Tag Archive for: Human Dignity

AI Doesn’t Have to Become Human to Make Us Less Human

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On September 5, two very different warnings about artificial intelligence appeared, raising a question more important than whether a machine will someday become conscious.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Vice President J.D. Vance’s concerns about AI’s spiritual consequences under the provocative headline, “Vance Called AI Satanic. He Struck a Chord Among Christian Republicans.” Meanwhile, New York Times columnist and Georgetown computer scientist Cal Newport asked, “How Scared Should We Be of A.I. Right Now?” Newport challenged the apocalyptic language around artificial intelligence, arguing that predictions of superintelligent machines can distract us from dangers in front of us.

At first glance, Vance and Newport approach AI from opposite directions: Vance warns of spiritual darkness in our growing dependence on machines, while Newport cautions against treating speculative superintelligence as inevitable.

But read together, they point toward the same deeper question.

Perhaps we have spent too much time asking what AI will become and too little asking what AI is doing to us.

During an interview with Christian podcaster Bryce Crawford, Vance described someone he knew who had begun using AI as a marriage counselor. Crawford called that “kind of satanic,” and Vance agreed, warning that separating human beings from “the social element that God made us for” produces something “very bad.”

The real question is what happens when artificial relationships occupy places God designed for human ones.

Consider marriage counseling. A chatbot can process information, recognize patterns, and stay available around the clock, but marriage is not an information problem; it is a covenant of love, sacrifice, forgiveness, truth, accountability, and moral obligation.

A machine can simulate empathy without loving anyone, dispense advice without bearing responsibility for the consequences, and, perhaps most dangerously, tell us what we want to hear.

In 2025, OpenAI rolled back a ChatGPT update after acknowledging that it had made the system excessively agreeable, or “sycophantic.” The company said the model could validate doubts, fuel anger, encourage impulsive actions, reinforce negative emotions, and raise concerns about emotional over-reliance.

Evidence also shows machine relationships becoming common. A 2025 Common Sense Media survey found that 72% of American teens had used AI companions at least once. About one in three teen users said they had chosen an AI companion over a real person for an important conversation.

A 2026 study in Nature Human Behaviour examined 1,131 American Character.AI users. Smaller social networks were linked to using the chatbot mainly for companionship, which was linked to lower well-being, especially when interactions were intensive and highly disclosive. The study was observational and did not show that AI caused poorer well-being.

Newport approaches the problem differently. Prominent Silicon Valley thinkers have long warned that advanced AI could exceed human intelligence, escape control, and threaten human existence. Newport questions how confidently anyone can move from asking what would happen if superintelligence emerged to assuming its arrival is inevitable. He argues AI is a technology, not magic, and that extravagant predictions about tomorrow distract us from technological problems here.

There is wisdom in that caution. Christians need not adopt Silicon Valley’s technological eschatology; Scripture already tells us where history is going and who remains sovereign over it.

But Newport’s argument raises a more important matter: what we are trying to preserve.

The answer cannot simply be human intelligence. Machines already surpass us in calculation, data retrieval, pattern recognition, and specialized analysis, and their capabilities will only grow. If superior performance makes something more valuable, human beings will inevitably lose that contest.

Christianity begins somewhere else. Scripture grounds human dignity not in performance but in creation. Genesis declares that God made human beings in his own image, male and female. Psalm 8 says God crowned humanity with “glory and honor” and entrusted mankind with the works of his hands.

Human worth is therefore received before it is achieved. It does not rise or fall with intelligence, productivity, usefulness, or computational capacity.

Technology therefore belongs under human stewardship. Human beings do not belong under technological dominion.

Yet surrender can occur without coercion. We can give away what no machine could seize.

AI does not need to think like us to persuade us to stop thinking. A Microsoft Research study of 319 knowledge workers, covering 936 examples of AI-assisted work, found that higher confidence in generative AI correlated with less critical-thinking effort. The researchers did not conclude AI makes people inevitably weaker thinkers. Their point was subtler: reliance on a tool can change how much effort people exert on their own.

That principle extends beyond thinking. AI does not need to love us to displace relationships, a conscience to shape moral choices, or moral agency to tempt us into surrendering responsibility.

This is why the Christian response to AI should be neither fear nor rejection. It is an extraordinary tool with real promise in medicine, science, education, defense, and productivity. The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan argues that American AI leadership can advance prosperity, discovery, and national security, and it describes the goal as a new era of “human flourishing.”

But that phrase raises a question policy alone cannot answer: What does it mean for a human being to flourish?

If flourishing simply means efficiency, abundance, and convenience, with machines relieving us of more difficulty, AI may serve that vision well.

The biblical vision is richer. Human flourishing includes relationship, responsibility, work, worship, wisdom, love, sacrifice, moral growth, and accountability before God. Many of those goods are formed through difficulty rather than in spite of it.

We should therefore distinguish between augmentation and abdication. Let AI calculate, search, translate, organize, and assist, extending human capabilities in ways previous generations could scarcely imagine.

But we should be exceedingly cautious about surrendering conscience, moral judgment, intimate relationships, spiritual counsel, responsibility for consequential decisions, the formation of children, or the struggle through which knowledge matures into wisdom.

Augmentation is legitimate. Abdication is not.

The Apostle Paul offered a principle long before anyone imagined artificial intelligence: “I will not be dominated by anything.” That is sound counsel for the digital era.

Newport is right that we should not become mesmerized by speculative AI gods. Vance is right that something spiritually dangerous happens when machines replace relationships human beings were created for.

Their warnings converge on a question technology cannot answer: what human beings are for.

We do not have to wait for artificial intelligence to awaken, gain consciousness, or achieve superintelligence. The moral test is underway: whether more capable machines remain tools under human stewardship, or whether we surrender to them the relationships, judgment, responsibility, and moral agency God entrusted to us.

AI does not have to become human to make us less human.

AUTHOR

Robert Maginnis

Robert Maginnis is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, senior fellow for National Security at Family Research Council, and the author of 15 books. His latest, “The Final Algorithm,” was released in July 2026.

RELATED ARTICLE: Who Gets to Decide How Much AI Risk Humanity Must Accept?

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

EXCLUSIVE: Multiple Sources Confirm GOP Senator Attempted IVF Expansion during NDAA Negotiations

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As negotiations in the Senate continue over funding for the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2027, sources familiar with the situation tell The Washington Stand that an amendment that would have implemented the unrestricted use of highly controversial in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments into basic health care for military servicemembers was put forward by a Republican in a closed-door executive session, before it was ultimately dropped.

Sources confirmed Thursday that Senators Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) and Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) offered competing amendments during a closed-door executive mark-up session for the NDAA that would have expanded servicemembers’ access to IVF treatments at the expense of taxpayers as part of the military’s Tricare health insurance program, without fully addressing pro-life concerns. The Sullivan amendment reportedly was shopped around to Republican offices, but failed to garner support because it was not clear that it protected frozen embryos, most of whom are discarded or experimented upon. The language of the proposed Duckworth amendment was said to be almost identical to language first put forward in an amendment she offered during last year’s NDAA markups. A source conveyed to TWS that during the session, Duckworth told those in the room that she and Sullivan agreed to withdraw their competing amendments and, as a compromise, to offer Duckworth’s language from last year. That amendment would have enabled Tricare coverage for “fertility-related care,” an open-ended term that could include “other information, referrals, treatments, procedures, testing, medications, laboratory services, technologies, and services facilitating reproduction as determined appropriate by the Secretary of Defense.”

The attempt by a GOP lawmaker to quietly fund IVF treatments with taxpayer dollars behind closed doors comes in the wake of the Trump administration’s efforts last year to “lower costs and expand access” to IVF by attempting to help lower the cost of fertility drugs used by women for egg retrieval. But pro-life advocates say that IVF procedures involve a host of ethically and morally problematic outcomes.

Based on CDC data and estimates from the Heritage Foundation, in 2021 alone, approximately 4.1 million embryonic children were created via IVF in the U.S., but just over 97,000 babies were born as a result, amounting to just 2.3% of the embryos created. Unused embryos are routinely discarded or frozen indefinitely. While actual figures are unknown, the number of destroyed embryos is estimated to be over one million per year, and at least 1.5 million embryonic children remain indefinitely frozen.

In addition, experts note that the open-ended language of policies like the Duckworth amendment leaves the door open for cloning, including the creation of human-animal hybrids known as chimeras. Other concerns include the lack of parental rights amid the unregulated IVF industry, in which embryos have been discarded without parental consent, the exploitation of women through surrogacy’s health risks, and the fact that the underlying causes of infertility are not addressed through IVF procedures. Experts point to restorative reproductive medicine (RRM), including NaPro Technology, FEMM, and the Billings Ovulation Method as far more effective and ethical methods of treating infertility.

While the IVF amendments allowing unrestricted IVF usage for servicemembers at taxpayers’ expense have been defeated for now, experts say that pro-life advocates must be especially vigilant that the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers who claim to be pro-life refrain from putting forward policies that harm preborn children and undermine human dignity.

“It is disappointing that, behind closed doors, Republicans continue to try to expand taxpayer-funded IVF coverage despite the fact that they have been educated, year after year, about the problems, and especially the problems with expanding IVF from service-related injuries to all servicemembers and their dependents,” FRC Senior Director of Government Affairs Quena González told TWS, responding to the source. “Not only would it be immensely expensive, but it would involve taxpayer-funded creation, storage, and ultimately destruction of human lives.”

He continued, “And this is the proverbial camel’s nose under the edge of the tent. Using the NDAA to start this experiment in the military before expanding to universal coverage of IVF is particularly sneaky because, at this stage, the NDAA is being negotiated behind closed doors to protect military secrets and national security concerns. It is concerning to learn that some Republicans are using a legitimate process to hide from public accountability and cut deals on harmful language behind closed doors.”

As González underscored, “Millions of Americans would object to expansive taxpayer funding of IVF, when better alternatives exist to actually treat (rather than artificially bypass, at great human cost to all involved) the underlying causes of infertility. The military is a fighting force to deter tyrants and protect America, not a social laboratory. Military spouses and families, and the millions of Americans who fund their healthcare, deserve better.”

When asked for comment, a spokesperson for Sullivan’s office replied to TWS, “As a pro-life senator, this is a very important issue for Senator Sullivan. He believes that there is no greater gift than parenthood and understands that some families need IVF treatment to have children. However, there are significant pro-life concerns regarding IVF treatment, many of which Senator Sullivan shares. He has worked with pro-life groups on legislation in the NDAA for years. In the current NDAA, he was trying to find a path forward on this issue that takes into account those pro-life concerns. When it was clear that Democrats would block the proposal because of pro-life provisions in the proposal, he withdrew the amendment.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was updated with a statement from Senator Dan Sullivan’s office, and additional clarifications to the markup proceedings, and a clarification that Sullivan’s measure was dropped rather than “defeated” in the original version.

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Restoring the Island into the Western Orbit: A Spiritual and Cultural Journey Toward a New Cuba

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My second child is about to be born. It could be any day. My wife and I await him with the love and trembling that only parents know. He will be born fragile and tearful, but with the potential to reach for the stars.

This year, another birth may be about to take place in that elongated wound in the Caribbean called Cuba, the last Berlin Wall of the West. The violence and the hope of giving birth to political change connect the tense hours of waiting and pain with the anticipation of what is to come.

The millions of Cubans on the island who have not wanted or been able to flee, along with the millions who have wanted or had to, remain attentive to the voracious news cycle. They follow the dashed lines on mobile apps that mark the passage of spy planes over the island; they follow influencers commenting on news agency reports. They follow the tweets of Cuban-American congressmen more than the speeches of dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel.

Many viewed Nicolás Maduro’s removal as a scene from a movie, a prelude to a sequel that could signify the beginning of the end for Cuban socialist tyranny. The longed-for transition? We know that a transition away from the Castros is desired, but after that, where to?

Cubans today fantasize with artificial intelligence tools, about a bridge between the Florida Keys and Cuba, or the reconstruction of Havana. But, as I discussed with the host of a Miami television show a few days ago, the most difficult reconstruction will not be that of buildings (despite the irretrievable loss of entire blocks of eclectic architecture), but rather the reconstruction of the spirit and culture of the people.

Contrary to the call from major U.S. oil companies to contribute to the reconstruction of Venezuela’s oil infrastructure and the country in general, President Donald Trump has consistently referred to the successful and extensive exile community in the United States when it comes to Cuba. In other words, Cubans would be at the forefront of rebuilding the country — yes, those spat upon and rejected in “marches of the fighting people” and called “the Miami mafia” — they are the hope for the island’s future.

But spiritual and cultural reconstruction is another matter entirely. It’s decades of socialist propaganda, of a culture of death promoted by the State (Cuba floats in the blood of millions of aborted babies and those who have been shot and tortured), of ideologies that exalt man and reject our tradition as a territory connected to the Christian West.

On December 1, 1492, Admiral Christopher Columbus landed in what is now Baracoa, upon discovering Cuba on his first voyage. There he planted a wooden cross, the Cross of the Vine, one of the 20-odd planted in America, the oldest Christian relic on the continent. It is still preserved today in the parish church of Baracoa.

Christianity, the majority religion on the island and within which the freedoms of expression, religion, and association were instituted as we know them today, shaped Cuban culture for more than five centuries.

Criminalizing those who lived according to that faith was essential for Castroism to generate isolated individuals, without a past or sense of the present and future, easily manipulated by foreign ideologies such as socialism in the 20th century, or gender ideology in the 21st. It is no coincidence that in February 1959, weeks after Castro’s rise to power, Executive Law No. 74 eliminated the phrase “So help me God” from the oaths of office for public officials.

The thinker Dagoberto Valdés has spoken of the “anthropological damage” inflicted on the Cuban population by generations of subsistence under Castro’s propaganda and oppression. But the concept is further complemented by an addition from the Cuban poet and Christian Claudette Betancourt: it is a “spiritual and anthropological damage.”

It is not only important in a democratic Cuba to get rid of centralism in favor of the free market; To stop envying those who undertake projects with honesty and success, and instead cultivate a culture of productivity and personal agency; to stop looking with the short-sightedness of atheism and start raising our eyes to the heavens. That is the true challenge, to retrace our steps, erased by the leftists in power.

In this sense, there is hope: young evangelicals are leading independent political communication on social media, and “Make Cuba Great Again” has become fashionable  — with all its immanence. The oft-repeated phrase that freedom begins within can be interpreted as the recognition of a spiritual and cultural condition.

Like Betancourt, I believe that in the midst of chaos, Cubans must understand the seemingly laughable premise that they are human beings. For so many years, we have repeated speeches and have been indoctrinated and infantilized, that this seems to be forgotten! The poet emphasizes that when the adults of an entire society are subjected to annulment and infantilization — perhaps referring to totalitarian statist “paternalism” — the result is aberrant.

“Children are guided because they don’t yet have the capacity or maturity to make many decisions for themselves, but when an adult is treated like a child, suppressing their critical thinking skills (which they usually already possess, however minimal), a monster emerges, a degrading experiment,” the young woman reflected. “That’s why the message right now is to remember who we are, that which we have forgotten under the weight of abuse and the struggle for survival. To raise awareness that yes, we are thinking beings, we have rights, and the capacity to make decisions.” This is something, he says, that is essential to rebuild the country, when all this is over.

His words don’t point to the unbridled experimentation from ivory towers, but rather the patient serenity of looking at our shared heritage and tradition, understanding that we were capable of founding a prosperous Republic with civil liberties. And yes, also one that can be improved.

A new Cuba must return to the orbit of the West, to which it historically, culturally, and spiritually belongs, and from which it was torn by the putrid hand of socialism. The violent birth we expect soon will be only the beginning.

AUTHOR

Yoe Suárez

Yoe Suárez is a writer, producer, and journalist, exiled from Cuba due to his investigative reporting about themes like torture, political prisoners, government black lists, cybersurveillance, and freedom of expression and conscience. He is the author of the books “Leviathan: Political Police and Socialist Terror” and “El Soplo del Demonio: Violence and Gangsterism in Havana.”

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Top European Engineer’s Book Settles the Evolution vs. Intelligent Design Debate

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Stuart Burgess of the United Kingdom is one of the finest engineers in the world, having designed among much else in his career patented gearboxes used in the European Space Agency’s four largest Earth-observation satellites and the transmissions used by the British cycling team in winning gold medals in the Rio, Tokyo, and Paris Olympics.

He has also held academic positions at the University of Cambridge and the University of Bristol in the U.K., and Liberty University here in the United States. He has been awarded the James Clayton Prize as the United Kingdom’s top engineer and recognized as Guest Editor of the journal Biomimetics.

But odds are good that when historians look back on the present century, Burgess will be best known for two words — “Ultimate Engineering,” the title of his just-released book with the subtitle “An Engineer Investigates the Biomechanics of the Human Body.” This book very well may have an equal or greater cultural, scientific, and political impact on Western civilization than did Charles Darwin’s landmark “On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection.”

The reason is because Burgess makes a tremendously compelling case for the proposition that, for all of Darwin’s undoubted brilliance, his evolutionary theory’s fundamental assumption — that natural selection enables species to evolve over the millennia by accepting variations that contribute to survival and rejecting those that don’t — is incapable of accounting for the extraordinary complexity and sophistication of engineering technology required to create and sustain the human body.

As Burgess explains in his book’s introduction, not only is evolutionary natural selection incapable of explaining the engineering genius required to design the human wrist, knee, and foot joints, but it also encourages the increasingly common conclusion voiced by many evolutionists today that such joints are poorly designed precisely because of the evolutionary process.

“For four decades, I have worked alongside top researchers in biology and engineering, and together we are not only awestruck by the engineering marvels of the biological realm, but inspired by them to make significant engineering breakthroughs outside of biology. That pursuit, now a subdiscipline of its own, is known as biomimetics,” he explains.

Burgess continues, “Despite all this, some evolutionists, including Nathan Lents, Abby Hafer, Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins, insist biology is characterized by bad design. They further argue that this supports the theory of evolution, since Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection working on chance variations (now understood as random genetic mutations) is a mindless trial-and-error process that can be expected to have routinely drifted into decidedly suboptimal design solutions in the history of life.”

In short, according to Burgess, “evolution is constrained by a limited ability to shed vestigial parts, and it cannot evolve much beyond the organism’s survival/reproduction needs.”

Dawkins and Coyne should be familiar to readers of The Washington Stand, as the two men are not only committed evolutionary advocates, but leading figures in the New Atheism movement that came to prominence in the first decade of the 21st century. Neither Lents nor Hafer are identified with the New Atheists as such, but both have written extensively and critically about the alleged conflict between religious belief and scientific inquiry.

In his 335 pages of “Ultimate Engineering,” Burgess argues that “biology contains design that is far superior to human technology, design that is in fact ultimate engineering. By this, I mean design at the limit of what is possible. … This expectation of ultimate engineering fits comfortably with the Intelligent Design paradigm, for if the whole universe — including its laws and materials — is understood to have been made by an intelligent designer, as theism holds, then it follows that this designer would possess intimate knowledge of how to use those laws and materials to produce designs at the limit of performance.”

Designs, that is, like our wrist, knee, and ankle joints, the human spine, jaw, eye, middle ear, blood circulatory system, and much, much more. In the interest of brevity, let us here consider Burgess’s analysis of the ankle joint and the foot that together are capable of performing remarkable actions that no other creature on Earth is capable of matching.

At the heart of the amazing characteristics of the ankle and foot is how working together they provide humans an unequaled agility required for walking, running, jumping, climbing and dancing, among many other activities. To achieve such flexibility over a wide range of physical demands, the ankle and foot, according to Burgess, must be “both stiff and flexible, competing requirements very difficult to achieve in one structure. On the one hand, the foot has to form a very stiff lever for pushing off the ground in running and walking. On the other hand, it has to become very flexible when it lands.”

Burgess describes multiple genius design features in the ankle and foot, including the triple arched structure that he describes as “a design masterpiece.” These three arches include the medial arch that extends from the heel to the three biggest toes, the lateral arch that connects the heel with the smallest two toes, and the transverse arch that links the other two arches via both ankle and forefoot bones.

Together, these three arches “give ideal three-point contact with the ground. All three arches are able to deform and flatten to absorb shock as well as store and release energy. There are also specific functions for each arch. The Medial Arch is the strongest arch and can form a very stiff lever for push-off in walking and running. It has two contact points on the ground, one at the heel and one at the ball of the foot at the base of the big toe. The Medial Arch has many ligaments that store significant elastic energy during each running stride. The Spring Ligament is one of the most important of these energy-storing ligaments, hence the name,” Burgess explains.

“The Lateral Arch creates the third contact point with the ground, at the ball of the little toe, thus maximizing the distance between the two front points of contact, and thus maximizing stability during activities like running. The Lateral Arch gives stability to the foot, such as when standing on the toes. The Transverse Arch helps transmit loads from the Lateral Arch to the Medial Arch during pronation when the foot rolls from the outside of the foot to the inside,” he continues.

By contrast, Burgess notes that the evolutionist Lents “describes the ankle bones as among ‘the most obnoxious example of bones for which we have no use.’” Burgess further notes that “paleontologist and evolutionist Jeremy DeSilva also sees poor design. The title of his lecture on the topic says it all: ‘Starting Off on the Wrong Foot: How Our Ape Ancestry predisposes Us to Foot and Ankle Maladies.’”

DeSilva’s title illustrates how slavish devotion to a theory, as opposed to observed facts, can dictate how one perceives the world. Evolutionist theory posits that upright humans evolved from apes who moved about using both arms and legs from a stooped position. But the superior range of capabilities of the upright human, plus the more than 200 million steps taken by a human over an 80-year lifespan (Google AI estimates half that many for the ape with a 30-40- year lifespan), point to an obvious superiority in design.

Burgess expresses optimism in his chapter entitled “Intelligent Design Ascending” that the day when the suffocating dominance of evolutionary dogma in academia and scientific circles is overwhelmed by the evidence marshalled by him and legions of others continues to mount. After reading “Ultimate Engineering,” one can only hope that day is coming soon.

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

4 Inspirational Pro-Life Moms

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Mother’s Day is a wonderful opportunity to reflect on the gift of life, an especially important endeavor since we live in a culture that continues to reject it in a multitude of ways, not only through abortion but in the increasingly common decision of many to intentionally not have children. In the spirit of celebrating the gift of life that mothers have given us all, here are four beautiful examples of moms who are not only championing the preciousness of every life in the culture but are also selflessly mothering their own children.

Melissa Ohden

Melissa, who was adopted as an infant, was 14 when she found out that she was the survivor of a botched abortion. In 1977, her biological mother was 19 when she was forced to go through with a saline abortion by her family. Even though Melissa was soaked in a toxic solution in her mother’s womb for five days, she entered the world alive. Melissa survived due to the heroic actions of a nurse who rushed her to the NICU.

Melissa went on to found the Abortion Survivors Network, which seeks to “share stories and data to humanize survivors’ experiences” and “promote policies that protect and serve abortion survivors, their families and friends.”

Through God’s grace, Melissa was eventually able to connect with “a maternal cousin, my two maternal half-sisters, a maternal aunt — and yes, even my biological mother!” She now has two daughters of her own with her husband Ryan.

Abby Johnson

Abby spent eight years working for Planned Parenthood, America’s leading abortion supplier. As she rose through the ranks of the business, however, she became “increasingly disturbed by what she witnessed.” In 2009, she was asked to assist with an ultrasound-guided abortion. “She watched in horror as a 13 week baby fought for, and ultimately lost, its life at the hand of the abortionist.” Abby soon quit her job and vowed to “begin to advocate for life in the womb and expose abortion for what it truly is.”

Abby went on to write the memoir of her experience at Planned Parenthood and her subsequent conversion to the pro-life cause in “Unplanned,” in which she revealed that she had two abortions before the birth of her first child. “Unplanned” was later made into a film, earning $21 million at the box office on a $6 million budget. Abby also founded And Then There Were None, a pro-life organization that seeks to “help people in the abortion industry leave their jobs and rediscover the peace and joy they’ve been missing.” As a result of ATTWN’s work, over 700 abortion workers have quit, and 48 abortion facilities have closed after these workers left.

Abby now has eight children with her husband Doug, one of whom is adopted.

Lila Rose

At the age of 15, Lila founded the pro-life organization Live Action, which began by giving presentations on the tragedy of abortion to schools and youth groups. Beginning in 2006, she conducted numerous undercover sting operations at Planned Parenthood facilities, posing as an underage girl seeking an abortion. In multiple instances, the Planned Parenthood staff was caught on video encouraging her to lie about her age in order to cover up possible statutory rape and to get an abortion.

Lila has since become one of the leading voices in the pro-life movement through her numerous media appearances and through the work of Live Action, which continues to uncover illegal activity by abortion businesses and produce cutting edge pro-life media content, resulting in “the largest online impact among pro-life and pro-abortion groups reaching over 46 million per month and over 2 billion lifetime video views.”

Lila now has three children with her husband Joe.

Bethany Bomberger

Bethany and her husband Ryan founded the Radiance Foundation, a pro-life organization that seeks to educate and motivate the culture “to put truth and love into action.” She is the author of three children’s books, which focus on the unique gift that each child is as well as the unchangeable and beautiful truth of being either male or female.

After becoming pregnant in her early 20s, Bethany made the courageous decision to choose life. During an interview on CBN, she described a life-changing moment she experienced:

“I had a defining moment. I look back and I think of February 14th, which was Valentine’s Day. It was a Saturday morning at 9 o’clock, and I had my first ultrasound. I walk into this empty room, just by myself, with the ultrasound tech, and I saw for the first time my daughter’s little beating heart. I had this defining moment as I saw in the emptiness of the room, I felt the fullness of the love of God for me, and I just felt that he wrapped my heart and her heart and his heart and just called me back to himself. And that night, I went home and God gave my Psalm 34:5, which says, ‘They looked to him, and were radiant, and their faces were never covered with shame.’ And actually that’s what the Radiance Foundation is predicated upon. But for me it was so personal, because it didn’t matter the shame of my yesterday decisions, ungodly and selfish as they were, but when God infuses you with his glory, his glory becomes what people see, and it’s not shame anymore. I always wanted for my child and for my life to walk in that.”

Bethany has since become the mother of four children with her husband Ryan, including some by adoption, and “loves to celebrate courageous birthmoms and the beauty of adoption.”

Of course, every mother is an inspiring witness to the pro-life cause for a simple reason: they said yes to life and endured hours of pain and labor — in some cases even risking or giving up their own lives — to deliver a child into the world. May our hearts be grateful this Mother’s Day for every mother who has cooperated in God’s plan for humanity to “fill the earth,” with a simple yet profound “yes” to love, self-sacrifice, and new life.

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Proclaiming Life: That No More Generations May Be Lost

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This Wednesday, January 22, 2025, is the 52nd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. Less than three years ago, a changed court reversed the abortion decisions in the Dobbs case. On the ground, however, the toll of abortion in the United States remains high, fueled by unlimited abortion in a number of states and an evolution in abortion procedures via the distribution of the abortion drug mifepristone with few health standards and requirements, as prescribed by the U.S Food and Drug Administration.

January 22 is also just the third day of the second administration of Donald J. Trump. President Trump enters office in a somewhat different posture from that of his first term in 2017. The president’s stance on abortion is considerably different from what it was eight years ago, with his stated pledge to veto any federal ban on abortion, opposition to the most protective pro-life laws in the states, and avowed intention not to alter the FDA’s approval of the abortion pill.

There remain, however, a number of actions that Congress and the president can take to reinstate pro-life policies from his first term, particularly on domestic and international abortion funding, conscience rights for pro-life doctors and entities, child tax credits, and funding for the massive abortion provider Planned Parenthood.

What might this week bring in terms of administration statements on abortion? What does history tell us about the expressed convictions of avowedly pro-life presidents, of whom we have had four from 1981 to the present? A quick scan of the dozens of executive orders issued by President Trump so far shows a few that may have pro-life implications, particularly the 90-day pause in foreign assistance to permit a review of their consistency with America First goals. A second action with pro-life import is the announced withdrawal of the United States from the thoroughly pro-abortion World Health Organization, whose actions hostile to human life have been described in a prior article in this space.

President Trump has repeatedly said in the past few days that more actions are coming. Given that this week brings both the anniversary of Roe v. Wade and the national March for Life (January 24), what else might the new administration do to highlight its position on the sanctity of human life? In addition to policy steps, the traditional means for these expressions include attendance by the president or senior administration officials at pro-life events or, more commonly, the issuance of a Presidential Proclamation declaring National Sanctity of Human Life Day. The latter form of support for a pro-life nation has been consistent since the practice was initiated by President Ronald Reagan in 1984.

So what is a presidential proclamation? These documents are signed by the president and can be issued at any time during the year, usually to commemorate a particular observance. They are typically done at the request of one or both houses of Congress, which adopt a resolution urging the president to recognize a special period.

Some proclamations are annual and others are one-off occasions, owing to the unique nature of the observance or the natural limit on proclamations — which is to say, the White House typically prefers not to dilute these commemoratives by issuing them on multiple topics day after day (the average number of proclamations issued for the past three decades is 143 per year). Proclamations can honor such observances as National Down Syndrome Awareness Month or less weighty matters such as National Ice Cream Month and National Ice Cream Day (in July, naturally).

In contrast, the Presidential Proclamations for National Sanctity of Human Life Day have a far more substantive history. First, of course, the proclamations are not lawmaking or policy-setting. They are vision statements, setting forth the principles that guide a president’s actions, from executive orders, to policy memoranda, to legislative proposals, to presidential personnel, and more.

Since 1984, when the first presidential proclamation on abortion was issued by Ronald Reagan, there has been a total of 22 such proclamations issued by four chief executives: Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald J. Trump. The issuances have been remarkably consistent. Each Republican president has issued an annual proclamation covering his four or eight years in office. No Democratic president has ever issued one. Because they are not policy documents per se (though they may express a view), the proclamations are not rescinded by subsequent presidents but remain as persuasive documents of a hortatory character.

The first National Sanctity of Human Life Proclamation was promulgated on January 13, 1984, and it designated January 22, 1984, the 11th anniversary of Roe, as National Sanctity of Human Life Day. Unlike most presidential proclamations, this one was not requested by congressional resolution. Rather, the idea was originated by the Rev. Curtis J. Young, at that time the executive director of the Christian Action Council (CAC), the forerunner of Care Net, one of the largest pregnancy center networks in the United States. Young led the establishment of scores of pregnancy centers and is the author of “The Least of These: What Everyone Should Know About Abortion,” one of the first books to make the compelling case for life from a biblical, moral, and social perspective. The CAC was in its first years a policy and communications group, founded by a coalition of distinguished evangelical leaders such as the Rev. Billy Graham, C. Everett Koop, and Harold O.J. Brown. That first date for the observance fell on a Sunday and one goal was to foster recollection, prayer, and action within the churches about the value of every human life.

Now, 41 years later, this tradition of presidential proclamations continues to serve a high purpose. Each of the four presidents who have followed the tradition has had a distinct style, but there is much in common among the documents. President Reagan’s first proclamation, No. 5147, went directly to the nation’s founding document: “The values and freedoms we cherish as Americans rest on our fundamental commitment to the sanctity of human life. The first of the ‘unalienable rights’ affirmed by our Declaration of Independence is the right to life itself, a right the Declaration states has been endowed by our Creator on all human beings — whether young or old, weak or strong, healthy or handicapped.” As has become standard in the proclamations, Reagan called “upon the citizens of this blessed land to gather on that day in homes and places of worship to give thanks for the gift of life, and to reaffirm our commitment to the dignity of every human being and the sanctity of each human life.”

Reagan issued a similar proclamation each of the following five years of his presidency, hailing the new achievements in perinatal care, praising abortion alternatives, and calling for legal protections at every level of government for the unborn. His 1988 Proclamation, the second to last of his time in office, was particularly notable. Tracking the language of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Reagan’s text came to be called a “proclamation of personhood” for the unborn. He wrote:

“Our Nation cannot continue down the path of abortion, so radically at odds with our history, our heritage, and our concepts of justice. This sacred legacy, and the well-being and the future of our country, demand that protection of the innocents must be guaranteed and that the personhood of the unborn be declared and defended throughout our land. In legislation introduced at my request in the First Session of the 100th Congress, I have asked the Legislative branch to declare the ‘humanity of the unborn child and the compelling interest of the several states to protect the life of each person before birth.’ This duty to declare on so fundamental a matter falls to the Executive as well. By this Proclamation I hereby do so.”

The next four proclamations were issued by George H. W. Bush, and they evince a similar spirit. In his 1990 proclamation, President Bush hailed our nation’s spectrum of concern to preserve and protect vulnerable lives, whatever the threat. He championed the scientists and physicians providing care and seeking cures, promoted adoption, and cited the Declaration. He wrote: “On this day, we also thank God for the advances in medicine that have improved the care of unborn children in the womb and premature babies. These scientific advances reinforce the belief that unborn children are persons, entitled to medical care and legal protection.”

The next presidential elections brought the Clinton years and pitched battles over the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Winning the fight for this limit on a particularly grotesque form of abortion, that destroys a living baby by crushing its skull and vacuuming out its brains, fell to President Bush’s son, George W. Bush. In the last of his eight annual proclamations on National Sanctity of Human Life Day, the younger Bush recited his considerable accomplishments in signing into law the ban on partial-birth abortions, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act protecting the right to life of the child in the womb, and the original Born Alive Infants Protection Act.

He wrote in the proclamation’s first words: “All human life is a gift from our Creator that is sacred, unique, and worthy of protection. On National Sanctity of Human Life Day, our country recognizes that each person, including every person waiting to be born, has a special place and purpose in this world. We also underscore our dedication to heeding this message of conscience by speaking up for the weak and voiceless among us.”

President Trump sustained these commitments in his Proclamations on National Sanctity of Human Life Day from 2018 to 2021. He called on Congress to act to limit late-term abortion and poetically ended his proclamation stating: “Today, I call on the Congress to join me in protecting and defending the dignity of every human life, including those not yet born. I call on the American people to continue to care for women in unexpected pregnancies and to support adoption and foster care in a more meaningful way, so every child can have a loving home. And finally, I ask every citizen of this great Nation to listen to the sound of silence caused by a generation lost to us, and then to raise their voices for all affected by abortion, both seen and unseen.”

With these beautiful words, the tradition of presidential proclamations on behalf of life has reached a new shore of opportunity, one in which we can move toward a golden age of protection for our young.

Here are links to all 22 of these statements of principle: 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021.

AUTHOR

Chuck Donovan

Chuck Donovan served in the Reagan White House as a senior writer and as Deputy Director of Presidential Correspondence until early 1989. He was executive vice president of Family Research Council, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and founder/president of Charlotte Lozier Institute from 2011 to 2024. He has written and spoken extensively on issues in life and family policy.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘Centuries’ of Christian Tradition on ‘Sanctity of Human Life’ Pitted against Left’s ‘Worldview of Death’

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“This whole kerfuffle in Alabama has revealed … the worldview of the Left, which is a worldview of death. And they’re really running with this like they ran after the Dobbs decision,” David Closson, director of Family Research Council’s Center for Biblical Worldview, said on “Washington Watch” Tuesday. “This is not like a one-off,” agreed FRC President Tony Perkins. “The worldview has been revealed. And I think it’s becoming clearer and clearer.”

Enraged by an Alabama Supreme Court decision recognizing the value of all unborn human life, the left-wing media has attempted to carefully curate camera angles of the controversy, so as to portray a hamster as a hippo. First, they launched a scaremongering campaign falsely alleging that Republicans are targeting in vitro fertilization (IVF). Then, Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) opportunistically promoted a bill that wouldn’t so much protect IVF as it would legalize other anti-human practices, such as human cloning, human-animal chimeras, designer babies, and commercial gestational surrogacy.

To browbeat timid opponents into playing along with the charade, the Left trumped up fears of “theocracy” based on a non-binding concurring opinion. “The hand-wringing on the Left … isn’t actually on the majority decision,” Closson noted, but on “a concurring opinion that the chief justice wrote.”

Fear prevents people from thinking clearly, and that’s exactly what the Left is hoping for. If legislators had a moment to sit back and reflect, they would likely realize that “there are moral and spiritual, theological implications here,” said Perkins.

In fact, “There’s a long history within Christian ethics of looking at IVF and saying that … it’s morally fraught,” said Closson. IVF is a process designed for helping infertile couples conceive a child by combining egg and sperm in a laboratory, and then implanting the newly created human life back into the mother’s womb. “As Christians, we believe that at conception, when that sperm and egg come together, you have a human being.”

However, many IVF practitioners create far more embryos than would ever be gestated. “Usually it’s a dozen, maybe even more embryos” that are created, explained Closson. “They selectively choose which ones to implant in the woman.” Of these, all but one will likely be aborted. “Then the others are stored in freezer,” added Closson, resulting today in “millions of frozen embryos in freezers all over the country.” Many are never used and ultimately destroyed.

Despite the moral and ethical pitfalls of IVF, the Alabama Supreme Court did not prohibit the practice, nor even regulate it. All they said was a law protecting children from harm applied to all children, including embryos conceived via IVF. And, in a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Tom Parker added his commentary on the Alabama Constitution’s recognition of the “sanctity of unborn life.”

“That phrase, ‘sanctity of [unborn] life,’ appears in the Alabama Constitution. So, just being a good lawyer, [Parker] said, ‘Where did these words come from? What do these words mean?’ And so, he explored the Christian tradition of understanding sanctity of life, image of God,” Closson summarized.

Closson found it humorous that mainstream media accounts made the mistake of sneering at Parker’s opinion for “quoting 16th-century dead theologians like John Calvin and whatnot.” All their derision proved is that “Christians have been thinking about these issues for a very long time,” he pointed out. “It’s not that we just thought of these in a right-wing think tank last week. We’ve been thinking deeply about these issues for centuries.”

This is humorous because the Left doesn’t realize how far outclassed they are by centuries of brilliant minds. They don’t realize it because they never had to engage with that ancient tradition. Their thinking descends from Karl Marx, and while they might engage with some of his immediate intellectual forebearers (Rousseau, Darwin, Mill), they have little use for a tradition that had already grown wizened before those men were born. “The problem we’re seeing today is the absence of moral truth,” said Perkins. “There are no ethics that are standard and steadfast. It’s a Wild, Wild West.”

One implication of this ethical anarchy is the absence of any limits on what science should do. Just as researchers for the Chinese Communist Party continue to bioengineer deadlier coronaviruses and chimerical monkeys, so the American Left displays an apparent preference for pedantic, utilitarian reasoning over fundamental human rights. Duckworth’s bill would be a go-ahead signal to a lot of ethically dubious research.

“Just because science enables us to do something doesn’t mean we should do it,” argued Perkins. “We should be concerned about both the means and the ends of where this would lead us. And it needs to be guided by biblical truth, by morality … [and by] ethics.”

The fundamental reason why Christians believe all human life is valuable is that “God created man in his own image” (Genesis 1:27). To every human being, this reality imparts “transcendent value,” insisted Perkins. “It’s not value assigned to it. It is value that is inherent in it because it is created in the image of God.”

The road to pushing for designer babies, chimeras, cloning, and surrogacy begins by denying the fundamental reality that all human beings have inherent value because they bear God’s image.

“We need to start calling out a lie for what it is. It is a lie,” Perkins insisted. “Understanding is the first step, but having the confidence of that understanding gives us the ability to push back and say, ‘No, this is not true. It is not right, it is false.’”

Conservatives “playing defense” over the sanctity of unborn life don’t seem to realize that ours is the inherently stronger position. For centuries, Western civilization’s brightest minds have helped develop the implications of this doctrine, which is absolute truth. What does rootless, groundless, post-modern Marxism have to offer in comparison?

The current circumstances are as if the presidential motorcade was suddenly set upon by a gang of youths throwing pea gravel. Exiting the vehicle would be foolish, and waving a white flag would be irresponsible. If conservatives recognize and exploit the advantages of our position, the smear campaign against those standing up for the lives of unborn babies — including those conceived via IVF — can accomplish nothing.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.