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Dear Readers,
From our very beginnings, First Things has borne witness to the sanctity of life. Defending the unborn was a great passion of our founder, Richard John Neuhaus. The entire staff of First Things remains firmly committed to the pro-life cause. Now, as the Supreme Court hears the Dobbs case tomorrow, the stage is set for overturning one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history.
Below is a sampling of articles from our pro-life writings throughout the years. I invite you to read them, think on them, and pray that the abortion regime is coming to an end.
R. R. Reno, Editor
First Things
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“Surely, one may devoutly hope, Justice Scalia exaggerates. In his dissent from Planned Parenthood v. Casey (joined by Rehnquist, Thomas, and White), he develops the analogy between this case and the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857. What happened then is, in ways ominously parallel, happening now. Claiming to ‘resolve’ a question in passionate dispute, the Court simply takes one side and demands that the nation follow. It did not work then, Scalia argues, and it will not work now.” - October 1992
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“In Federalist 45, James Madison assured critics of the Constitution that ‘the power reserved for the several states will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the state.’ By no stretch of the historical imagination can we believe that the Constitution would have been ratified had the people known that they would lack the legal and political competence, as Madison said, ‘in the ordinary affairs,’ to keep the invalid from being killed by physicians. Roe v. Washington raises once again the problem of federal courts abrogating democratic self-governance guaranteed by the Constitution.” - March 2010
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“But the pro-life movement kept faith with abortion's tiny victims. In the great civil rights struggle of the post-segregation era, a grassroots movement kept the flame burning and kept hope alive. We refused to abandon the unborn to the ‘tender mercies’—or women to the ghoulish ‘compassion’—of the abortionists at Planned Parenthood and the like. We had little support among the wealthy, powerful, and influential. Wall Street hoped we would go away. The media were playing for the other team. The intellectual elites mostly sneered. But janitors and school teachers, factory workers and stay-at-home moms, insurance salesmen and office workers and cashiers at the grocery store, and retired people from all walks of life refused to leave the field. They prayed and protested and counseled on sidewalks in front of the abortion mills.” - January 2016
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“Using Dobbs to overturn Roe will therefore move our society slightly
closer to a more accurate understanding of what it means to be human.
Abortion is couched in the language of choice and liberty, something that strikes an obvious—and cynical—rhetorical chord with the American soul; but in reality it reflects a profoundly defective anthropology, according to which every individual is sovereign and everybody else we encounter, even our own children, are to be considered first and foremost a threat to that sovereignty.” - August 2021
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