Originally published at National Catholic Register
The pro-life cause has undoubtedly lost ground in the political battles of the last two years in the United States and in other Western nations — but why has this been the case?
For American professor Hadley Arkes, a leading intellectual figure in the pro-life movement, one major reason is because many abortion opponents have allowed the debate to focus not on the nature of the human embryo — and therefore on the intrinsic illegitimacy of abortion — but rather on legal considerations that judge abortion’s validity only by its constitutionality.
The remedy, according to Arkes — a legal philosopher who is the founder and director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding, a think tank based in Alexandria, Virginia, named for an American Founding Father and legal scholar — America is to reclaim the terms of the debate by returning it closer to the tenets of natural law, a set of rights governed by universal principles that each person possesses by their very human nature and not by their individual will or the evolution of customs.
Arkes has consistently based his intellectual work in defense of life on this
