(Read Part 1)

Continuing our list of recommended books on sanctity of life issues, it is good to remember that, though often derided as a “single issue,” these topics represent a set of foundational propositions that gird the entirety of social existence. Keeping up with the “literature on life” is a permanent obligation.

10. “Children at Risk: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Our Kids” by Dr. James C. Dobson and Gary L. Bauer (1990). A major book at the beginning of the post-Reagan era, “Children at Risk” foretold with keen insight the coming debates over life, care for the disabled, the importance of family, and the definition of marriage and identified the central message of social conservatism. The stakes in these debates mattered for adults, but their most important consequence was and is for children — and for the future they will inherit. In that period, Family Research Council, which follows a similar course today, was a division of Focus on the Family, devoted to action and wisdom both in the home and in the public square.

11. “The Tragedy of American Compassion” by Marvin Olasky (1992). No writer has done more to chronicle the history of charitable enterprises in the United States than Marvin Olasky, now editor-in-chief of Christianity Today and author of 29 books and dozens of articles on poverty, medicine, the press and abortion, homes for unwed mothers, and other philanthropies throughout American history. Picking from his work is exceptionally difficult, but the 1992 book lays out the best case ever made for the success of private charitable efforts by people of faith in contrast with government largesse that leaves issues of character and spiritual fortitude unaddressed. Olasky’s work was a touchstone of conservative efforts to reform the welfare state as well as to stoke a rebirth of Christian charitable institutions.

12. “War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race” by Edwin Black (2004). This is a seminal work about one of the most powerful, if often silent, motives for abortion and sterilization. Eugenics took shape in the late 19th century with the work of Charles Darwin and the advocacy by his cousin Sir Francis Galton of strategies of selective breeding. Galton “constructed his own theory of inheritance in which nature, not nurture, played the leading role.” Black explores the dark shadows of this belief system throughout American public policy and its manifestations in forced sterilization, restrictions on marriage, and persecutions of various subgroups. He recounts the impact of the infamous 1927 Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell upholding forced eugenic sterilization. Black traces the connections between American eugenicists and policies established under Nazism to promote the “Aryan race.”

13. “Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese” by Stephen W. Mosher (1984). We missed this one in the initial list, but anthropologist Stephen Mosher was among the first author-experts in the West to describe the reality of life under Chinese communism in that country’s rural communities. With a black market and state-controlled economy, and a brutal policy of coercive birth control, the People’s Republic of China embarked on campaigns that resulted in arguably the worst human rights abuses of the past century. Read in tandem with John S. Aird’s masterful “Slaughter of the Innocents: Coercive Birth Control in China) in 1990 for insight into how so massive a set of crimes can evade worldwide condemnation and correction. The true penalty today is a fertility rate in China at less than half of replacement and barely a third of replacement in urban areas like Shanghai. The question is, are these brutal, generations-destroying policies reversible at all?

14. “Embryo: A Defense of Human Life” by Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefson (2008). The core of the argument against abortion, embryonic stem cell research, embryo-freezing and other practices rests on whether nascent human life is, in fact, a human individual of equal worth with any other. This book by Princeton jurisprudence scholar Robby George and philosopher Christopher Tollefson goes to the heart of the matter, informed by decades of experience with legal and policy regimes that dismiss sanctity of life standards for the smallest and youngest among us. The authors make their case on the basis of reason, law, and scientific evidence, not claims specific to religious traditions or insights. 

15. “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men” by Mara Hvistendahl (2011). One of the enduring effects of the anti-life and coercive policies that afflicted multiple nations as the 20th century closed is the imbalance between men and women due to prenatal sex selection and abortion. Hvistendahl, a pro-choice scholar, delved deeply into these policies and their results. There have been as many as 160 million missing girls and women across Asia and surprising evidence of sex-selection practices in a number of developed nations. Far from being universally condemned, leading abortion advocates continue to oppose sex selective abortion According to these voices, there is no woman’s right to be born. Hvistendahl’s give-and-take with demographic expert Nicholas Eberstadt makes especially compelling reading about what Eberstadt terms “a global war on baby girls.”

16. “The Case for Polarized Politics: Why America Needs Social Conservatism” by Jeffrey Bell (2012). The late Jeff Bell was a key figure in the fight to maintain the impact of social issues in a world where most nations had moved on from the fray. He was accomplished as a political activist, policy expert on issues from economics to the family, historian, and author on a full range of questions from monetary policy to immigration and life and marriage. He was a key architect of Ronald Reagan’s pathbreaking economic and budget stances. In this book, Bell sets forth how issues like abortion have been kept alive in U.S. politics. Abortion and other issues arose when the left abandoned its socialist attitudes and turned to the sexual revolution to feed its momentum. As publisher Encounter Books states, “American social conservatism derives from a branch of the Enlightenment that Bell analyzes as the ‘conservative enlightenment.’ The ability of this optimistic belief system, which dominated the American founding and transformed the English-speaking world, to spread its natural-law-centered vision of democracy will affect the shape of politics in the decades ahead.” With much of the left embracing socialism anew, does a new politics of optimistic social conservatism have an opening?

17. “Pity for Evil, Suffrage, Abortion and Women’s Empowerment in Reconstruction America” by Monica Klem and Madeleine McDowell (2023). For decades, pro-life feminists like Carol Crossed, Serrin Foster, Frederica Mathewes-Green, Erika Bachiochi, and Marjorie Dannenfelser have made the case for 19th-century feminism as a strongly pro-life movement. Klem and McDowell’s well-researched and well-written book makes the same case conclusively, drawing on original sources to characterize various phases of the movement and figures such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Charlotte Denman Lozier, and dozens of others less well-known but devoted to the fight. In an era where a radically pro-abortion feminism is media-dominant, and where a small but increasingly vocal movement is calling for women to abandon work aspirations and even forgo voting, “Pity for Evil” is a powerful reset that affirms women can pursue their dreams in every dimension of family and community.

This has proved to be an impossible task, as it has necessitated leaving off the list not only other books by these authors but classics by writers like Ramesh Ponnuru (“The Party of Death,” 2006), Malcolm Muggeridge (“Something Beautiful for God,” 1971), Mike Pence (“Life is Winning,” 2020), Francis Beckwith (“Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case against Abortion Choice,” 2007), Erika Bachiochi, (“The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision,” 2021), David Closson (“Life After Roe,” 2025), and Tony Perkins/Bishop Harry Jackson (“Personal Faith, Public Policy,” 2008). 

In the meantime, while mentioning none of the works of advocates for legal abortion and euthanasia, it behooves us to read the books and essays of these authors for insights into the numbness they have helped induce. After all, the cause for which we strive is a marathon, and it is well worth keeping the reading lamp lit into the night.