Tom Shakely

Research Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism

Tom Shakely is a Research Fellow with Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism, where he focuses on human dignity, human rights, and law and policy. Tom also serves as Chief Engagement Officer at Americans United for Life, a national leader in advancing life-affirming law and policy, where he hosts "Life, Liberty, and Law," featuring conversations on the human right to life.

Tom previously served as Executive Director of the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network, whose Crisis Lifeline serves patients and families facing denial of basic care and strives to awaken the conscience on human dignity and bioethical issues.

Tom has spoken on human rights issues at the United Nations, testified to the District of Columbia City Council on conscience rights, and advised on testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and U.S. House of Representatives. Tom is a member of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and Knights of Columbus, and is a Charlotte Lozier Institute guest contributor and a Sons of the American Revolution life member. Tom serves as a board member for the Mount Nittany Conservancy and has previously served as a board member for the Pro-Life Union of Greater Philadelphia and as an at-large member of Archbishop Charles J. Chaput’s Archdiocesan Pastoral Council in Philadelphia, as well as a National Review Institute Washington fellow and as a Leonine Forum fellow.

Tom holds a B.A. in Political Science from the Pennsylvania State University, M.S. in Bioethics from the University of Mary, and Certification with Distinction in Health Care Ethics from the National Catholic Bioethics Center. Tom has written for National Review, HuffPost, National Catholic Register, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and other nationally recognized media.

Archives

‘Suffering and Sacrifice Are Part of a Flourishing Human Life’

Tom Shakely
July 9, 2021
Dr. Jennifer Frey delivered an excellent talk on “Suffering and the Problem of Evil” to the Thomistic Institute’s Yale University chapter this April. Listen to the whole talk, which I think is really a call to be practically wise amidst the tumult of our chaotic lives. I’ve transcribed the below from Dr. Frey’s talk and any errors are mine. First, on the classical view of justice: Now, it’s central to the virtue of justice in particular that there are certain things we must never do because that sort of action is to wrong someone. So, if we were to commit this sort of action—the wronging someone sort of action—then we would be not exercising justice but injustice. Murder, torture, rape, judicial condemnation of the innocent, lying—these are perhaps obvious examples …

A Time for Choosing on Roe and the Abortion Regime

Tom Shakely
July 7, 2021
The U.S. Supreme Court must reverse Roe v. Wade, writes Ramesh Ponnuru: “ ought to be seeking nothing less than the full overturning of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. We ought to be asking, that is, for a declaration that the Constitution contains no right to abortion, allows legislatures to enact bans on abortion, and does not authorize judicial second-guessing of those bans. …The pro-life movement and Republican politicians should explain that overturning Roe won’t by itself ban abortion. They should make that point because it’s accurate, because it will help prepare pro-lifers for the political battles to come if they succeed in court, and because it will do a little to calm the nerves of those who fear …

The Supreme Court and American Independence from Abortion

Tom Shakely
July 1, 2021
The U.S. Supreme Court is once again turning to the issue of abortion, having decided to consider Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization later this year. At the heart of the case is a Mississippi law that would protect human life at 15 weeks from conception, the moment of sperm-egg fusion at which science and medicine recognize that a new and distinct human life comes into existence. The Supreme Court won’t hear the Mississippi case until this fall, and America likely won’t learn of their decision until next summer. In the meantime, we’ll be left to speculate. Ever since the Supreme Court created abortion rights out of thin air with its 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, it has been confronted in one form or another by the issue of abortion. After a half century …

China, Human Rights, and Washington’s Lack of Strategy

Tom Shakely
June 22, 2021
Bruno Maçães writes on the United States and our shifting and ill-defined aims with respect to China: I have a column out today that takes a broadly positive view of the European Union’s strategy on China. That strategy seems to me the brightest line of the struggling new geopolitical Union being developed in Brussels. The column goes some way towards explaining why that is the case, but I wanted to add a couple points directly related to how the EU compares to the United States when it comes to China.Well, the essential point, it seems to me, is that Washington still lacks a strategy. I am not talking about the erratic policy of the Trump years. The problem has persisted and it was there before Trump.Would you be able to say what the US wants from its China policy? To …

Carter Snead on the Fundamental Disagreement of Our Time: What a Person Is

Tom Shakely
July 22, 2020
“The fundamental disagreement … is about what a person is — what human flourishing is, what is the nature of human identity, what is human nature, is there such a thing as human nature. And I think that it divides along, broadly, two polarities that you see play out in our public conversations and our private conversations…” One view, as Professor Carter Snead of Notre Dame lays out in this rich five minutes, is that what defines a human being is that you have “will and desire”. The other and older view is what Alasdair MacIntyre calls “recipricol indebtedness”: Professor Snead points to the question of telos; to whether human life has any concrete end or purpose outside of our fleeting autonomy. One way to start thinking through the question of …

Independence Day and Renewed Vigor

Tom Shakely
July 4, 2020
Happy Independence Day! As America marks July 4th, it’s worth taking a few moments to pause in gratitude for the Declaration of Independence and its lasting importance for what America’s framers recognized about the human person, the source of human dignity, and the nature of human rights. Clarke Forsythe, Senior Counsel at Americans United for Life (and a colleague and friend) writes in National Review today on why the Declaration still matters for all Americans: Amid our national dialogue over race and justice, my family’s reading of the Declaration of Independence will be even more meaningful than usual this Fourth of July. At the core of the Declaration — the founding political document of America — is the principle that the consent of the governed is the …

‘The Committee Heard From People Who Had Made Plans for Suicide’

Tom Shakely
May 21, 2020
Australia braces for more intentional killing, as Queensland appears set to join Victoria in embracing what we euphemistically term “assisted dying”: Queenslanders are set to find out this week whether laws will be introduced by the Palaszczuk government.In March, a parliamentary health committee recommended Queensland legalise voluntary assisted dying for adults with advanced terminal medical conditions. …The committee, which began its inquiry in November 2018, gauged public opinion on the issue and found most Queenslanders were in favour of helping terminally ill people to die.The committee heard from people who had made plans for suicide in circumstances where they had a life-limiting illness or debilitating condition.It found a terminally-ill person took their own life …

What If We Ignored Those Most Vulnerable to COVID-19?

Tom Shakely
May 15, 2020
“We locked down America with relative speed in March and we avoided all the worst predictions of the potential impact of the coronavirus, but we struggled to reach consensus anywhere on how to responsibly open back up.” If we had to write the one sentence history of the COVID-19 pandemic today, that would be something like America’s version. We don’t know how things will continue to play out, but what’s clear at the moment is that state and local leaders appear to be paralyzed. Unfortunately, those bearing some of the greatest costs of this ruling class paralysis aren’t likely the first to come to our minds. Their story is not told in the TL/DR history of this time. We’re witnessing the failure of the managerial bureaucracy when leaders like New York’s Gov. Andrew …

Autonomy, Ezekiel Emanuel, and the Limits of Advance Directives

Tom Shakely
April 23, 2020
One of the lessons (wrong, it turns out) that Americans took from the Terri Schiavo fight goes something like this: “What made Terri’s situation so tragic was that she didn’t have a “living will,” an advance directive. If she had only had one of those, everything would have worked out fine.” Advance directives, more commonly called “living wills,” are simple enough documents. Aging with Dignity is just one of many organizations that offers a “simple” advance directive. You run through a list of treatments or care you do or do not want to receive in the future, putting pen to paper, and viola! — you can now rest easy knowing your wishes will be respected should you no longer be able to speak for yourself in a critical …

China, the Virus, and the Imperative to Build for Tomorrow

Tom Shakely
April 21, 2020
Marc Andreessen’s “It’s Time To Build” is a hopeful cri de coeur in this time of pandemic. Americans, and American elite leadership specifically, need what strikes me as essentially a spiritual awakening, and Andreessen speaks to that in his own way by pointing out that an ugly aspect of American life that this virus has revealed is a sort of cultural impotence: Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it …

Bloomberg: A Patient’s Care is ‘Futile’ if We Decide the Patient Has Little Value

Tom Shakely
March 11, 2020
Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign is over, but I want to return to something Bloomberg once said that was brought up by reporter Peter Hasson during Bloomberg’s most recent campaign that speaks to a fundamental issue in healthcare issue: Billionaire and Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg said in a 2011 video that some elderly cancer patients should be denied treatment in order to cut health care costs. He drew on a hypothetical example of a “95-year old” with “prostate cancer” to signal an openness he would have to reform how Medicare provides treatment.“All of these costs keep going up, nobody wants to pay any more money, and at the rate we’re going, health care is going to bankrupt us,” said Bloomberg, who was then New York City’s …

Making Something Lawful Creates a Market for It

Tom Shakely
March 9, 2020
The Australian state of Victoria made it lawful to commit assisted suicide last year. The number of those who have killed themselves since “voluntary assisted dying” became legal is more than four times higher than the Victorian government had anticipated. Xavier Symons reports : The Voluntary Assisted Dying Review Board’s first Report of Operations, released on Tuesday, provides information on how Victoria’s euthanasia legislation is being enacted, including details of how many people have been issued with a ‘VAD permit’, as well as information on some of the barriers preventing people from accessing the scheme. According to the report, permits to access the lethal medication were issued to 70 patients between June 19, when the scheme first started, …

Suicide Prevention Means Rejecting Suicide Assistance

Tom Shakely
February 21, 2020
A friend calls you up to let you know that she’s thinking of ending her life. What do you tell her? She’s getting older and has experienced a life-threatening (but not terminal) condition for many years. She feels beaten down, alone, and like she’s too great a burden for those who were once closest to her, but who’ve generally stopped visiting in recent years. She’s looking to you for good counsel. If you’re like most, you wouldn’t respond by affirming her hopelessness. If you’re like most, you wouldn’t respond by enthusiastically affirming her “right to die” or by encouraging her to pursue a means of suicide. Instead, you would recognize her vulnerability. Instead, you would strive to stand alongside her in …

‘Rights Talk’

Tom Shakely
February 20, 2020
How often we hear of human rights and how little we hear of human responsibilities. How can we have one without the other? Every right suggests a claim and every claim suggests a responsibility. What makes human rights “work” is our ability to discern when particular human rights claims ought to be responsibly fulfilled and when particular claims are, in fact, a threat to either the good of the individual or the good of society. This is what Ryan Anderson was getting at recently when he pointed out that rights are “grounded in and thus limited by the demands of justice and common good“. Any authentic right is grounded in and thus limited by the demands of justice and common good. That’s what a sound philosophy of rights will show. And that’s why …

Human Rights Require Knowledge of the Human Heart

Tom Shakely
February 19, 2020
I’m excited to join the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Let me share my approach to the issues of human dignity, liberty, and equality and the moral duties that the Center exists to consider and advance. I believe that when it comes to issues of human life we’re generally engaging conflicts that are neither unresolvable nor destined for stalemate. We’re debating issues that matter. We can lose sight of this due to the tendency to throw our hands into the air over the seemingly complex nature of many human life issues, content to “agree to disagree” because “it’s complicated.” For those determined to advance human dignity, liberty, and equality, settling for this false peace is, in fact, a surrender to (at best) a materialist philosophy that …