Help Aleteia continue its mission by making a tax-deductible donation. In this way, Aleteia's future will be yours as well.
*Your donation is tax deductible!
If it had happened today, James P. McFadden would have gotten the news right away, likely from the feed on his smartphone.
But it was January of 1973, and McFadden went out to buy a newspaper. The US Supreme Court decision from the day before, in the case of Roe v. Wade, was splashed across the front page.
“He could not believe that the Supreme Court, with all its moral power, would be behind a decision that would take away the right to life of the unborn,” his daughter, Maria McFadden Maffucci, recalled.
The elder McFadden was a journalist – at that time serving as associate publisher at National Review, the magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr. His first reaction to the Roe decision was to organize a lobbying organization to work for a legislative reversal of the court ruling. But he also saw the need for a forum to exchange ideas on the life issue.
The result was the Human Life Review, a quarterly journal he began publishing in 1974.
McFadden “realized that every good cause, every major cause, needs a good publication,” his daughter said.
It would be, in its own words, an academic-quality journal – though accessible to a broad readership, not just scholars – “devoted to civilized discussion of legal, philosophical, medical, scientific, and moral perspectives on all life issues.”
Fifty years later, in a world where many print publications have yielded to the digital revolution, McFadden’s brainchild still rolls off the presses and arrives in subscribers’ mailboxes four times a year. And it is still hailed as the intellectual backbone of the pro-life movement.
Heavy hitters
Perhaps somewhat naively, McFadden imagined an army of writers and intellectuals supporting the new initiative. He “couldn't believe that writers who were proud of their craft, that brilliant minds would ever be on the side against life,” McFadden Maffucci said.
While there might not be an overwhelming bias toward the pro-life position in the literary and journalistic world, Human Life Review over the years has featured some “heavy hitters” in its pages: Venerable Jerome Lejeune, Malcolm Muggeridge, William F. Buckley and his brother, Sen. James L. Buckley, Henry Hyde, Cardinal John J. O’Connor, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Nat Hentoff, Clare Boothe Luce, C. Everett Koop, Helen Alvare, Eric Metaxas, Kathryn Jean Lopez, and Wesley J. Smith, among others.
One particular article the HLR is particularly proud of having published – so much so that the magazine reprinted it as a small book – was Ronald Reagan's 1983 piece, “Abortion and The Conscience of a Nation.”
“That was an extraordinary piece, and all the more important because it was written by a man who used to be pro-abortion, and so it shows somebody struggling with the issue with intellectual integrity and then coming to the pro-life view, and of course, becoming a great defender of life,” said Fr. Paul D. Scalia, a son of former US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who worked for HLR in the early 1990s.
Engaging the culture
Human Life Review from the start was very much a “family business,” McFadden Maffucci said. That’s appropriate for an effort that sought to support the sanctity of human life. James McFadden’s wife, Faith Abbott McFadden, served as senior editor of the Review for many years and edited a column in a bulletin he had also published, Catholic Eye. James McFadden died in 1998, and Faith died in 2011.
Maria McFadden Maffucci, who is now editor in chief, has seen the near demise of the Review several times – only to be buoyed by a sudden major donation from a supporter that breathed new life into the effort.
“There have been many times when I really felt like, ‘This is it. We're not going to make it. It's over,' and kind of looked up to heaven and said, 'What am I going to do?' And something always would happen -- most often a generous supporter would send us a financial gift -- so I knew we could keep going.”
Sometimes, it was “a supporter's words of encouragement or a wonderful article that gave me the emotional and moral energy to keep going,” she added.
With a small staff and a loyal cadre of freelance contributors, HLR continues to explore new facets of the pro-life movement. It has evolved from an intellectual response to legal abortion to a place of debate and source of information on new challenges, such as euthanasia and assisted suicide, neonaticide, genetic engineering, cloning, fetal and embryonic stem cell research and experimentation, as well as underlying issues of family and society.
There’s also a new political landscape following the 2022 fall of the Supreme Court decision that originally spurred on McFadden. With Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization returning states’ power to regulate abortion, pro-lifers find the battle has shifted, and in some cases more challenging.
“I think the huge message of the post-Dobbs world is that the culture is in no way ready to make the argument against abortion and the life issues on their own merit,” said McFadden Maffucci. “So my goal is really to work more and more with the culture.”
In addition to editing the journal, she has overseen new efforts, such as public forums and debates over better approaches to influencing people’s thinking about life issues. Last June, the Human Life Foundation, the parent organization of the Review, held a conference called “Breaking Through: The Culture of Life in Arts and Entertainment.”
“We talked about the fact that, for example, fiction portrays the truth of life, and sometimes fiction, without the author even realizing it, will have pro-life themes, because that's actually reality,” said McFadden Maffucci.
In the coming year, the foundation plans to hold another conference, about how Churches can best reach out to pregnant women to support human life.
A record
In the words of HLR editor Anne Conlon, the quarterly journal is a “record” of the pro-life movement.
“It's important to have a record for history. As Jim McFadden said so eloquently, nobody will be able to say they didn't know what was going on during these dark years, because it is there,” Conlon said. "It shows that there were a substantial number of people who didn't buy into this great lie about human life, about unborn children being clumps of tissue that you can casually discard and not think twice about. It's there, over and over again, from doctors, from lawyers, from political scientists, from [ordinary people], from journalists following the development of the history since Roe v. Wade, everything: the attempts to have a Human Life Amendment, the Congressional legislation, the Supreme Court decisions, the different things that have happened, like going after pro-lifers with the RICO Act, then the whole partial birth abortion era, when Congress was successful, finally, in opening people's eyes to unborn children with diagrams of this hideous form of abortion, which is all chronicled in the Review.”
But in addition, HLR has been a means for people to find their way, whether they were pro-life or not, and for the pro-life movement to mature and respond to the evolving culture.
“For people who did have pro-life values but didn't know how to articulate them or how to argue them to different kinds of audiences, I think the journal has been invaluable,” said Richard M. Doerflinger, former Associate Director of the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Doerflinger said he was hired by the bishops’ conference “straight out of a graduate program in theology.” But the conference wanted him to serve as a legislative assistant.
“I knew virtually nothing about public policy, particularly on these issues,” Doerflinger told Aleteia. He began reading the Human Life Review, to which his office subscribed, and received “a very quick education in the best that's been written on these things.”
“It was an enormous help to me,” said Doerflinger, who is also a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life. “I don't know how I would have gotten my bearings without it.”
At Congress
Ellen Wilson Fielding, a frequent contributor over the years, said HLR has provided a “special kind of cross fertilization of ideas and techniques and approaches to help people become aware of the range of possible things they can be doing and should be doing, to spark conversations among different different branches of the pro-life movement.”
Laura Echevarria, Director of Communications and Press Secretary of National Right to Life, said she has appreciated the “deep dive” HLR articles often take in philosophy, the law, politics, or simply the reasons women get abortions.
Echevarria, who has written for the journal, said HLR has ended up on the desks of members of Congress.
Hadley Arkes, a frequent contributor and Ney Professor of Jurisprudence Emeritus at Amherst College, noted that former federal judge John T. Noonan had written an article in 1981 about the ability of fetuses to feel pain. Ronald Reagan, in the 1984 State of the Union Address, “seemed to pick up on Noonan, … saying that doctors ‘confirm that when the lives of the unborn are snuffed out, they often feel pain, pain that is long and agonizing.’”
“And what that produced was a remarkable set of hearings in the Senate,” during which a physician from Yale and others withdrew their claim that fetuses could not feel pain at 12 weeks gestation, Arkes said.
Continuing importance
The Human Life Review might be even more important now than it was in 1974, some commenters have observed. Fr. Paul Scalia said that what the Review does best – making the intellectual argument for the pro-life cause and thinking clearly about it – “is even more important today and more difficult, because we live even more than 50 years ago in not a soundbite culture but a tweet culture."
“And everything is done to appeal to feelings and passions more than to appeal to the intellect,” said Fr. Scalia, a pastor in Falls Church, Virginia.
Hadley Arkes added that there has been a loss of the capacity on the part of public figures to talk about abortion in public.
“You know, Lincoln complained that there is slavery,” said Arkes. “It was a central issue before us. We can't talk about it in the churches. It's too unsettling there. We can't talk about it in politics. It's too explosive there. It's the thing that we most need to talk about, but we can't find a place to talk about it. And in the years since the Human Life Review got going, it's become harder to talk about this issue in public. And it's evident that so many people in public life and so many ordinary people have just obviously not had 10 minutes of serious conversation about the subject.”
Now, not only four times a year but with an expanded online presence and a program of public events, the Human Life Review is determined to keep the conversation going.
