Defenders of the Unborn (Oxford, 2016) by Daniel K. Williams sympathetically summarizes the development of the pro-life movement from the 1930s to the 1970s. Williams shows that pro-lifers were as likely to be political liberals as conservatives, with many viewing defense of the unborn as a human rights and civil rights issue. He also shows that pro-lifers were holding their own politically until the Supreme Court short-circuited the debate in 1973.

Charles Camosy’s Beyond the Abortion Wars (Eerdmans, 2015) opposes “simplistic and binary language” regarding abortion. He thinks compromise is possible, but he notes that students in a class he taught on medical ethics could not even agree on what to call the creature in the womb: the “fetus” abortionists like or the “prenatal child” that recognizes humanity.

Wesley Smith’s Culture of Death (Encounter, 2016) is an updating of his pathbreaking book from 2000. Smith describes how the new, anti-Hippocratic-oath style of “Do Harm” medicine is escalating its assault on the young but especially the old, as euthanasia and assisted suicide become all the rage.

Abraham Nussbaum’s The Finest Traditions of My Calling (Yale, 2016) is a well-written, angst-filled account by a doctor that starts with the Hippocratic oath and decries the way doctor-patient relationships have become more like computer-machine interaction: “We are encouraged to count something, rather than to see someone.”

The latter two books are very different—Smith examines evils such as infanticide and euthanasia, while the index to Nussbaum’s book doesn’t include words like abortion—but both call out the medical industry for callousness. Smith documents “a disintegrating value system in health care that disdains the sickest and most disabled among us as having lives that are not worth living.” Nussbaum describes a doctor who “monetized every minute of his day. He later told me that if he spent ten minutes with a return patient, he generated a profit. If he spent twelve minutes, he broke even. If he spent fourteen minutes, he lost money.”

Smith offers a set of good proposals: “Reform Hospice … Hold the Line in Dehydration Cases … Continue the Struggle Over Abortion … Beware the New Eugenics.” Nussbaum examines physician education: “Instead of training with the general surgeon in his or her hometown, the student trains with the otolaryngologist at the nearest medical school—or, even better, with the renowned otolaryngologist at a distant research university. But once the student is there the faculty explains that otolaryngology is far too broad a field, so the student becomes a thyroid and parathyroid microvascular otolaryngologist.”

M.D. specialization, like the equivalent narrowing of Ph.D. work, has its benefits but often makes a doctor a dull boy cut off from broader concerns.

Pro-life, anti-jihad

It looks as if the Trump administration will talk not in vague terms about a war on terror: It will honestly speak of a war against radical Islam, and hope moderate Muslims will join us in the effort. Shiraz Maher’s Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea (Oxford, 2016) shows the relationship of holy war to Islamic belief in predestination and delves deeply into many other theological aspects.

Peter Neumann’s Radicalized: New Jihadists and the Threat to the West (Tauris, 2016) does not go as deep, but explains well the four waves of modern terrorism and the new wave ISIS represents, with its recruitment of foreign fighters and European supporters. A chapter titled “The American Exception?” answers that question largely positively: Yes, we have lone wolf terrorists, but American Muslims are much less susceptible than their European counterparts, in part because immigrants here have more opportunity.

While Vladimir Putin talks an anti-terrorist game, he apparently follows in Josef Stalin’s path of terrorizing former comrades. Serhii Plokhy’s The Man with the Poison Gun (Basic, 2016) details the career of a KGB assassin who fired not bullets but poison, and killed without a trace. A report released one year ago showed that Putin had probably approved the poisoning of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko. —M.O.