When we grasp the principles disclosed in the recent decisions of the courts on partial-birth abortion, we see at work furnishings of mind, among the judges, strikingly different from the furnishings of mind that were evident in the jurists of the founding generation. As I have suggested, these changes have been long in the making, and yet, when they finally break in upon us in their import, they can be startling nevertheless. Someone might aptly ask, if all of this is so radical and even treasonous – rejecting of the very premises of the American regime – why has it not been especially noticeable? But in all of this, there is nothing novel: The point has been aptly made that the moral life often consists in discovering the further implications of our own principles. The changes in American law have been in the making since the end of the nineteenth century, and they have accelerated since our jurisprudence moved into a new liberal phase with Griswold v. Connecticut (on contraception) and Roe v. Wade (on abortion). But over the last 20 years, in a series of decisions, the courts have been compelled to make ever more explicit the new understandings on which their new jurisprudence must come to rest. As that remarkable man of all seasons, John Paul II, has put it, they are understandings that come to a focus on the nature of “the human person.”