Nearly 50 years ago, as concern grew in the country about the fairness of death penalty laws, the American Law Institute published a "model statute" aimed at helping state lawmakers draft laws to ensure that death sentences were meted out fairly and consistently. Last fall, the institute withdrew its support for the model death penalty law. The decision was a striking repudiation from the very organization that provided the blueprint for death penalty laws in this country.

Peace activists are planning today to protest George W. Bush's visit here to speak and accept an award for his pro-life efforts at a Catholic summit. It is "outrageous that he's receiving a pro-life award," said Sharon Tipton, an organizer of the protest with a group called the Orange County Peace Coalition, which she described as an umbrella group for other local peace organizations.

The Obama administration and a Congress narrowly controlled by Democrats present both new challenges and new opportunities for Catholic pro-life advocates on Capitol Hill. Sr. Carol Keehan, president and CEO of Catholic Health Association and a Daughter of Charity, said in an interview that pro-life advocates have faced different strategic challenges and priorities in recent Republican and Democratic administrations.

The pregnancy rate among teenage girls in the United States has jumped for the first time in more than a decade, raising alarm that the long campaign to reduce motherhood among adolescents is faltering, according to a report released Tuesday. The pregnancy rate among 15-to-19-year-olds increased 3 percent between 2005 and 2006 -- the first jump since 1990, according to an analysis of the most recent data collected by the federal government and the nation's leading reproductive-health think tank.

It has been almost 40 years since the landmark Roe v. Wade decision took the issue of abortion out of state legislatures, where it was being debated in many states, and established a constitutional right to the procedure. The decision short-circuited the messy, cumbersome, noisy way we Americans make laws and cast the debate in absolute terms. Pro-choice advocates insisted that women had an absolute right to an abortion. Pro-life forces insisted the unborn child had an absolute right to life. The ambivalence most Americans felt about abortion and about the pre-Roe legal regime that left many women dead or maimed from illegal abortions -- got lost amid the claims of absolutists.

It is 2009's quiet story -- quiet because it's about what didn't happen, which can be as important as what did. In this highly partisan year, we did not see a sharpening of the battles over religion and culture. Yes, we continued to fight over gay marriage, and arguments about abortion were a feature of the health-care debate. But what's more striking is that other issues -- notably economics and the role of government -- trumped culture and religion in the public square. The culture wars went into recession along with the economy.