Life Matters Journal           Included in the issue that just came out for this online journal:   A Migrant’s Right to Life and the War Against the Weak by Keith Michael Estrada critiques how nominally pro-life legislators are trying to remove current legal protections for the children escaping horrific violence in Central America.   Preventing a New Cold War: A Proposal for Solving the Ukraine Crisis, by John Whitehead.     Increasingly Isolated: States’ Misguided Attempts to Preserve the Death Penalty, by Ben Jones.   A review of the obvious pro-life implications of the popular book and movie The Giver (which we mentioned before) by Nick Neal.   Along with essays on the problems of views justifying torture, the argument on abortion from bodily rights, secular sources for asserting morality, and questions for what questions need to be addressed for a situation where legal bans on abortion have happened.         ^^^^^^^   Rest in Peace: CL Endorser Theodore Hesburgh            Father Ted Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame University for 35 years, died on February 26, age 97. While criticized for having abortion-defending politicians speaking at the university, which he did on free-marketplace-of-ideas grounds, he made his own stand against the killing of unborn children clear in this response to Governor Cuomo’s remarks, which we quote from below. This countered Cuomo’s idea that religious convictions should be abandoned when making public policy, and showed the effectiveness of placing abortion in the context of all forms of violence.           See obituaries at Notre Dame University and National Catholic Reporter.   ^^^^^^^ Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom (WILPF)           WILPF is having a 100th-anniversary conference in The Hague, near Amsterdam in the Netherlands, April 27-29. We have three people going to make a consistent-life presence, but we can always use more. If anyone is planning to go, or lives close enough and would like to come and join us, please let us know at weekly@consistent-life.org.     ^^^^^^^ Quotation of the Week Theodore Hesburgh The Overlooked Consensus on Restricting Abortion  September 30, 1984, Universal Press Syndicate           If politicians are religious – and most are in one way or another, like most Americans – it is inconceivable that their religiously founded moral convictions will not enter into their political lives. Moral convictions touch many public concerns in America: the nuclear threat, human rights, problems of poverty, housing, education, the Third World, drugs, environment, and abortion, too. . . .         I grew up and was educated during the thirties and forties and learned to despise prejudice of all kinds, especially our treatment of blacks in America. Certainly this basic moral conviction was of religious origin, but it was also philosophical, experiential, and shared by many non-religious people throughout the nation. . . .         Executive action by President Johnson and legislative action by the Congress in 1964, 1965, and 1968 changed the face of America. Apartheid, once the law of the land, was dead, and a new American consensus, both religious and non-religious in origin, welcomed its demise. Neither the consensus nor the change just happened; both were made to happen.         Was there anything un-American about that procedure? Was I wrong to spend fifteen years on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, trying to build a consensus opposing what I and others, for both religious and non-religious reasons, believed a horrible injustice? Now, is it un-American to be convinced that the frivolous taking of life is unjust? Is it un-American for people so convinced to articulate what they believe to be an existing consensus, or to develop a new one, in order to restrict legal abortions?

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