Those who seek to advance the Catholic Church’s teaching regarding the sanctity of life confront both new challenges and opportunities in the wake of the June 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. On the one hand, many people in the U.S. and in other developed nations have increasingly accepted abortion as a seemingly inevitable aspect of public life. (We are employing the term abortion here to denote intentional embryocide or feticide.) Young women and men are taught from an early age that they must control their fertility in order to augment their autonomy, protect themselves, and advance professionally and socially. At the same time, both sexes are initiated into a culture of noncommitted sexual practices and attitudes, separated from the notion of marriage and responsibility for children as the context for human sexuality. These cultural trends feed an already existing indifference, callousness, or even disrespect toward the good of human life, which is viewed by many as having merely instrumental, and not sacred, value.
On the other hand, there is a growing awareness of the biological reality that life begins at conception and thus that abortion ends the life of a human being. Many surveys indicate that most Americans disapprove of a legal regime of unrestricted access to abortion. Nor are Americans in general satisfied with the way that abortion is discussed: They see our public culture today as excessively divided and marked by ideologies that are partial and superficial. In addition, our intellectual and academic communities lack a coherent and profound vision of the human person and of social ethics.