Abortion on Trial

The trial I wrote about last week had nothing to do with the ethics of abortion. Sadly. It centered instead on an Arizona state law regulating abortion. When the Supreme Court did an end around the legislative process back in 1973, unilaterally declaring all state abortion bans to be unconstitutional, it thereby spared abortion from having to bear up under much public scrutiny as it wormed its way into the American mainstream. The Court’s ruling also stripped from fathers any legal right to prevent their own children from being torn apart in the womb. For plenty of prospective dads, that was seen as a feature, not a bug. It’s the sex they wanted, not the children. Andrew Klavan recently noted that birth control and abortion have “turned fertile female bodies into sterile sex toys”—a tradeoff perfectly suited to bringing…

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The Father Who Sued An Abortion Clinic for Killing His Child. And Won.

There’s nothing unusual about a wrongful death lawsuit. Tens of thousands are filed each year in response to the more than 200,000 accidental deaths that occur annually in the United States. Most of these lawsuits are settled before they ever reach a courtroom. What is unusual is to file a wrongful death claim on behalf of someone who was never born—which is precisely the scenario I wrote about four years ago in an article titled, “The Estate of Baby Villegas, Deceased.” It is the story of a grieving father who was powerless to prevent his ex-wife from aborting their child. But instead of just lamenting his legal impotence, he found an obscure statutory basis for suing the Arizona abortion clinic that killed his child.

When I published the piece in October of 2022, no judgment had yet been rendered, but the fact that the case was being heard at all was remarkable in its own right. When a similar suit—believed to be the first of its kind—reached the Alabama circuit court in 2019, it was immediately dismissed on the assertion that the federal precedent established…

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No Such Thing as Mom

Our 13-year-old son doesn’t have a phone, but he does have a new used CD player. And two weeks ago, we added a landline to our home for the first time in 20 years. Which is to say, our embrace of technology is running in the wrong direction. Then I topped it off by doing this past Friday something I hadn’t done since last century. I went to an actual store and bought an actual album on the actual day it came out. That would be Switchfoot’s Forever Now! Compact discs have done away with jewel cases, apparently, but the rest of the experience was gloriously 1990’s. And then there are the songs.

I made an uncredited reference to Forever Now’s first single in my last article, but it’s track 11–“Two Twins”—that contains a metaphor so simple and profound that it hardly seems possible I could go 50 years without having heard it before. Or thought of it myself. For those of you who didn’t buy the record at Barnes and Noble last week, or listen via more traditional means—Click here to read the rest.

The Old Vices Were Better Than the New

Back in the olden days, when I was in junior high school, I got a subscription to Sports Illustrated—a luxury afforded me by my mom’s remarriage. Prior to that, there had been no money in the frivolous expenditures fund, but wealth has a way of introducing new temptations. I’m speaking, of course, about the swimsuit issue. All the way through high school, it would confront me with a moral dilemma each and every February. By way of context, I had been baptized into the faith on April Fool’s Day, 1990, and I was committed. I was also a hormone-laced teenage boy. Though my mom didn’t restrict my access to SI’s famed swimsuit issue, my own moral compass was something of a tyrant. I was fairly convinced I had to get rid of it, but that was easier said than done. As soon as I would pull it from the mailbox, the reasons for not disposing of it came flooding in. I would stand with it hovering over the garbage can like Frodo overlooking the fires of Mordor. My precious!

In the pre-internet world of my youth, pictures of beautiful women in revealing swimsuits were almost sacred for their scarcity. Social media has made the…

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Whom Do We Charge? Mom, Dad, or the Abortionist?

Last week, the Gospel Coalition published an article by Scott Klusendorf titled “Why Equal Protection Bills Harm Pro-Life Efforts.” His basic premise: charging aborting mothers with murder will lead to more abortions in the end. Two days later, Seth Gruber posted a response via Substack in which he publicly took Scott to task for his “poorly reasoned” position. Though these are not names that will mean anything to the average American, both men carry significant clout within pro-life circles—which is why it’s distressing to see them publicly at odds. Distressing, but not surprising. This is the era of ideological infighting, after all. Schisms are the new black.

For my part, I’ve known and admired Scott Kluesendorf since the beginning of my pro-life career some three decades ago.…

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The Problem of Faith in a World Full of Evil

The existence of evil has never been a philosophical problem for me. How can there be wickedness in a world created by a good God? Because he gave his creatures the freedom to rebel. Or at least the angelic and image-bearing ones. We did (rebel, that is) and here we are. That’s enough explanation for me. It’s the problem of faith that I struggle to get my head around. If you have the faith of a mustard seed (ie a very little), Christ told his disciples in Matthew 17, you can say to this mountain, move from here to there and it will obey you. Or in the less poetic and well-known rendering from Luke: If you have the faith of a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, be planted in the sea, and it will. Though we might question the practical value in transporting mountains or planting trees in the ocean, the basic takeaway seems pretty clear. If you have faith, the normal laws of nature are no longer binding.

Some years ago, my wife and I planted a small tree in the corner of our backyard. But then we decided we wanted it smack dab in the middle. So with tremendous faith, I approached the tree and told it in no uncertain…

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