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Cardinal Gerhard Müller has rebuked local Belgian authorities who tried to shut down a conference he spoke at this week, comparing them to “absolutist rulers of the past.” The former head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office strongly criticized the mayor of Brussels and his supporters for their attempt to cancel the National Conservatism conference that took place April 16-17, calling them political activists who desired the withdrawal of the “fundamental right to freedom of assembly.”

The post Cardinal Müller rebukes Belgian mayor: Politics is about ‘dignity of man in the Image of God’ appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

Of the approximately 4,800 employees in Vatican City, more than half work for the Holy See, i.e. in the authorities, media, or embassies of the Church’s administration. The others are employees of the 44-hectare Vatican State: gardeners, shop assistants in the supermarket or at the post office, museum attendants, and cleaners. A full-time work week is 36 hours.
 

The post The Vatican’s 36-hour week appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

Elementarz etyczyny (“The Ethics Primer”) is an underappreciated part of Karol Wojtyła’s pre-papal corpus.  Which is unfortunate, because it says much that’s quite important for us to hear today. It’s a collection of twenty essays – really columns – he wrote in 1957-58 for the Kraków Catholic newspaper, Tygodnik Powszechny.  They deal with a range of philosophical questions, from the source of morality to the role of struggle in social ethics, from asceticism to the compatibility of Christian ethics with authentic humanism.  Many of the essays are Christian jabs at the postulates of Marxism, though no small number also criticize Kant, whose ethics were then taken quite seriously in various European quarters.

Philosophical assumptions guide a culture, and Wojtyła examined several that were regularly served up in Communist-occupied Poland.  But Wojtyła also identified the deeper truth that philosophy can lead (or mislead) a culture. And so – unlike superficial American dismissals of “philosophizing” as an abstract waste of time – he showed that philosophy, real philosophy, is worth the time and effort.

Several of the essays probe a basic human experience: the experience of obligation.  We all feel “obliged” at some point in life to someone or something. What significance, what meaning, does that experience have?

Wojtyła observes that we all experience that there are things we should do and things we should not.  He adds another thing we all experience: some of the things we should do we don’t, while those we shouldn’t we do.

His point is to insist that man is not the author, the auto-creator of moral norms.  If that were true, Wojtyła argues, man could waive his self-imposed rules. But we all also have the experience that our sense of obligation endures even when we engage in (vain) self-dispensation.  That suggests we are not the source of those moral norms or the sense of obligation flowing from them.

Wojtyła was writing in a particular context; his immediate opponent was the oxymoronic “socialist morality.”  But his observations are still very pertinent to our current condition in the free societies of the West. Let me offer three relevant contemporary applications.

First, the sense of obligation of which Wojtyła speaks is not a time-and-culture-conditioned phenomenon unique to some people behind the Iron Curtain a decade or so after World War II.  Any person honest with himself must admit that the experience Wojtyła analyzes is a universal one: all human beings at some point in their lives experience “I ought to do that,” even when they really don’t want to. Even when they confess that they cannot circumvent its demand.

But that experience stands in direct opposition to the many variants of “self-autonomy” Western societies worship.  The sense of an obligation not of my authorship challenges all claims of “rights” to “define meaning, the universe, and human life.” It therefore calls into question every project built on assumptions of self-made morality, “autonomous ethics,” “self-definition,” or a subjective vision of moral norms that are neither grounded in nor needing any objective anchor.

A deeper reckoning with the truth of that insight would save us, not just from a lot of superficial sloganeering but especially from the disastrous policies masquerading as deep “thought” – the laws and cultural expectations that flow as a result from those shibboleths. And that reckoning does not require a profound and learned ethical analysis. It just requires us to examine a basic and common experience: “I ought.”

Second, the nagging persistence of the sense of “obligation,” despite our attempts to talk ourselves out of it, or our “autonomous” will trying to dispense with it, leads to another experience: responsibility.  If in good faith I find I really can’t rationalize that obligation away and still feel accountable to its demands, it means I have a responsibility towards it.  It’s a responsibility not of my making because – as with obligation – if it really was just my own doing, I could dismiss it. But I can’t.

I sense that responsibility comes not from me but from the obligation, and that it holds me – perhaps even against my will – to account.

Responsibility, then, is not just a self-assumed yoke, the mark of the morally “mature” (but autonomous) actor.  Even when I don’t embrace them out of principle, I recognize there are “shoulds” that hold me to account.  Responsibility, then, is not just a matter of my choice.

That leads us to a third insight, especially valuable for our times: the value of guilt.  Contrary to current assumptions: “guilt can be good.” That’s not to say it’s good if it’s paralyzing or obsessive, but it is to say that not every manifestation of guilt is paralyzing, much less obsessive.

Guilt is not always pathological, something to suppress or flee.  Humans sense obligation – a “should” – towards which they are responsible.  They also have the experience of not being responsible, of not having done what they “should” or done what they “shouldn’t.”  That non-self-imposed responsibility then assumes a new form: guilt.  I failed my responsibility by betraying my obligation.  That experience is not simply bad, because it reveals an accountability to the good, independent of my will.

In traditional Catholic terms, it recognizes conscience.  Conscience is a source of moral guidance before we act and of judgment after we act.  Conscience is a healthy sense of recognition that not all my acts comport with what I “should” do, failings for which I bear obligation.  It is healthy because it acknowledges that first principles lie outside my sovereign will: “good is to be done and evil avoided.”

Wojtyła’s analysis of obligation certainly aligned with an older Catholic understanding of conscience, but it broke fresh ground in forcing everyone to reckon with the implications of primordial and universal human experiences – that we have obligations for which we are responsible towards which we can fail – which leads to a state of affairs that requires fixing.  As a common human experience, it grounds objective morality independently of particular religious commitments.

Isn’t that a very relevant need of the contemporary West?

The post Obligation, Responsibility, and Guilt appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

An especially hot news item in 2024 has been the surge of drug-related violence in Ecuador.  Until recent years, Ecuador was hailed as an island of relative stability in the swirling violence of the illegal drug trade in the Western hemisphere.  The situation there contrasted with the level of chaos and violence in neighboring countries … Continue reading "Yet Another Drug War Failure"

The post Yet Another Drug War Failure appeared first on Antiwar.com.

When future historians go searching for the final nail in the US coffin, they may well settle on the date April 20, 2024. On that day Congress passed legislation to fund two and a half wars, hand what’s left of our privacy over to the CIA and NSA, and give the US president the power … Continue reading "April 20, 2024: Final Nail in America’s Coffin?"

The post April 20, 2024: Final Nail in America’s Coffin? appeared first on Antiwar.com.

Eight more people were killed.

The post <I>Iraq Weekly Roundup</I>: 13 Killed appeared first on Antiwar.com.

You’ve been reading the names of James and Emily LePage of Alabama in the news lately. Their surname heads LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, the Alabama Supreme Court decision declaring that embryos conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) are children, at least, as far as the state’s wrongful death law is concerned. In typical fashion, most commentators have avoided centering on the people at the heart of the matter. The case was filed by the LePages and other families after they were let down by the caregivers they trusted to protect their irreplaceable frozen embryos. In fact, the “cryogenic nursery” at the Center for Reproductive Medicine (CRM) was left so insecure that a patient wandered in, pulled some embryo containers out of refrigeration, and, upon feeling the unbearable cold of the vessels, dropped them. The embryos, and the hopes and dreams their parents had for them, were destroyed.

What many people don’t know is that the inconceivably bad experience of the LePages and other Alabama families is not rare. Fertility is a big business, with billions in venture capital investments pouring into the industry worldwide in recent years. In the United States, that massive growth in profit-seeking hasn’t been accompanied by meaningful regulation or consumer protection. Instead, there has been a burst of incidents, ranging from the unmasking of doctors who impregnated patients with their own sperm, to horrific lab mix-ups, to an explosion in pricey add-on services that don’t actually help patients get pregnant. In just a single week in March 2018, two fertility clinics in Ohio and California devastated more than a thousand families with the news that their frozen embryos—and some frozen eggs—had accidentally been allowed to thaw and perish. “I still sometimes wake up screaming, enraged that I will forever be childless,” patient Monica Coakley recently wrote in STAT.

Regulating IVF in the United States

The last significant regulation of the fertility industry in the United States was in 1992, with the Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certification Act (FCSRCA). This law requires IVF clinics to submit information about pregnancy rates to the Centers for Disease Control, for ultimate dissemination to the public. The most recent data have shown that success rates in IVF are abysmally low, and even after multiple tries, at least 30 to 40 percent of patients using their own eggs will end treatment still childless. The FCSRCA data were meant to help would-be parents navigate those odds. But the industry itself admits the results are easily manipulated, most commonly by cherry-picking patients; some doctors simply refuse to treat couples who have poor chances of conceiving.

Since then, instead of meaningful outsider oversight, fertility businesses have been left to police themselves. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine does offer professional guidelines on many hot-button issues, for instance, they urge doctors to resist the temptation to pump up success stats by transferring lots of embryos at once (and to cut down on complicated multiple pregnancies). But the ASRM’s suggestions are entirely voluntary and easy to ignore.

Thus we get awful cases like that of Dr. Donald Cline, who fathered at least ninety-four children with unsuspecting women who thought they were being inseminated with donor sperm or their husband’s sperm. As shown in the Netflix film Our Father, Cline’s offspring were flabbergasted to learn that his behavior was perfectly legal and no federal crime was committed. (He did get hit with a $500 fine and a one-year suspension . . . for lying to investigators). Cline isn’t a lone wolf: dozens of other fertility doctors have now been caught doing the same thing, thanks to revelations from consumer DNA testing companies like 23andMe. 

The ASRM gestures toward the fact that embryos have a unique ethical status. Its guidelines say selling embryos is “ethically unacceptable,” while at the same time they give the stamp of institutional approval to payments for donors who turn over their sperm and eggs.

But that warning only gets lip service at California Conceptions, a fertility business with a factory operating model. The company whips up batches of human embryos using the raw materials of sperm and egg donors and then divides them among different women willing to pay to try to get pregnant with them, scattering siblings across the country. California Conceptions children are the result of a bulk ordering process by a corporation looking to find customers for its inventory—and quickly.

Then there’s controversial pre-implantation genetic testing, or PGT-A. In America, it’s routinely up-sold as a chance to reduce the odds of miscarriage, which for fertility patients is like offering a steak to a starving pilgrim. The only problem? This steak is just sizzle. Research shows expensive PGT-A doesn’t help medically normal couples have a baby, possibly because the testing process itself harms their embryos. 

Practices like these are devastating for the dignity of everyone involved. The bodies of egg and sperm donors are treated as valuable raw material to be harvested for industrial purposes. Embryos themselves are subject to a degrading quality control process, which calls to mind a USDA livestock inspection. And their parents’ desperation to have children has been turned into a lucrative opportunity for investors who realize pain can be profitable. Can we question the angelic purity of licensed medical professionals and venture capitalists? Troubling news from the world of Silicon Valley fertility start-ups says we probably should. Without meaningful regulation, the human family in our country risks becoming just another tech product.

IVF Regulation Worldwide

It doesn’t have to be this way. In the vast majority of first-world countries, doctors and businesses working on the bleeding edge of bioethics don’t police themselves. 

In Germany, for instance, the 1990 Embryo Protection Act limits the number of embryos that can be created in a single cycle to just three. The law centers on issues of consent, raising the possibility of multi-year prison terms for doctors who impregnate women without their knowledge or create embryos without the genetic parents’ authorization. Cloning and elective sex selection via PGT-A are explicitly criminalized. 

It’s not just the Germans. From Canada to Australia, from Italy to France, and even in South Korea, non-medical sex selection—or what American clinics euphemistically sell as “family balancing”—is outlawed. South Korea’s regulations in this area come from bitter experience: a strong cultural preference for sons, and the availability of abortion, caused a massive gender imbalance in the newborn population in the 1980s. 

Third-party reproduction is heavily constrained worldwide: in Spain, lawmakers allow donors to produce only up to six children, and in Hong Kong, just three. Further protection is coming from the burgeoning movement to abolish donor anonymity, led by donor-conceived adults. In the UK, France, and the Netherlands, children with a background in donor conception are entitled to the name of the person who contributed half their DNA. 

Though all of these guardrails limit the profitability of the fertility industry, more importantly, they help safeguard the human dignity of patients and reduce the harms that can arise from reproductive technology—or at the very least they’re a small step in the right direction. Fertility businesses can’t create embryo assembly lines, and instead of being a faceless source of spare parts, sperm and egg donors are identifiable as individuals. Not least, the risk of accidental incest is massively reduced when donor information is available and progeny are limited.

In the United States, there is some forward progress. In 2022, Colorado enacted the “Donor-conceived Persons and Families of Donor-conceived Persons Protection Act,” a landmark bill that forces fertility clinics to identify and maintain contact with donors, and limits matches to twenty-five families. The new law also requires donors to be at least twenty-one years old. These rules protect everyone. Kids have access to up-to-date medical information, instead of a giant question mark hanging over their genetic health histories. Teenagers shouldn’t donate sperm, just as for similar reasons we don’t let them drink hard liquor in a dive bar.

At the federal level, the trend of removing anonymity has received pushback from some in the LGBTQ+ community, who express insecurity around the implication that biology is an important factor in families. But secrets are toxic. And a growing number of donor-conceived adults (and plenty of donor-recipient parents) are raising their voices to affirm that genetic identity does matter, and that recognizing that fact doesn’t somehow invalidate the very real love in donor-affected families. 

It’s painful that in the aftermath of LePage, many pundits jumped to repeat corporate talking points. The case paved the way for the LePages and other CRM families to recover damages, even as the industry on the losing side announced a passive-aggressive pause in performing procedures to evaluate their “new” responsibilities under the law. In fact, LePage revealed that patients and fertility businesses have very different conceptions (pun intended) about what’s at stake in treatment. For families, it’s everything. For companies, it’s the bottom line. It’s way past time for consumer protection in the fertility clinic.

Image by Vladimir and licensed via Adobe Stock.

The fourth annual March for Life California in Sacramento today represented a homecoming of sorts for both myself and Priests for Life, where I am the coordinator of street activism and the youth outreach director.

I’m a native of Southern California and Priests for Life was founded in San Francisco in 1991. When a young priest named Father Frank Pavone took the reins of the organization in 1993, its base of operations moved to New York. Since 2017, Priests for Life has been headquartered on Central Florida’s Space Coast. I live in Ohio now.

But our ministry has always been built around traveling to wherever we need to go to get the pro-life message heard, so I made the trip here to march in solidarity with activists living in a state that seems to prefer its citizens dead rather than alive.

Here representing the Silent No More Awareness Campaign was Carol Marie Siedenberg, the campaign’s regional coordinator for San Diego, some 600 miles south. Four other pro-lifers made the long trip with her, and other supporters of Silent No More, a project of Priests for Life and Anglicans for Life, carried signs that read “Women Do Regret Abortion,” and “Men Regret Lost Fatherhood.”

“I wanted to be here because I felt I’m part of the problem. I created the problem by being post-abortive and I want to be part of the solution,” Ms. Siedenburg said. “My being here gave me the opportunity to be interviewed by Channel 13 (CBS) here in Sacramento and I pray to God that the Holy Spirit worked through my voice and will reach out and touch the hearts of some who hear the interview.”

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My trip here started with an invitation to the Defend Life dinner Sunday night, and I was thrilled and honored that some young activists from organizations like Live Action and Pro-Life San Francisco were picking my brain and treating me like an elder of the movement – which, after more than 30 years, I am!

Pregnancy help centers were honored at the banquet, and today at the march, red heart-shaped balloons emblazoned with the words “Love Them Both” – a motto of the help movement – could be spotted throughout the crowd of thousands, and many speakers at the rally talked about the importance of these centers that offer far more support to families than just diapers and bottles.

Today before the march I helped lead a “die-in” organized by the California-based Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust. Thousands watched, enthralled, as young people fell on the ground and draped red blankets over themselves, each representing a baby killed by abortion today.

A band named California Will be Saved led a worship service right in front of the Capitol building. This was the same band that led worship in the middle of Beverly Hills last year during an action that was so successful, the owners of a planned abortion mill were told they were no longer welcome.

Gov. Gavin Newsom never showed his face but that’s no surprise, as he is one of the most abortion-friendly governors in the nation. He’s in the news today for proposing an emergency bill that would allow Arizona abortionists – who soon could find themselves out of work – to perform abortions in the Golden State, and he released a hideously untrue commercial targeting an Alabama law that makes it illegal for people to help minor girls leave the state for abortions.

California pro-lifers have their work cut out for them but they are up to the challenge. On Wednesday, SB 1368, a bill will come up for discussion that would require the state Education Department to make information about pregnancy centers available on its internet website and included in resources disseminated by school districts.

LifeNews Note: Bryan Kemper is the youth outreach director for Priests for Life and the founder of its youth outreach Stand True. He is the author of Social Justice Begins in the Womb and Pro-life is the New Punk Rock. Priests for Life’s Bryan Kemper at the March for Life California in Sacramento with Carol Marie Siedenburg, San Diego regional coordinator for the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, and Frank Tooker of San Diego.

The post Thousands of Pro-Life People Join California March for Life to Protest Abortion appeared first on LifeNews.com.

Meant to “humanize the invisible lives affected by war and terror”…

‘Number 207’: Hundreds of Sculptured Pieces of Underwear Displayed in Historic Catholic Church in Venice

(image credit: Luca Asta)

The 60th edition of the international art exhibition known as the Venice Biennale is currently underway in the eponymous city in northeastern Italy. It was kicked off this past Saturday, Apr. 20, and will last until Nov. 24 of this year.

According to Wikipedia,

The festival has become a constellation of shows: a central exhibition curated by that year’s artistic director, national pavilions hosted by individual nations, and independent exhibitions throughout Venice.

Boston-based Catholic Schools Foundation (CSF) held a fundraising gala last week which featured an appearance from Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey.

Healey is not only a staunch supporter of abortion and the LGBTQ movement, she also currently cohabits with a woman. Healey’s female “partner” is a mother of two and was still married to her childrens’ father when her relationship with the governor began.

The Pilot reported that the CSF’s 34th annual Building Minds Scholarship Fund Gala was held in Boston on April 11. The gala raised over $5.6 million to support Catholic school scholarships in the Archdiocese, according to The Pilot.

The Democratic governor “made a special appearance to thank the foundation and its donors for ‘doing God’s work,’” The Pilot noted.

The Pilot is published by the Archdiocese of Boston and describes itself as “America’s oldest Catholic newspaper.”

Just two days earlier, Healey visited St. John’s Prep, an elite all-boys Catholic school in Danvers, MA, which serves grades 6 through 12. The school is sponsored by the Congregation of St. Francis Xavier (Xaverian Brothers).

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At the prep school, “the governor spent almost an hour engaging with five student groups,” Blaze Media indicated.

St. John’s Head of School Ed Hardiman told the governor that he was “really excited to have the opportunity to engage with … and to learn from” her.

Furthermore, the school praised its visit with Healey via an entry on its website, posted April 12. “[I]t was quickly clear [Healey’s] personal values are closely aligned with those of the Xaverian Brothers,” the entry alleges.

Healey was raised Catholic but it is unclear if she still claims to practice the faith.

On Tuesday, the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts decried Healey’s visit.

“Healey is a partnered lesbian, endorsed by Planned Parenthood, who has credited the nation’s largest abortion perpetrator as the force which made possible her political career,” the organization stated in a news release.

“The Planned Parenthood Advocacy Fund of Massachusetts endorsed Healey and contributed to her campaign, when ran for Attorney General—her first elective office—in 2014,” the Catholic Action League noted. “[Healey] subsequently said that [Planned Parenthood’s] support was ‘a game changer for my campaign.’”

“Healey received their endorsement again when she ran for re-election in 2018, and when she ran for governor in 2022,” the League added.

In addition, Catholic Action League Executive Director C.J. Doyle pointed out that the governor “is an opponent of vouchers and tuition tax credits for private and parochial schools.”

“Healey actually appointed her former lesbian paramour to the state’s highest court, the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth, which by the way is the oldest court in the United States,” Doyle added.

American Family News described that Healey had appointed her ex-significant other Gabrielle Wolohojian “in February to an open seat on the state’s highest court.”

At the time, Healey had defended her controversial appointment stating: “I’m proud of that nomination and I’m proud of nominating someone who is so deserving and so qualified.”

“Of course, I had a personal relationship with Judge Wolohojian for many years so I happen to also know something about her character and her integrity and the kind of person she is,” the governor also remarked in February.

While Healey and Wolohojian’s relationship ended years ago, the governor is currently cohabiting with Joanna Lydgate.

Lydgate is a lawyer who was Healey’s Chief Deputy when the now-governor was serving as Massachusetts Attorney General.

Healey maintains that she began seeing Lydgate months after she had ceased being her employee. Lydgate is the co-foundress and currently serves as the President and Chief Executive Officer of the States United Democracy Center.

The Center has been described as protecting so-called “voting rights,” a loosely defined term which in recent years has been often used as a left-wing euphemism for opposing election integrity measures.

LifeNews Note: Joshua Mercer writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.

The post Catholic School Hosts Fundraiser With Pro-Abortion Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey appeared first on LifeNews.com.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hold a hearing on a case seeking to stop Joe Biden from turning Idaho emergency rooms into abortion centers.

As LifeNews.com reported previously, the Supreme Court ruled in January that Joe Biden can’t force Idaho to turn its emergency rooms into abortion centers. The nation’s highest court ruled that Joe Biden can’t exploit a federal law to try to weaken Idaho’s abortion ban by allowing emergency room doctors to do abortions.

But that decision was a temporary victory and Idaho oficials are fighting in court to win the entire case, Idaho v United States. This is the first case to be heard by the Supreme Court directly relating to the Dobbs decision which overturned Roe v. Wade.

Last year, the Justice Department filed suit Aug. 2 against the state of Idaho, hoping to undermine its new law prohibiting most abortions by claiming that the state law conflicts with EMTALA and medical treatment for pregnant women in emergency rooms.

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit that challenges Idaho’s protective law — arguing that it would prevent supposedly medically necessary abortions. Despite false reports that abortion bans would prevent doctors from treating pregnant women for miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies, pro-life doctors confirm that is not the case. Some 35 states have laws making it clear that miscarriage is not abortion and every state with an abortion ban allows treatment for both.

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U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill found that Idaho’s law conflicts with the federal law because it bans abortions in nearly all circumstances. But the state argued the any emergency abortion is allowed under its abortion ban on elective abortions.

The nation’s highest court will hear oral arguments on Wednesday.

Brandi Swindell, Founder and CEO of Stanton Healthcare, which provides medical care and provides support for pregnant women in need, told LifeNews that the Supreme Court should side with her state.

“It is deeply troubling to see President Biden ignore and disrespect the voices of Idaho’s women as he attempts to advance a radical abortion agenda through federal regulations,” she said. “The Dobbs decision made it clear there is no federal or constitutional right to abortion. Our hope and prayer is the Supreme Court will respect the rights of Idaho’s voters and not allow our emergency rooms to be turned into abortion clinics by the federal government.”

The case involves the Biden administration’s unlawful attempt to use a law that ensures indigent patients receive emergency room care to force doctors to perform abortions that are illegal under Idaho law.

Idaho’s pro-life law imposes penalties on physicians who perform prohibited abortions unless doing so is necessary to save the life of the pregnant woman or other exceptions apply. The federal government claims—and the lower court ruled—that EMTALA requires abortions in violation of this law if an emergency room doctor thinks it is appropriate.

“Hospitals—especially emergency rooms—are centers for preserving life. The government has no business transforming them into abortion clinics,” said ADF Senior Counsel Erin Hawley, vice president of the Center for Life and regulatory practice. “Emergency room physicians can, and do, treat ectopic pregnancies and other life-threatening conditions. But elective abortion is not life-saving care—it ends the life of the unborn child—and the government has no authority to override Idaho’s law barring these procedures. We urge the Supreme Court to halt the lower court’s injunction and allow Idaho emergency rooms to fulfill their primary function—saving lives.”

After the Supreme Court returned the issue of abortion to the states in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the federal government sued the state of Idaho, claiming that EMTALA, an ancillary provision of the Medicare statute, preempts Idaho’s pro-life law. But as explained in the emergency application, “EMTALA is silent on abortion and actually requires stabilizing treatment for the unborn children of pregnant women.”

“The United States’ position conflicts with the universal agreement of federal courts of appeal that EMTALA does not dictate a federal standard of care or displace state medical standards. The district court accepted the United States’ revisionist, post-Dobbs reading of EMTALA and enjoined Idaho’s Defense of Life Act in emergency rooms. The district court’s injunction effectively turns EMTALA’s protection for the uninsured into a federal super-statute on the issue of abortion, one that strips Idaho of its sovereign interest in protecting innocent, human life and turns emergency rooms into a federal enclave where state standards of care do not apply,” Hawley notes.

Idaho’s abortion ban permits a physician who does an abortion to raise the affirmative defense that the abortion was necessary to save the mother’s life or that the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest that was reported. In both cases, the physician must choose a procedure that is most likely to save the life of the baby and protect the mother. The law explicitly excludes contraception from the definition of abortion, and women upon whom abortions are performed may not be prosecuted.

The pro-life laws in Idaho and other states include clearly defined exceptions that allow abortions in the cases when a mother’s life is at risk. Because the pro-life movement cares about the lives of both mother and child and there are rare cases in which only the mother’s life can be saved, it supports such exceptions.

But these exceptions mean the Biden administration’s guidance is unnecessary. Undermining Idaho’s life-saving efforts and expanding abortions appear to be the administration’s real goal.

The post Supreme Court Will Hold Hearing on Case to Stop Biden From Turning ERs Into Abortion Centers appeared first on LifeNews.com.

Planned Parenthood’s just-released annual report reveals that the industry giant performed a record number of abortions last year – 392,715.

Planned Parenthood President and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson and Board Chair of Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) Tanuja Bahal introduced its 2022-2023 annual report by referring to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that declared Roe v. Wade an unconstitutional event that “took away our right to control our own bodies and lives.”

And while the organization’s leaders bemoan that, since the Court’s ruling, “more than 20 states have banned some or all abortions,” the report reveals the group received a hefty raise from American taxpayers.

Taxpayer funding via government grants, contracts, and Medicaid reimbursements reached $699.3 million, as indicated in the most current report, up from $633.4 million in 2022, and an amount that is 34% of Planned Parenthood’s overall revenue.

“There’s not enough outrage, I think, to force the federal government to stop subsidizing abortion,” CatholicVote Director of Government Affairs Tom McClusky said about the abortion giant’s increase in taxpayer funding.

He also observed the actual amount of government funding Planned Parenthood receives is probably even more than that:

Normally, when I talk to people, I have to say it’s over a billion because there are a lot of reimbursements that Planned Parenthood gets that are probably not included in the report. Especially through state subsidies and things like that since they’re so hooked into Obamacare. And they get a lot of money now through the trans grants that come out of HHS by the administration.

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Planned Parenthood has touted that it is now the second-largest provider of transgender hormone drugs in the nation, and its current report boasts that 45 of its affiliates are now offering so-called “gender-affirming care” hormone drug treatments.

“I think they understand that, if abortion is not going away, and, if the Biden administration gets its way and the abortion pill is distributed like candy, then they can’t profit from that, especially since they’re fighting the practice that people see a doctor beforehand,” McClusky surmised. “Then, the next cash cow for them is the trans services.”

Nevertheless, according to McClusky, the big problem is that Congress continues to fund abortion.

“Just look recently at the most recent omnibus where, that we know of, at least two abortion facilities got over a million dollars from federal taxpayers and earmarks,” he pointed out.

In exchange for that taxpayer funding, the group that claims “abortion is health care” continues to perform less of other preventive and healthcare services.

The Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI), the research arm of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, summarizes data from Planned Parenthood’s reports each year.

For the 2022-2023 report, CLI details that, while this past year abortions comprised “97.1% of Planned Parenthood’s pregnancy resolution services,” the group’s “prenatal services, miscarriage care, and adoption referrals accounted for only 1.6% (6,316), 0.9% (3,604), and 0.4% (1,721), respectively.”

“According to data from Planned Parenthood’s own annual reports, since 2010: Total services are down 17.0%,” the pro-life group reports.

McClusky said that Republican members of Congress “need to start hearing from people back home.”

While national abortion legislation is very important – because we care just as much about the babies born in California as we do about babies born in Alabama – but, in the meantime, when you talk about saving as many lives as possible, imagine if the largest abortion provider in the world – Planned Parenthood – lost a billion dollars in revenue by no longer getting taxpayer funds. I’m sure it would get its money from the celebrities in the world and others, except taxpayers would no longer be paying for it. And I think pro-lifers would be on even ground finally. If we just stopped subsidizing merchants of death.

LifeNews Note: Susan Berry writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.

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In an act of executive overreach from Joe Biden, on August 11, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) published a proposed rule to implement the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA). The pro-abortion rule which would establish a nationwide requirement that employers with 15 or more employees make “reasonable accommodation” to enable employees to obtain elective abortion, including providing paid or unpaid leave.

This mandate also applies to employers in states with protective pro-life laws. The mandate does not require payment for the abortion nor does it require abortion health insurance coverage.

The EEOC proposal clearly disregards the legislative intent of the bipartisan PWFA, which established workplace protections for pregnant women and was not intended by Congress to include abortion.

In December 2022, Congress passed PWFA, a pro-life bill that aimed to make the workplace more accessible to pregnant women. “The PWFA has been in effect since June 27, 2023, but the final rule and accompanying guidance clarify (and in some ways expand) the obligations that were explicit in the statute itself,” according to the law firm of Gibson Dunn.

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“The regulations implement the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which itself provides helpful accommodations to pregnant women in the workplace,” stated Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Committee for Religious Liberty. “The EEOC, however, has defied Congress’s intent and added a mandate for employers, including religious employers, to provide accommodations, such as leave time, for abortion.”

The EEOC summary of the proposed rule is available here.

LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.

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