Paul Stark has brilliantly woven in a new analogy (pizza making) to make clear the fundamental distinction between the construction of things and the development of life. (The German Constitutional Court in 1975 and 1993 supported this distinction. That support can be found via one of the articles linked in Stark’s piece.) Unborn children aren’t […]
Author: Richard Stith
Richard Stith is a research professor at Valparaiso University in Indiana. Having received both his law degree and a doctorate in ethics from Yale University, he taught legal philosophy and comparative law at Valpo Law for 41 years. From Harvard and from the University of California, Berkeley, he holds degrees in political theory. He was for a year director of the Program in Biomedical Ethics at St. Louis University School of Medicine. He served for many years on the Advisory Council of the National Lawyers Association and on the Board of Editors of the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LAW and has taught and published on comparative law and legal philosophy in Spain, India, China, Ukraine, Chile and Mexico. In 2001, he became the first U.S. professor to be designated by the European Commission as teacher of a Jean Monnet Module (on the law of the European Union) and shortly thereafter was named the first Swygert Research Fellow in recognition of his scholarship. He is a consultant on the Academic Council for the doctoral program in law at the Universidad de Los Andes in Chile, where he has directed doctoral seminars. Professor Stith has served as a member of the national boards of University Faculty for Life and of the Consistent Life Network. He has been a speaker at national, state, and international right-to-life gatherings and has presented pro-life testimony by invitation before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution and to state and foreign legislative committees. Among his significant publications: “The Priority of Respect: How Our Common Humanity Can Ground Our Individual Dignity,” International Philosophical Quarterly 44 (2004): 165. Other works can be found at http://works.bepress.com/richard_stith/ Email: [email protected]
Our immediate intuitions sometimes favor the pro-life position and sometimes oppose it. An ultrasound video of an unborn child sucking its thumb makes a case against abortion that reason hardly need supplement. But a zygote photographed just after an in vitro conception is not so easily recognizable as a human being or person. Pro-lifers often […]
Once each person is no longer taken as an unquestionable given, eventually everyone will have to show that he/she has a life of net positive value (is justified in living) in order for it to be thought reasonable for him/her to go on living. And there is no reason to think that his/her net value […]
We must pick up and use the fact that the abortion rate is declining, rather than get sidetracked into a fight about its immediate causes and consequences. Even if it were true (which I doubt) that the greater availability of contraceptives (rather than pro-life educational and law reform efforts) is the primary cause of this […]
I’ve noticed in general that there are no activists working against late-term abortion among all the folks who claim they think life begins sometime after conception. In other words, even after they recognize the existence of life, they don’t much care about protecting it. Many say they will put up with a little protection, as […]
As far as I know, this is the only time in the modern world that there has been a popular vote precisely to let kids of this age (20+ weeks) be killed on request. (America made a judicial decision to this effect. China & North Korea are the only two bodies to have made a […]
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Papal effect on Life Chain?
Yesterday in Valparaiso, IN, we held our annual peaceful, prayerful Life Chain protest against abortion. A Mennonite protester asked a Catholic, “What do you think of your Pope coming out pro-abortion?” This is how media-spun papal talk may be perceived at the grassroots level. Interestingly, our numbers here were way down this year (though […]
Note that the same day the interview was released, Pope Francis uttered these awe-inspiring words: ” Every unborn child, though condemned to be aborted, has the face of Jesus Christ, has the face of the Lord . . .” Isn’t it perhaps relevant that the Pope in that America magazine interview was using words appropriate […]
Encouraging Hispanic immigration is a double-edged sword for the GOP: It may increase GOP votes in the short run, but it may increase Democratic voters in the long run. And, frankly, it is hard to imagine any bid the GOP could make on immigration or almost any other Latino issue that the Dems could not […]
Meeting with U.S. bishops in Rome on January 19, 2012, Pope Benedict urged them to mobilize “every level of ecclesial life” against cultural and political trends that threaten “humanity itself.” He called on all Catholics “to offer public witness to their faith, especially with regard to the great moral issues of our time: respect for […]