists for a reason. Yet unlike the woman whose baby is aborted in a clinic, the woman who takes mifepristone at home has no doctor, no nurse, and no technician to blame if something goes wrong, much less if everything goes horribly right. Mifepristone lays the burden of responsibility squarely on her shoulders, as the sole agent of her child’s death. Maybe something went wrong, maybe she was mistaken about the nature of the drug, maybe she regrets her decision, it matters not: By putting more killing in the hands of mothers with practically no oversight, the FDA is giving women the unfettered freedom of choice abortion advocates have been begging for for generations. It is a responsibility they almost certainly are not prepared to meet.

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Chicago archbishop Blase Cardinal Cupich defended the award, saying it is being given to “recognize all the critically important contributions Senator Durbin has taken to advance Catholic social teaching in the areas of immigration, the care of the poor, Laudato Si’, and world peace.”

What has been missing from the discussion about the appropriateness of this award is the perspective of a Catholic who has served in public office. I spent sixteen years in the U.S. House of Representatives as a pro-life Democrat. In this light, I want to offer my unique understanding of how the bestowal of this award could undermine the Church’s witness in the public square. 

The Church has much less influence on Catholics in public life than it used to. This is evidenced in the Democratic party on the issue of abortion. Post-Roe, the party has always been pro-choice, but the existence of Catholic Democrats committed to the teachings of the Church meant that a pro-life wing remained. Though the number of self-identifying Catholics did not diminish, this faction gradually dwindled in Congress to near non-existence. 

There are two reasons why a Catholic politician would abide by the Church’s teachings. First, she may believe that for the sake of her soul she must follow, no matter the personal cost. Second, she may understand that her Catholic constituents will punish her if she does not. 

The diminished influence of the Church demonstrates that politicians’ concerns about the eternal and the temporal consequences of their actions has weakened considerably. This stems from fewer Catholics today understanding and respecting the Church’s teachings and how they are to be put into action in the public square. 

This is most obvious with regard to abortion. Part of the blame lies with Catholic politicians who have been sowing confusion on this issue. In 1984, then-New York Gov. Mario Cuomo’s slick defense of his refusal to support abortion restrictions included the claim that doing so would make “my religious value your morality” and “my rule of conduct your limitation.”

Recently, Sen. Durbin conveyed a similar attitude, saying, “My personal feelings on the subject [of abortion] are one thing. . . . When it comes to public policy, the opportunity for that decision should always be there.”

Both of these men began their political careers favoring pro-life policies. As Democrats, however, being pro-life hurt their political ambitions if they wanted to rise in the party. They needed a way out. 

Neither wanted to directly claim the Church is wrong on abortion. Instead, they crafted their rhetoric to profess a false claim about the doctrine of the Church—that understanding abortion to be “intrinsically evil” is only a faith-based belief. This suggests it is akin to the Virgin Birth or the Real Presence, neither of which the government would force Americans to believe. 

In claiming this, they were hoping to convince others—and possibly themselves—that there was no choice to be made between putting truth into practice and pursuing political advantage. While neither man reached the political heights they sought, both had very successful careers in the world’s eyes. 

Meanwhile, the assertions they made about abortion have had and continue to have negative consequences for the Church and the country. Countless Catholics have been misled about what the Church teaches. Other Catholic politicians have used this template over and over again as they duck their responsibility to defend the defenseless. Millions of abortions have continued. 

While it is bad enough when politicians act as politicians in the worst sense by making these claims, when Church leaders give their tacit approval through silence—or worse yet, honor a man who made them—it is destructive to the Church and undermines its witness in the world. 

Instead, Catholics, especially those in public life, need to hear the instructions that Pope Leo gave last month to a delegation of local elected officials from France. He reminded the group: “Christianity cannot be reduced to mere private devotion,” because “there is not the politician on one side and the Christian on the other.”  

Catholic public officials are “called to . . . deepen [their] understanding of the doctrine . . . and to put it into practice in the exercise of [their] duties and in the drafting of laws.” This is appropriate because “its foundations are fundamentally in accord with human nature, the natural law that everyone can recognize, even non-Christians, even non-believers.” 

Finally, the pope acknowledged that he is aware of partisan orders “to which politicians are subjected,” but emphasized that they need “courage to sometimes say ‘No, I cannot!’”

This is what Catholics need to hear, and heed, if we want to restore our witness. 

Image by Goat_Girl, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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Strictly speaking, artificial uteruses are not necessary for the development of bodyoids. Such a reprogrammed embryo could ­theoretically be created in a lab and implanted in a woman’s uterus, as is done with IVF. But the notion that an entity regarded as subhuman should be born from a human mother seems too gruesome even for these bioethical pioneers to contemplate.

The authors admit that many will find the prospect of bodyoids disturbing, but they argue that a “potentially unlimited source” of “spare” human bodies will be immensely useful and should be pursued. We could, for example, harvest the organs of these ­presumably nonsentient humans and conduct experiments on them in order to test drugs and other medical interventions. The authors even suggest that it would be more ethical to do drug testing on humans who cannot feel pain, because they lack nervous systems, than on animals that can feel pain. There are other potential benefits for animal species as well, they aver, since we could use animal bodyoids to avoid causing pain and suffering in the cows and pigs we slaughter for food.

Human bodyoids are not entirely within the realm of science fiction. Scientists have recently produced “embryoids,” or “synthetic ­embryos,” from reprogrammed stem cells, without the use of sperm and eggs. Embryoids are living entities that seem to develop as human embryos do but that presumably lack the capacity for full human development. (We do not know for sure that they do, as they are typically destroyed after fourteen days, before the heart and brain have begun to develop.) Just as advocates for embryoids argue that their innovation allows us to avoid the ethical problems associated with embryo-destructive research, so advocates for bodyoids propose to provide us with “ethically sourced ‘spare’ human bodies.”

The Christian ethicist Oliver O’Donovan described “a position too familiar to technological society, that of having achieved something that we do not know how to describe responsibly.” In the case of bodyoids, I submit, advocates do not know how to describe them at all. One can hear them stumbling over their words and fumbling with descriptors.

Bodyoids are human bodies. Or rather, human-like bodies. But not human in any morally relevant sense—they lack brains, after all. But sufficiently human that we can harvest their organs for transplant and conduct experiments on them to see how “real” humans would respond to drugs. Indeed, they are of interest to scientists precisely because they are so, well, so very human. But not really. For the most part.

Well, then, what are human bodyoids?

Long before ethicists began to contemplate living—or at least, undead—human creatures who lack all brain function, such entities were explored in science fiction and horror films. The precise name for such a creature is zombie. The concept has roots in Haitian folklore, where the term is zonbi, referring to a person who has been brought back from the dead through magical means to serve as a mindless slave. The problem with creating zombies, our stories suggest, is that they always come back to bite us. Creating them ­diminishes our humanity.

Are not zombies precisely what advocates of bodyoids want to conjure into existence—a mindless slave, biologically and physiologically human in all relevant ways, that can nevertheless be experimented upon, harvested, and killed with impunity? Indeed, by our current definition of brain death, such an entity cannot actually be killed because it is already dead. In this, too, it resembles a zombie. One can easily imagine a B-movie horror feature titled Revenge of the Bodyoids.

The concept of brain death—­defined as total cessation of all brain function—arguably paved the way for advocates of the ­creation and exploitation of bodyoids. As the authors of the article point out, “Recently we have even begun ­using for experiments the ‘animated cadavers’ of people who have been declared legally dead, who have lost all brain function but whose other organs continue to function with mechanical assistance.” What are we to make of the term “animated cadaver,” which seems to express a manifest contradiction?

Advocates for the brain-death criterion argue that death is the disintegration of the unified organism, and the brain is responsible for maintaining organismic unity. Liberal bioethicists also argue that without consciousness, though there may be a living human being, there is no morally or legally relevant “personhood.” But these arguments do not withstand scrutiny. The brain modulates the coordinated activity of the other organs; it does not create that coordinated activity. That is accomplished by the organic formal unity of the body as a whole—which modern science, with its reductionistic analysis of the body into component parts, fails to discern.

Although a brain-dead patient has no functional electrical activity of the brain, the patient continues, with the help of machines, to breathe and to circulate blood. The organs continue functioning and remain fresh for transplant. The body of a brain-dead person on a ventilator maintains homeostasis and ­coordinated unity of functions: The kidneys make urine; the liver makes bile; the immune system fights off infections; wounds heal; hair and fingernails grow; endocrine organs secrete hormones; broken bones ­heal and broken skin repairs; children grow proportionately as they age. Pregnant mothers can even gestate babies after brain death, sometimes for months. Consider the contradictions and manifest absurdities in this headline: “Brain-dead Virginia woman dies after giving birth.”

To all appearances, a patient in this state is not, in fact, dead. Some medical ethicists have therefore—quite sensibly—questioned the validity of “brain death” as a criterion for death. The brain-death criterion was developed by a Harvard Medical School committee in 1968 to free up ICU beds and promote organ ­transplantation—with death itself forming the foundation of the organ-transplant enterprise. For organ transplantation rests upon a paradox, perhaps an outright contradiction: a “dead” donor whose body, with its precious organs, is still living.

After a person is pronounced brain dead, if the family refuses transplantation or if the organs are deemed unsuitable for transplant, the following situations emerge. Once the ventilator is turned off, the patient’s heart may continue beating for several minutes, or even a few hours (especially if the patient is a newborn). Surely we would not send such a “dead” patient to the morgue, cremate her, or bury her while the heart still beats. Should we then give a drug, like potassium chloride, to stop the heart of the supposedly already dead patient? In some cases, we wait a day or two to shut off the machines of a patient who is pronounced brain dead, to allow family to travel and be at the bedside when the ventilator is discontinued and, eventually, the heart stops. Will the family witness the death of the patient, or merely the cessation of efforts to animate an already dead corpse? If the latter, why would family members want to be present for that?

Considering these oddities and absurdities, which stem from the legal fiction that brain death is the death of the person, “total brain failure” is a more accurate term than “brain death.” It indicates an irreversible coma, not a dead body. Perhaps such a person is “better off dead,” as many people assume. Certainly, it is ethically justifiable in such a situation, where meaningful recovery of human functioning is impossible, to discontinue life-extending measures such as ventilators or antibiotics. Even so, such a person is not yet dead.

Indeed, advocates of bodyoids, which would similarly lack all brain function, do not argue that a bodyoid is dead—merely that it is not human. Bodyoids are of interest precisely because they are living and human in all scientifically relevant respects. To their credit, the Stanford authors do mention the following danger: “Perhaps the deepest [ethical] issue is that bodyoids might diminish the human status of real people who lack consciousness or sentience”—such as those in a coma or babies born without a cerebral cortex (a severely disabling condition known as anencephaly).

However, the authors go on to dismiss this concern. They argue that, like bodyoids, a sufficiently detailed mannequin would look much like us; that does not make it human. But nobody is proposing scientific experiments on mannequins, and for good reason. However realistic they might appear, they are not human, and thus, unlike a bodyoid, they have no value for ­science and medicine.

A bodyoid’s value for science and medicine lies precisely in what it would be, which is not a zombie, not a dead person, not a mannequin that mimics the human form. It would be a profoundly disabled human being, designed and created to be profoundly ­disabled—a ­vulnerable human being so ­totally defenseless and voiceless that it could be exploited with ­impunity.

If this is the case, we would endorse this macabre project only if we ourselves had become, so to speak, moral zombies.

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Durbin, a Catholic, was ultimately elected and served in the U.S. House of Representatives as a self-proclaimed supporter of the right to life. On more than one occasion, he stated on record that he opposed abortion on demand and believed Roe v. Wade should be overturned.

But even as early as 1985, Durbin was already showing signs of betrayal. He claimed to oppose federal funding of abortion but voted against a provision to the Equal Rights Amendment that specified that abortions not be funded by the taxpayer. And in the fall of that year, he refused to support the Kemp-Kasten Amendment, which would have excluded groups performing or referring for abortions from receiving federal funding. In fact, Durbin went so far as to introduce his own amendment—called the Durbin Amendment—that actually required groups to refer or perform abortions in order to be eligible for funding at all. 

In 1986, the National Right to Life printed a letter in the Herald & Review, a Decatur newspaper, clarifying Durbin’s approach to abortion in Congress.

The respected National Right to Life Committee—which issues an annual compilation of congressional votes on abortion—reported that during 1985, Durbin voted anti-abortion on only three out of seven votes (on the House floor and in the Appropriations Committee). Durbin voted pro-life on the least controversial votes. On the “hot” issues where the outcome was in doubt, Durbin voted against the pro-life position.

So, what happened? In 2005—more than twenty years after appearing on stage at Springfield’s March for Life—Durbin answered this question. In an interview with Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press, Durbin laid out his personal evolution on the issue of abortion.

I came to Congress not having seen what I think is the important part of this debate and not understanding, if you will, really what was behind it. You know, it’s a struggle for me. It still is. I’m opposed to abortion. If any woman in my family said she was seeking abortion, I’d go out of my way to try to dissuade them from making that decision. But I was really discouraged when I came to Washington to find that the opponents of abortion were also opponents of family planning. This didn’t make any sense to me. And I was also discouraged by the fact that they were absolute, no exceptions for rape and incest, the most extraordinary medical situations. And I finally came to the conclusion that we really have to try to honor the Roe v. Wade thinking, that there are certain times in the life of a woman that she needs to make that decision with her doctor, with her family and with her conscience and that the government shouldn’t be intruding. It’s true that my position changed, but as Abraham Lincoln said when they accused him of changing his position, “I’d rather be right some of the time than wrong all the time.”

At best, his response is troubling. At worst, it’s a reflection of the lack of catechesis of his generation—“family planning” often being a euphemism for contraception—and, some could argue, the materialization of the prophetic concerns that Pope Paul VI laid out in his papal document on the regulation of birth, Humanae Vitae: “Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for . . . a general lowering of moral standards.”

Pope John Paul II went even one step further in Evangelium Vitae, describing contraception and abortion as “fruits of the same tree.”

It is true that in many cases contraception and even abortion are practiced under the pressure of real-life difficulties, which nonetheless can never exonerate from striving to observe God’s law fully. Still, in very many other instances such practices are rooted in a hedonistic mentality unwilling to accept responsibility in matters of sexuality, and they imply a self-centered concept of freedom, which regards procreation as an obstacle to personal fulfillment. The life which could result from a sexual encounter thus becomes an enemy to be avoided at all costs, and abortion becomes the only possible decisive response to failed contraception.

We see clearly how the Church has both anticipated and addressed exactly the conflict that Sen. Durbin claims to struggle with: One cannot consent to the use of contraception and also wholly oppose abortion. The two are inextricably linked.

We can also assume based on more recent votes that the senator’s conundrum continues to influence him. As recently as 2022, he voted to codify Roe v. Wade—an explicit contradiction of his former stance.

In November, the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Office of Human Dignity and Solidarity plans to honor Durbin with a “lifetime achievement” award, which will be presented by none other than the cardinal archbishop Blase Cupich. 

My organization, Illinois Right to Life, has stood alongside Springfield Bishop Thomas Paprocki to vehemently oppose this choice by the cardinal. The scandal of giving such an award notwithstanding, the senator’s soul hangs in the balance. Durbin’s “personal evolution,” as many in Illinois refer to it today, is a conundrum that’s played out in his life very publicly for more than thirty years.

One cannot help but call to mind the words of Pope Paul VI on the concern of the Church: “It is to be anticipated that perhaps not everyone will easily accept this particular teaching. . . . But it comes as no surprise to the Church that she, no less than her divine Founder, is destined to be a ‘sign of contradiction.’ She does not, because of this, evade the duty imposed on her of proclaiming humbly but firmly the entire moral law, both natural and evangelical.”

Image by White House (Pete Souza), licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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The Church teaches that abortion—the intentional killing of an unborn human being in the womb—is “intrinsically evil,” an action that is always and everywhere “incompatible with love of God and neighbor.” We must, as Pope John Paul II said in Evangelium Vitae, “have the courage to look the truth in the eye and to call things by their proper name.” In the case of abortion, “we are dealing with murder” since “[t]he one eliminated is a human being at the very beginning of life.” The Second Vatican Council described abortion as “an unspeakable crime.” Reflecting the inherently violent nature of the act, Pope Francis frequently compared abortion to hiring a mafia hitman “to take a human life to solve a problem.” Shortly after his election as Supreme Pontiff, Pope Leo XIV said to the Vatican Diplomatic Corps on May 16 that “no one is exempted from striving to ensure respect for the dignity of every person, especially the most frail and vulnerable, from the unborn to the elderly, from the sick to the unemployed, citizens and immigrants alike.” Unfortunately, Sen. Durbin has excluded the unborn from respecting their human dignity. The law “cannot declare to be right what would be opposed to the natural law.” Thus, efforts to create a legal right to abortion are inherently illegitimate and incompatible with justice and the common good.

Throughout his tenure, Sen. Durbin has been an outspoken proponent of legal abortion. In his nearly three decades in the U.S. Senate, Durbin has dedicated himself to creating, preserving, and expanding a legal right to abortion—that is, a legal right to kill an innocent human being in the womb. In vote after vote, Durbin has supported legislative efforts to exclude a whole class of human beings from the legal protections of the law. His views are so extreme that he even voted against the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act (which bans the gruesome procedure in which a child’s skull is punctured with a pair of scissors and its brains sucked out with a vacuum) and the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (which would require life-saving medical care for any child who happened to survive a failed abortion).

This obscene violence—a legal right to which Durbin sought to enshrine in American law—is contrary to human dignity and human solidarity. Thus, it is absurd that Sen. Durbin should be given an award from the office of “human dignity and solidarity” when Durbin has spent his time in office denying the human dignity of the unborn and undermining solidarity with the weakest and most vulnerable among us.   

The planned honor is titled a “lifetime achievement award” and the event where Durbin is to receive it is called the “Keep Hope Alive” benefit. This is darkly ironic because the slaughter of the innocents in utero is nihilistic and always without hope, and the policies Durbin has supported have denied a lifetime to countless unborn children. 

Sen. Durbin’s appalling record on the foundational issue of unborn human life renders him unfit to receive the proposed award or any Catholic honor.

The decision to grant Durbin this honor is gravely mistaken. If it takes place, it will be a source of enormous scandal among both Catholics and the public at large. People will be understandably confused as to whether the Church is sincere in its opposition to abortion, as to whether the Church really views abortion as a matter of life and death, and as to whether the Church believes human dignity is really at stake. Some Catholics may conclude that abortion is, at the end of the day, really not that important. They may conclude that some of the Church’s teaching can be safely ignored if one supports other policies that are consistent with the Church’s teachings on other matters, such as immigration.

To bestow an award on Durbin for his work on immigration, notwithstanding his brazen support for the abortion license, ignores the Church’s teaching that “[a] political commitment to a single isolated aspect of the Church’s social doctrine does not exhaust one’s responsibility towards the common good.” The Christian vocation in public life demands integrity, not the selective invocation of particular teachings. As the U.S. bishops have taught, “being ‘right’ in such matters can never excuse a wrong choice regarding direct attacks on innocent human life. Indeed, the failure to protect and defend life in its most vulnerable stages renders suspect any claims to the ‘rightness’ of positions in other matters affecting the poorest and least powerful of the human community.” Someone like Sen. Durbin, whose legislative acts have worked to undermine the protection of human life—the very foundation of civil society—is unworthy of any public honor.

Furthermore, bestowing this award on Durbin would violate both the USCCB’s guidelines and the Archdiocese of Chicago’s own policies concerning honors and awards. In the 2004 statement Catholics in Political Life, the nation’s bishops spoke with one voice, teaching that “those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles . . . should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.” Similarly, the Archdiocese of Chicago’s own policy manual provides that “Any Catholic entity subject to the authority of the Archbishop of Chicago, and any boards/fundraising committees affiliated with them shall not give awards or honors or host presentations, speaking opportunities or appearances by individuals or organizations whose public position is in opposition to the fundamental moral principles of the Catholic Church.” It is unclear why Cardinal Cupich saw fit to ignore both his brother bishops and his own diocesan policy manual.

Although Richard Durbin maintains his residence in Springfield and is therefore subject to my pastoral care and authority as the bishop of his place of domicile, Cardinal Cupich did not consult with me about this award or even notify me about his decision. I learned about it in the media. This failure to consult with a brother bishop concerning a member of his diocese is even more troubling given the fact that Cardinal Cupich knows that Sen. Durbin has not been permitted to receive Holy Communion in the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois since 2004 pursuant to Canon 915 of the Church’s Code of Canon Law for “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin” by his support for abortion. Rather than hand out awards to politicians who support the legal destruction of unborn human life, the USCCB urges people like Durbin “to consider the consequences for their own spiritual well-being, as well as the scandal they risk by leading others into serious sin.”

I offer this fraternal correction in the hope that Cardinal Cupich might reverse this erroneous decision, and so preserve the integrity of the Church’s moral teaching and avoid the scandal that this decision will otherwise cause to the faithful.

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