Winning campaigns to protect human life from the manifold threats we face today is a multi-faceted enterprise. Over the past six decades, these campaigns have generated initiatives in politics, social policy, legal theory, religious outreach, sidewalk witness, and education. In the wake of the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, advocates for life have renewed some strategies while developing new ones. Pregnancy centers are expanding, young activists are going door to door, research is being redoubled. In the midst of these strategic changes, it is possible that time for reflection on the issues at stake will be limited. It is likely, too, that the full dimensions of these issues — “pro-life” has never been properly understood as a single issue — will not be fully appreciated.

In the interest of aiding reflection and deepening understanding of what is at stake in today’s controversies, I have compiled a list of books that pro-life students and activists could find helpful to strengthen them in the cause. No list of this type would be perfect, and readers will point out some obvious omissions, but here are a few from my near-60 years in the fight that have stayed with me as ballast.

1. “A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence” by Fredric Wertham (1966). An excerpt from this book in chapter nine, titled “The Geranium in the Window,” was widely distributed by right-to-life voices as they traveled and spoke to audiences in that era. A psychiatrist who explored, often controversially, the origins and normalization of violence, Wertham devoted this chapter to the forces that forged the campaign by Nazi doctors to carry out euthanasia and exterminate the weak. That campaign was a prelude and partner to the Holocaust, and the role of medicine in carrying out these unprecedented crimes is crucial to our understanding.

2. “Handbook on Abortion” by Dr. and Mrs. J.C. Willke (1971). The Willkes were key players in the pro-life movement, writing prolifically, helping found Cincinnati Right to Life as well as Ohio and National Right to Life. They were classic entrepreneurs as well, creating their own publishing house, Hiltz Publishing, and ultimately distributing millions of copies of their book worldwide. As a physician and nurse, they brought authority to the effort to bring abortion out of the darkness and compel the public to see the practice for what it is. They were among the first to publish photographs of late-term killings, then considered contraband and smuggled out of hospitals. Anyone who saw the picture captioned “One day’s work in a Canadian teaching hospital,” a waste bag full of the corpses of well-developed babies, will never forget it. The Willkes motivated millions of young people to face reality and join the movement for life.

3. “Aborting America” by Bernard Nathanson, M.D. (1979). A pivotal year, 1979 saw a shift in the political world with the embrace by Ronald Reagan of the right to life. Nathanson drove the most significant private conversion to the cause, having presided, he admitted, over more than 60,000 abortions at his facility in liberal Manhattan. Nathanson, a cofounder of NARAL Pro-Choice America, could not help but see what was transpiring in each abortion, and he memorably said the practice would end if we had a “window to the womb.” Via the advent of ultrasound, such a window was created. Nathanson’s 1985 film “The Silent Scream” was viewed in the White House and drove further change. America continues to abort its most precious resource, its children.

4. “Ethics at the Edges of Life: Medical and Legal Intersections” by Paul Ramsey (1980). The distinguished professor of Ethics and Religion at Princeton University produced a series of unmatched books exploring what history, logic, medicine, and culture tell us about the importance of regard for the sanctity of every human life. His memory is honored at an annual event hosted by the Center for Bioethics and Culture (CBC). Ethics at the Edges of Life explores the special vulnerability of the prenatal, neonatal child, and the elderly. It should be read through, alongside Prof. Ramsey’s “The Patient as Person” (1970), “Fabricated Man: The Ethics of Genetic Control” (1970), and “The Ethics of Fetal Research” (1975), representing a full curriculum in these essential topics.

5. “A Private Choice: Abortion in America in the Seventies” by John T. Noonan Jr. (1979). One of the most eminent legal scholars of his era, Noonan exposed the driving forces behind the 1973 abortion cases. Elsewhere, he described his finding that opposition to abortion represented “an almost absolute value” in human history. In 1985, President Reagan nominated Noonan to the 9th S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where he served for more than three decades. While on the court in 1995, he wrote a key ruling upholding a state of Washington statute outlawing assisted suicide, which was subsequently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

6. “The Least of These: What Everyone Should Know About Abortion” by Curt Young (1983). Keying its title off the words of Jesus at Matthew 18:3, the Rev. Curtis J. Young made one of the earliest and most thorough cases for a biblical underpinning of the sanctity of human life. At that time, Young was the executive director of the first evangelical nonprofit to champion life, the Christian Action Council (CAC). Always a forerunner and accelerator, it was Curt Young who proposed the idea of a national Sanctity of Human Life Sunday to the Reagan White House, a tradition that has endured under Republican presidents to this day. Young also led the drive by the CAC to encourage Christian churches to create and support pregnancy care centers, leading to the establishment of hundreds during his years at CAC, now known by the name CareNet. “The Least of These” remains must-reading.

7. “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation” by Ronald Reagan (1983). This long essay by the nation’s 40th president came on the heels of two major losses in Congress on a human life statute and the Hatch constitutional amendment. Reagan agreed to write the booklet at the request of editor J.P. McFadden of Human Life Review, the indispensable journal of the cause. It was meant to buoy up the case for life as a leading national concern, and Reagan’s words even now convey a sense of the centrality of the issue for our national life. He wrote, “Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves. Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide.”

8. “The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide” by Robert Jay Lifton, M.D. (1986). This examination of the decades-long corruption of the medical profession prior to and during the Nazi era is documented and exhaustive. The radical feminism of the National Organization for Women, the decline of religious belief, and other factors stream into our contemporary abortion culture. But from the time of Hippocrates, a bulwark against the sacrifice of the innocent was supplied by those closest to the expectant mother in a time of vulnerability: the medical profession. Their unique access to the patient can either guarantee care or destroy life and hope. As one review describes Lifton’s work, “Massive episodes of killing of human beings by other human beings have been an ongoing saga for centuries. Misguided belief and misguided science, and the abuse of constantly advancing technology in the name of one or other nation-state, have made possible the acceleration of megadeath.” As the classic crime novel has it, we now have the “means, motive, and opportunity” for new holocausts. We best know how they happen.

9. “Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade” by Daniel K. Williams (2016). Here we jump forward temporarily in order to jump back. Pure histories of the pro-life movement are rare compared to books and essays that engage the arguments. Many of the former are written from a perspective on the issues evident in the language and bias of the sources, with occasional exceptions, like Cynthia Gorney’s generally balanced “Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars” (1998). Williams’s 2016 work harks back to the early days of the pro-life movement, and his findings are surprising to anyone who wasn’t alive at that time. A summary of the book at Amazon says it well: “The kinds of people in attendance at pro-life rallies [pre-Roe] ranged from white Protestant physicians, to young mothers, to African American Democratic legislators-even the occasional member of Planned Parenthood. One of New York City's most vocal pro-life advocates was a liberal Lutheran minister who was best known for his civil rights activism and his protests against the Vietnam War.” In the 1970s, one was as likely to meet Jesse Jackson, Dick Gregory, or Fr. Daniel Berrigan at a right-to-life event as to see a bishop or minister.

Well. We are now roughly halfway through the modern era of U.S. debate over the sanctity of life, and I see it is impossible to limit the list of must-read literature to these books. For each volume mentioned, a new one that is similarly indispensable springs to mind. Since it’s August and at least some of us are at the beach or poolside, with the reader’s permission, I will stop here and resume the list in my next piece for The Washington Stand. Fairly or not, we will omit pro-choice works as, to say the least, many lists of them have already gotten lavish attention online.