What Pro-Life Forgot

There is a real pro-life tradition in America. It is older than the religious right, more philosophically rigorous, and almost completely unknown to the people who today call themselves pro-life.

I want to tell you about it. Not because I think it will win the political argument — it lost the political argument forty years ago, and the people who won that argument have spent the time since burying it. I want to tell you about it because the actual tradition is the thing my church has been losing for fifty years, and as a practicing Roman Catholic and a physician who delivers babies, I have an obligation to say out loud what was actually taught before the slogans replaced it.

This is the tradition the religious right took the conclusion of and discarded the reasoning behind. They kept "abortion is wrong." They threw away everything that made it intelligible.

This is what they threw away.

Natural law

The foundation is natural law. Aristotle, fourth century BC. Thomas Aquinas, thirteenth century, building on Aristotle. The claim is structural: the universe has a moral order, and human reason, properly exercised, can perceive it. Aquinas wrote in the Summa Theologiae: "Natural law is nothing other than the participation of eternal law in rational creatures." That sentence does a great deal of work. It claims that human dignity is not invented by states. Not granted by majorities. Not contingent on faith. It is a fact about what we are. A thing visible to reason. Knowable.

Knowable is the word. It is the name of this campaign because it is the word that gives the tradition its weight. The Catholic claim has never been that abortion is wrong because God said so. The Catholic claim is that abortion is wrong because the dignity of human life is knowable, and once you know it, certain things become non-negotiable. You cannot reason your way out of one threat to human life without reasoning your way out of all of them.

That last sentence is the load-bearing one. It is also the sentence the modern political pro-life movement cannot survive saying.

The seamless garment

In 1971, a Catholic pacifist named Eileen Egan coined a phrase from the Gospel of John (19:23). At the crucifixion, the Roman soldiers gambled for Christ's tunic rather than tearing it, because it was woven seamless. Egan said the protection of life was the same. Seamless. Indivisible. You could not cut out one thread without unraveling the whole.

In July 1971, Archbishop Humberto Medeiros of Boston used the phrase "consistent ethic of life" in a homily. In December 1983, at Fordham University, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin formalized the framework in a lecture that has been taught in every Catholic seminary since. The position was this: the protection of human life is one commitment, with many applications. If you say you are pro-life, you are bound to a set of related positions that cannot be separated:

Against abortion. Against capital punishment. Against unjust war. Against euthanasia. Against poverty and the conditions that make life cheap. Against racism and the systems that designate some lives as less.

This was not a political coalition. This was a doctrine. A coherent argument from a single foundation to a set of conclusions that move together. The Catholic Church teaches this. It is still in the Catechism. You can look it up. The men currently shouting in the name of "pro-life" politics have, with very few exceptions, abandoned five of the six conclusions and built a movement around the sixth alone. That is not the Catholic position. It is a political project that borrowed the Catholic vocabulary and kept the slogan after dropping the argument.

Feminists for Life

In 1972 — the year before Roe — a group of Catholic women founded Feminists for Life of America on a single premise: that abortion is not a women's rights issue but a women's abandonment issue. Their argument was that when society materially supports pregnant women — housing, healthcare, childcare, paid leave, economic security, the dignity of being treated as someone whose pregnancy matters — abortion rates fall. Not because women are coerced. Because women, given the actual material capacity to mother, want to. The slogan was "Support the woman, and she will choose the child."

That position is intelligible. It is also, in 2026, anti-Republican in every way that matters. The political party that uses "pro-life" as its identity opposes universal childcare. Opposes paid family leave. Opposes Medicaid expansion. Opposes WIC. Opposes the child tax credit. Opposes universal pre-K. Opposes Title X family planning. Opposes federal funding for community health workers. The actual material policies that would, on the Feminists for Life argument, reduce abortion are the policies the modern pro-life movement spends its institutional life fighting against.

This is not a contradiction. It is a confession. The movement does not, in its actions, believe its own premise. If it believed the dignity of human life was the point, it would support the conditions that protect it. It does not. Therefore the dignity of human life is not the point.

King and Bernardin

The most important fact about the natural-law tradition I have not yet told you is this: it produced the American civil rights movement.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" was written from a Birmingham city jail on April 16, 1963. Eight white Alabama clergymen had published an open letter calling King's nonviolent direct-action campaign "unwise and untimely." King wrote his response on the margins of a newspaper and on scraps of paper smuggled in by his lawyer. In the letter, he had to make the argument that the laws he was being arrested for breaking were not really laws at all. To do that, he reached for Aquinas.

"A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality."

That is King, citing Aquinas, in jail, making the same philosophical move that Bernardin would make twenty years later at Fordham. The civil rights movement and the consistent ethic of life were not parallel traditions. They were the same tradition, in different applications. A Black Baptist preacher in a Birmingham jail and an Italian-American Catholic Cardinal at a New York lectern reaching for the same Italian Dominican monk from the thirteenth century, because the foundation he gave them was structural enough to hold both arguments.

Read the line again. "Any law that degrades human personality is unjust." That is what they all believed. Segregation degrades personality. Abortion degrades personality. The death penalty degrades personality. Poverty degrades personality. War degrades personality. The garment is seamless. You cannot cut it.

The men who built the modern anti-abortion movement in 1979 could not stand inside this tradition because they were defending segregated schools. They wanted the conclusion. They could not afford the foundation. So they took the conclusion and walked away from the foundation. King had stood inside the foundation. Bernardin would stand inside it. The men of the Moral Majority could not.

What was lost

What was lost was a coherent moral language. A way of talking about human dignity that did not require you to choose between the unborn and the Black, the poor and the dying, the immigrant and the prisoner. A vocabulary that committed you across the whole arc. That language is gone from American public life because the people who would have spoken it were displaced, in 1979, by people willing to say half of it for political advantage.

What replaced it is a political project that calls itself pro-life while it strips Medicaid from pregnant women, defunds the agencies that count Black maternal deaths, refuses to expand WIC, opposes paid family leave, opposes universal childcare, supports capital punishment, supports war, and supports a criminal-legal system that disproportionately kills the men whose children they claim to be saving. That project is not pro-life. It is pro-control. It is what Catholic moral theology calls a hijack — a movement that takes the language of a tradition and weaponizes it for purposes the tradition itself would condemn.

I am a practicing Roman Catholic. I deliver babies. I have watched women in obstetric crisis be sent home from emergency departments because the doctors caring for them were afraid of state law. I have watched the men who wrote those laws stand at podiums and call themselves pro-life. They are not. They are something else, and I will not pretend otherwise to be polite.

The claim

Here is the claim. The natural-law tradition — Aristotle, Aquinas, King, Bernardin — is not gone. It survived inside Catholic moral theology because Catholic moral theology is, by design, slow. It survived inside Black church traditions because the Black church carried Aquinas through King and never stopped. It survived in Feminists for Life. It survived in Catholic Worker houses. It survived in the people, in every generation, who refused to cut the garment.

It can be claimed again. It belongs to anyone who actually means it. You do not have to be Catholic. You do not have to be religious. The Aristotelian-Thomistic foundation is, by its own terms, available to human reason. Knowable. That is the entire claim.

I am a physician. I deliver babies. I oppose the death penalty. I oppose unjust war. I am for paid family leave, universal childcare, expanded Medicaid, federal community health workers, and the conditions that make human life — all human life, from before birth through natural death — protectable. That is the position I was taught is the Catholic position. It is the position King was teaching from jail. It is the position Bernardin was teaching at Fordham.

The men who took the slogan and threw the philosophy away have had forty years. They have produced Dobbs. They have produced the criminalization of miscarriage. They have produced bounty laws. They have produced the federal erasure of the word Black from federal health language. They have produced an American maternal mortality rate that is three times France and ten times the Netherlands. By their fruits, you shall know them.

The Catholic tradition produced King. The Catholic tradition produced Bernardin. The Catholic tradition produced Feminists for Life. The Catholic tradition produced, in its modern political hijack, none of what calls itself pro-life today. Take note of which side claimed the language and which side claimed the work.

What Is Knowable is, in part, an attempt to put the actual tradition back in front of the people who deserve to see it. There is a real pro-life tradition. It belongs to the seamless garment. It belongs to whoever will carry it. It does not belong to the men who hijacked the slogan and abandoned the substance.

Reclaim it.