Professor Hadley Arkes is a Jew who happily converted to the Catholic faith, a public intellectual, and the founder and director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding.
He is no stranger to this site, as can be seen here, here, and especially here.
Professor Arkes — “a member of the Amherst College faculty since 1966, and since 1987 … the Edward Ney Professor of Jurisprudence” (bio) — is unusual in the hallowed halls of American academe because he is a prominent defender of the Natural Law, so it is no surprise that he sets the basis of his pro-life positions on that foundation.
Interestingly, Professor Arkes considers the Dobbs decision to be a pro-life setback. To see why, read the piece linked blow.
(Solène Tadié/National Catholic Register) — The pro-life cause has undoubtedly lost ground in the political battles of the last two years in the United States and in other Western nations — but why has this been the case?
For American professor Hadley Arkes, a leading intellectual figure in the pro-life movement, one major reason is because many 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 — a legal philosopher who is the founder and director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding, a think tank based in Alexandria, Virginia, named for an American Founding Father and legal scholar — America is to reclaim the terms of the debate by returning it closer to 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.
Read more at the National Catholic Register…
