The defense rests.

When I heard about the October 17 death of Jim McFadden, founder and publisher of the Human Life Review (HRL), I felt strangely bereft.

My association with Jim began in 1989 when he reprinted an anti-abortion piece I had written for Newsweek. (His Review dealt solely with "life issues": these came to include topics like euthanasia, contraception, and in vitro fertilization, but abortion was far and away its overriding concern.) He sent me a copy of the issue in which my piece appeared and I read through it with a growing sense of dismay. I had never been published in so conservative a magazine. Indeed, as a good left-winger, I had barely even read one, except to poke fun at it. My first reaction was to hide the thing before my husband saw it.

Something kept drawing me back to it, however, until finally I gave up, sat down, and read it straight through. I was hooked.

What a strange experience. With the exception of the abortion issue, Jim and I probably disagreed on almost everything of any importance: from women priests to capital punishment, from defense spending to socialized medicine. Still, I thought of him as a dear friend and a profound influence on my life.

Jim was, probably first and foremost, a Catholic. He was a strong conservative, fiercely loyal to the pope, and utterly convinced of the prophetic power of the church. For thirty years he worked as a journalist with the National Review, whose political views were harmonious with his own, and for nearly twenty-five he presided over the publication of the Human Life Review, the only scholarly journal in the country devoted solely to exploring the "life issues," most notably abortion. In it, he gathered some of the world's finest argument on the subject, mainly against, but occasionally for as well, just to give his own stable of writers something fresh to wrestle with.

In addition, Jim put out the catholic eye, a quirky little biweekly newsletter that often gave an eye for an eye, written, it seemed, entirely by himself, in which he took on whatever secular god was in vogue at the moment. Sparing no one (except perhaps the pope and Mother Teresa), he would gallop along, shooting from the hip with sarcasm and truly awful puns, quoting from such diverse sources as the London Economist and the Baltimore Catechism. In the beginning, reading it used to literally give me a headache and I often flung it in the wastepaper basket in disgust, but just as often it made me laugh out loud.

Laughter was an important part of Jim's life. He loved finding the lighter side of almost everything and he made a point of lacing the very serious pages of the HLR with hilarious cartoons lifted from the Spectator of London. He was, as William Buckley pointed out, the "prime exhibit of G.K. Chesterton's dogged insistence that piety and laughter are inseparable, and indefeasibly the work of God." Jim was also a family man, delighting in his five children and two grandchildren and, most especially, in the love of his wife, Faith Abbott.

I think what I admired most about Jim was the strength of his beliefs. He was fearless in their defense, in spite of the ridicule he was certain to receive in an unbelieving society. This quality of his was an inspiration to me in my often lonely position as an anti-abortion left-winger. Given the intricacies of a situation in which most of the people I associate with are prochoice, the temptation is often to soft-pedal my prolife views, to be "sensitive and compassionate."

If nothing else, Jim made it impossible for me to use either of those words without quotation marks! In his own writing and in the things he published, he consistently exposed what passes for compassion (assisted suicide, for example) as the shallow selfishness it is. And he did it with a rigor that astonished: One is not accustomed, in these days when "nonjudgmental" is the highest compliment, to hearing unvarnished truth, thundering off the page with nothing less than biblical certainty.

But the really important thing about Jim McFadden, who cultivated the image of being "to the right of Atilla the Hun" (to quote his daughter, Maria), was that he was one of the sweetest men I have ever known. I was on the receiving end of his generosity for the nine years I knew him, and I am sure I was only one on a long list. Regularly he sent me large packages filled with magazines, clippings, and books - all to keep me informed and to encourage me to keep writing. How did he remember me - and how out of touch I might be feeling - in the midst of his extraordinarily busy life? On his first day back in the office after his cancer surgery, he sent me a note and "a few oddball items" he had been saving for me.

Our friendship was mostly through letters (we met only twice, both times for lunch in wonderful Italian restaurants in New York City), and these letters necessarily dwindled as his cancer progressed and I became more and more taken up by the care of my own seriously ill child. She was a special pet of his and he followed the joys and sorrows of her life with a constant concern, made sharper by his own suffering. I know he is watching her still, and I feel a little safer with this champion of human life now firmly ensconced in the only court that matters.

Jo McGowan and her family live in Dehra Doon, India. She is the founder of Karuna Vihar, a school for children with special needs.