I have a confession to make. I am in full-on birthday mode. Monday, November 24, is Bill Buckley’s 100th, and the nation should be celebrating. (It’s why I took a pregnant pause from this newsletter for the last two weeks.) I will be marking the occasion at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio that night. Father Gerry Murray of EWTN fame will join me to discuss some of the wonderful gifts this man we were blessed to know gave us.
Beyond just honoring the man himself, we celebrate WFB’s birthday because we need to look back to move forward. Isn’t that what conservatism is? As he always said: It’s about stewardship. And even if we didn’t have a country to preserve — with its protections for religion and life — it is good to say one man’s life is a blessing.
After all, we are here right now — online in this newsletter endeavor advocating the sanctity and dignity of life — because Bill was a stalwart defender of human life and encouraged the rest of us to be, too. His column on “How to Argue About Abortion” remains instructive, perhaps even more so in these confusing post–Roe v. Wade days.
The Jennifer Aniston–Reese Witherspoon Pro-Life Front?
One more confession: I’ve been watching the Apple TV series The Morning Show. It’s about media and politics with Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon and, well, I chose not to resist. Here’s the thing: it’s awful. Every kind of immorality and caricature makes an appearance. And it might not be possible to blaspheme as much as they do — from the mundane to the absolute in-your-face obnoxiousness. But a little bit of a spoiler alert: A recent episode featured an assisted suicide — medical aid in dying, as the culture of death prefers we refer to it. An elderly woman in a state that hasn’t yet actually legalized assisted suicide takes her pills and dies on a lawn chair. Her son had traveled to convince her not to do it. But after he stepped away for a moment, she did what she did. That the show would feature an assisted suicide after crusading for abortion on demand without apology after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling isn’t surprising. What was surprising was the regret — the examination of conscience that her son undergoes. The character, Corey, is struck by the fact that his mother was alone. Indeed, he realizes that it was loneliness that led to her death. And she had family. It didn’t have to be that way.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Now that we’ve gotten through Election Day of 2025, I’m expecting an imminent announcement from Governor Kathy Hochul concerning the legalization of assisted suicide in New York. It’s probably insane daydreaming to think she might have seen the same tragic crisis that I saw on The Morning Show and reconsider doubling down on death. But miracles do happen, and God works with everything, despite our best efforts to contravene His will.
And, a related reminder: Canada is killing itself: Movement Barrels Forward to Euthanize 12-Year-Old Children in Canada
Can we please not be Canada?
Standing Athwart the Nation’s Capital, Yelling Shutdown?
I write from Washington, D.C., at the moment at which things have gotten so bad that I managed to take this photo on Capitol Hill after a 15-minute Uber ride ended up taking an hour. It was so all-consuming that rather than get a scoop for you, I talked with a U.S. senator about the traffic and how we were better off in shutdown. The drivers are in road-rage mode. And that’s an observation from someone who recently got back from Mexico City, where every car trip seems to take triple what it should.
In all seriousness, the photo captures how I’ve been feeling. Just stop. We are in desperate need of life-affirming policies from our government. After the reversal of Roe, we should finally be able to let law be a teacher when it comes to protecting innocent human life. But we also need to do more ourselves. Support a young family with babysitting time for a date night. Make sure teens in your life know you are about more than talking points and judgment when it comes to abortion.
I have a sign in my office at NR in New York from 40 Days for Life that says: “We Will Help You.” What does that mean? It means that not only do we provide open doors of support, but that we are also actively seeking to make resources known and available that will make nurturing new life possible — that will make the flourishing of families possible. It means that we will celebrate anyone who self-sacrificially chooses adoption, knowing that it might be the best decision for everyone. That’s a separation we never want to have to choose, but it’s the gift of life. And that’s everything.
An Open-Door Policy Saves
Speaking of birthdays: My claim to fame in some circles is that I’m the godmother of an adorable boy named Noah who lives in Indiana. (There’s a school there that has a football team and an infamous mural that God should never forgive man for. Mercifully, He’s still God and will even forgive us for Touchdown Jesus.)
That Noah is living today is a certifiable miracle. Pretty much all the traumas and afflictions that exist in the world today were inflicted on him before he was even born. And yet he is here and flourishing — in an adoptive family that loved him even before they cast eyes on him. He was as close to left on their doorstep as one can be. And thanks be to God for that.
I wrote a little about his earliest days here. What more can we do to make sure that the Noahs of our society are never left alone to languish? It’s again, to be sure, a sign that we are in strong need of cultural renewal. But it’s more importantly about decisions we make in our lives to support human lives.
Focus on the Family
The National Council for Adoption had its annual Adoption Hall of Fame inductions this week. I swung by because they were including in their media roll Naomi Schaefer Riley. We’ve known one another for a few decades now — she was an NR intern once upon a time. And she’s gone on — as NR is known for, sharing the good of the talents who flow through here — to be the most reliably honest broker in reporting and advocacy on foster care and adoption. If you have not read her book No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives, please do. It’s a sobering account of what children and families are put through — agony — but it’s also got a chapter that is an inspiring blueprint about what to do about the problem. We just marked Mother Cabrini’s feast day and a new Catholic initiative to nudge people into reviving her legacy of care for orphans. When we had more Catholic nuns devoting their lives to God and His children, Catholics led the way on these issues. Today, it tends to be Evangelicals who seek to meet the needs around them on this front, unencumbered by the well-intentioned bureaucracies that Catholics tend to rely on these days. We’re not actually shackled by all we think we are. And children need us to take that responsibility seriously — to be free to love them in the way that only a family can.
Andrew Walther is another life I celebrate in November. It’s both his birth and his death month. It’s amazing to see his children and the joy they have. It’s a reflection of what Christians claim to believe about God, man, and eternal life. It’s mysterious. It’s arduous. But it’s also a way we need people to be living. That’s not easy. But is a life well lived ever easy? At the Buckley Institute conference in New Haven last week, I cited what I will always insist on being the correct diagnosis of Bill Buckley’s death, having watched it play out. Sure, he had emphysema. An awful suffering, to be sure — but his actual cause of death was a broken heart. Even being the “Renaissance Man” that he was, his life was still but a story of love and all that entails, imperfectly but radiantly. Goodness, he loved that woman.
Read about Andrew here, because as we said at the time, he just proves you can be a good man in the mess of the world — fighting religious persecution before it was cool, and doing those day-to-day life decisions that make all the difference in the life of children, even if you’re not able to stick around for as long as you planned to.
Other Things
I know we often obsess — or at least the algorithms do — on a story only for a day or so before we move on. But I keep thinking about Stevie Nicks and how she has talked about how much she wanted to be a mother. She’s said over the years how she would have been a good mother, and yet, she had an abortion, evidently for the sake of Fleetwood Mac. Honestly, the world would have gone on without Fleetwood Mac, and Fleetwood Mac may have been better if she had been the mother to her child. I do think it’s important to linger on this. Abortion as a necessity is not healthy, and, yes, it is not health care. It is a sign of sickness that organizations that claim to be for women can’t see the immiseration right in front of them. Conventional feminists are still telling women that abortion is the way of success when it is the most unnatural, unnecessary pain that there is — indeed, it is the cutting off of yourself from the most natural love that there is.
Around National Review
• Wesley J. Smith: German Identical Twins Receive Death on Demand
• John Gerardi: New York Times Coverage Avoids the Third Rails of Sex Trafficking
• Me: We Need Good Men
Before We Go
In the interest of nurturing community life — even online, as we have long sought to do here at NR — tell me: What are you most grateful for on the pro-life front? I’m sure the first answer that will come to mind for many is Dobbs. But there is a whole country out there outside of the District of Columbia. Email me at klopez@nationalreview.com.
And keep praying for our beloved Ramesh Ponnuru. And our friend, Mitch Boersma, too, who has been a host to many NRI conversations and co-sponsorships on life. To say cancer is so awful is both obvious and a woeful understatement.