John F. Kavanaugh

About the author: John F. Kavanaugh, a Jesuit priest, teaches at Saint Louis University. He is author of Following Christ in a Consumer Society, Faces of Poverty, and Faces of Christ.

Photographs of unborn babies in the third trimester of development —which show fully developed human features—prove without a shadow of a doubt that these babies are human beings. Therefore, abortions conducted during the third trimester of pregnancy are homicides and cannot be justified.

There were two groups conspicuously absent from the State of the Union Address, 2000. The first was nine Supreme Court justices. Our most judicious body seems to have had a case of the collective flu. The other absent group was third-trimester unborn human beings. These groups will face each other when the court examines the attempts to protect the lives of...