Pete and Susannah speak with Emory bioethicist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson about her ongoing philosophical journey into bioethical questions, and her critique of market-and-autonomy based ideas about human worth. Might an ethic of caution, care, and doing no harm provide a path forward for disagreement about personhood in the case of abortion?

They also discuss Denmark’s famed “eradication” of Down syndrome, and its cost: the eradication of people with Down syndrome.

Then, they speak with J. D. Flynn about a recent Times piece exposing the extreme unreliability of prenatal genetic testing, and the assumptions that the piece makes (by implication) about the value of human selves.

Flynn also describes his and his wife’s own experiences as parents of two adopted children with Down syndrome and one biological child without it: how can we receive all children, adopted and not, of all “kinds,” as gifts?

Susannah and Peter talk with O. Carter Snead about his book What it Means to be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics. They examine the question of the anthropology of expressive individualism as the framework for our current legal bioethical regime, and look at hot-button cultural issues including abortion, assisted reproduction, assisted suicide, and end-of-life care.

How should we die? How can we value and care for those who no longer have the same abilities they had when they were younger, but who are still vital members of the human family?

How should we make babies? How can we guard the mystery and gift of children from a false sense of our own mastery over their creation?

How should we live? How can we become the people we are meant to be by exercising care towards those who need our help, and by receiving care from those who love us?

Peter and Susannah discuss Aimee Murphy’s Rehumanize, an organization dedicated to a consistent life ethic, and the intersection between the pro-life movement and the disability rights movement.

How does the utilitarian obsession with quality of life and rejection of those who suffer attack the dignity of all of us? And how can an awareness of the existence of sufferers pull us out of our own meritocratic prisons?

Then, the hosts talk with Ross Douthat about his chronic Lyme disease and the way that official science can be limited. What does the experience of suffering teach us about the reality of the divine, and how do these liminal states open us up to transcendent reality?

Peter and Susannah discuss Peter’s lead editorial, describing his friendship with and care for a profoundly disabled young man. They consider the simultaneous truths of the good of health, the resurrection of the body, and the full image of God in the bodies and lives of disabled people.

They discuss the phenomenon of the “Ugly laws” of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Nazi eugenics program, the limitations of communitarianism, and the way that questions of disability touch on everybody, because they are about what it means to be a human in a body.

Then they welcome Plough contributor Victoria Reynolds Farmer, a writer with cerebral palsy who discusses her Marian devotion, her recent Catholic conversion, and what that has meant for her marriage and the prospect of motherhood.

Three boys play the Three Kings who deliver gifts on the eve of Epiphany. But what will they give the poor children they pass on the street? A delightful story of strong tradition broken by the power of love.

This story is one of several Swedish legends explaining why the Christmas Rose blooms in winter. 

Santiago Ramos on his outsiderness, the double homelessness immigrants live with that points to the eternal home.

Read it here: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/social-justice/immigration/the-quest-for-home

Simeon Wiehler, university dean in Rwanda, reflects on cruelty and healing in a land scarred by genocide, drawing on philosopher Immanuel Kant; Richard Kandt, a German colonialist obsessed with craniometry; and a young student, also named Kant.

Read it here: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/politics/human-rights/three-kants-and-a-thousand-skulls

Far from home, one father transplants fig trees. Another crafts chocolates. A third creates places of welcome. Stephanie Saldaña, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Nour Al Ghraowi: three daughters give voice to each man's story, as their lives interweave.

Read it here: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/reconciliation/in-search-of-lost-fig-trees

Ashley Lucas on the story of Russell Maroon Shoatz, a former Black Panther who spent three decades in solitary confinement, and the reckoning with violence past and present.

Read it here: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/social-justice/criminal-justice/the-end-of-rage