Erika Bachiochi

To create a society in which human beings can flourish, we must support child-raising families, schools that intentionally cultivate the intellectual and moral virtues, and local church communities.

If we are to safeguard the moral conditions for an authentic human ecology we must take far more seriously the care, nurture, and cultivation of children and young people in virtue.

Modern thought has largely neglected dependency, instead touting individual autonomy and rational self-interest. If we are to recover the human person’s proper relationship with others, we must turn to thinkers who give dependency its due.

There is no question that the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt is a win for abortion clinics and their doctors. Whether the decision is a victory for women and for liberty, we ought not be so sure.

The gross misappropriation of executive power to utterly remake the meaning of very basic legal terms threatens not only the structure of our government, it threatens the rule of law itself. This distortion of legal language is a particular threat to laws concerning women.

It is high time that the Court abandon the fiction that abortion serves women’s dignity and equality.

As the nation grieves the passing of a great jurist, it’s worth taking a close look at the precise contours of Justice Scalia’s towering contribution to statutory and constitutional interpretation.

Equality arguments for abortion rights are so commonplace today that perhaps we don’t see the tragic ironies as our forbearers, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, would have seen them. The suffragists presumed that the evil of abortion would be abolished by the elevation of women; today’s feminists assert that women’s elevated status depends upon the right to sacrifice the vulnerable.

The quest for sexual autonomy has hardly been the boon for women most pro-choice feminists seem to think. A genuinely feminist sexual ethic is needed, one that doesn’t reduce women to biologically challenged men.

Abortion betrays women by having us believe that we must become like men — that is, not pregnant — to achieve parity with them, professionally, socially, educationally.