Originally published at The Catholic Thing
The pro-life cause has lost ground in the political battles of the last two years. But why? For Professor Hadley Arkes, a major reason is that 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, is to return 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.
