By Hadley Arkes, The Catholic Thing - But by the end of the 19th century, the natural law had become an object of derision among lawyers. In our own time, conservatives sharpened the reaction against natural law as they recoiled from liberal judges, moving outside the text of the Constitution, inventing new rights to contraception and abortion. They were false constructions of natural right, but they had to be met by showing what was false in the reasoning… The conservatives, however, were losing their confidence in moral reasoning, and so their ingenious strategy was to avoid any hint of moral reasoning altogether.