Holocaust survivor Tova Friedman’s Auschwitz prisoner tattoo is still visible to this day, serving as a “never again” reminder as her Jewish grandchildren face a modern wave of antisemitism. “It’s like a cancer. If you don’t stop it early, it metastasizes. It’s going to kill the body. It’s killing our country.” She says that when she came to the U.S., it was “like I came to the Promised Land, and it was just a fabulous experience. And here it is today. I am shocked, I am pained, I’m scared. I’m scared both for America, I’m scared for the Jews, and it’s very painful for our young people.”
 

The post Auschwitz survivor: antisemitism is a ‘cancer’ spreading across America appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

Jesus, when I see you held by your Mother,
Leaving her arms
Trying, trembling, your first steps
On our sad earth,
Before you I’d like to unpetal a rose
In its freshness
So that your little foot might rest ever so softly
On a flower!….

This unpetalled rose is the faithful image,
Divine Child,
Of the heart that wants to sacrifice itself for you unreservedly
at each moment.
Lord, on your altars more than one new rose
Likes to shine.
It gives itself to you…..but I dream of something else:
To be unpetalled!….”

The rose in its splendor can adorn your feast,
Lovable Child,
But the unpetalled rose is just flung out
To blow away.
An unpetalled rose gives itself unaffectedly
To be no more.
Like it, with joy I abandon myself to you,
Little Jesus.

One walks on rose petals with no regrets,
And this debris
Is a simple ornament that one disposes of artlessly,
That I’ve understood.
Jesus, for your love I’ve squandered my life,
My future.
In the eyes of men, a rose forever withered,
I must die!…

For you, I must die, Child, Beauty Supreme,
What a blessed fate!
In being unpetalled, I want to prove to you that I love you,
O my Treasure!…
Under your baby steps, I want to live here below
With mystery,
And I’d like to soften once more on Calvary
Your last steps!….

The post An Unpetalled Rose appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

As we get older, the temptation to be dissatisfied with our lives can grow.  A fear of aging, along with memories of past failures and mistakes, can obscure the good in the world around us.  A culture of consumption, distractions, and anesthetics, which is what we’ve created, feeds on that restlessness and profits from the anxiety that so often animates our desires.  In the process, it steals something uniquely human from us.  It reduces us to a bundle of material appetites.  And it resents anything transcendent because questions about meaning threaten the machinery of wanting and possessing more.

This is one of the reasons why beauty – real beauty – can seem so diminished in our daily lives.  Real beauty draws us up and out of ourselves; it connects us to realities that can’t be commodified.  It re-sacralizes the world, even if only for a moment.  And in doing that, it indicts the vulgarity, cynicism, and disorder that constitute so much of contemporary life.

But we’re better than our base appetites.  We deserve something more than commercialized, materialist junk.  And the reason why is simple: As the philosopher Roger Scruton wrote in his book The Face of God, “the [human] face shines in the world of objects with a light that is not of this world – the light of subjectivity.”

Today’s social sciences tend to reduce individuals to data points and the human experience to patterns of behavior.  And of course it’s true that we humans are animated carbon, just like every other animal.  We have instincts and we reproduce more or less like every other animal.  But we’re not like any other animal.  We’re uniquely conscious of both our individuality and our mortality.  Which explains both our fear of loneliness and our need for meaning.  We’re the only species that buries and reveres its dead.  It’s in our nature to want more than this life can give; to sense that something more and higher might be possible.

Again, in The Face of God, Scruton wrote:

Take away religion, [take away] philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways they can represent their apartness.  Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead.  Biological reductionism nurtures this “living down,” which is why people so readily fall for it.  It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic.  It abolishes our kind, and with it, our kindness.

Beauty, in contrast, is an affirmation of our shared human dignity.  It reminds us of the goodness of life in an age of transgressive narcissism and repudiation of the past.  This is why, in the Catholic tradition, hostility to high culture; to excellence and precision in the life of the mind; and more recently and narrowly to the traditional Latin Mass, can seem so strange.

I grew up with the old form of the Mass.  I have no desire to go back to it.  It could often be mechanical and uninspiring, and the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council were overdue and necessary.  When done well, they produce a form of worship that’s both reverent and profound.

But what the old Mass did have, when a priest celebrated it with humility and conviction, was a tactile beauty that appealed to all the senses, especially sight, sound, and smell.  And in doing that, it communicated, vividly, the mystery of an invisible reality — a God radically holy, a God radically “other than” us, but at the same time intimate, loving, and incarnate in our humanity.

People leave the Catholic Church and the wider Christian community today for many different reasons.  But one of those reasons is the unconvincing, bourgeois mediocrity that can be too common in our worship – which then infects the whole atmosphere of Christian life.

My point is simply this:  Ugliness kills the spirit and explains the impulse for desecration that infects so much of modern “art.”  Ugliness dumbs down the imagination, softens the brain, and hardens the heart.  People of faith have a hunger for beauty and mystery and belonging to a story; the story of a living, believing community, ongoing and true across cultures and time.  And they’re too often not getting that in their local churches.

In his book Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, Scruton wrote that:

Our need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people.  It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition, as free individuals seeking our place in a shared and public world.  We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust.  Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves.  The experience of beauty guides us along this second path:  It tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perception as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.  But beings like us. . .become at home in the world only by acknowledging our “fallen” condition. . . .Hence the experience of beauty also points us beyond this world to a “kingdom of ends” in which our immortal longings and our desire for perfection are finally answered.

This is why a hunger for beauty and the religious frame of mind are so closely related and so vital for human flourishing.  They both flow from a humble sense of human imperfection while reaching for the transcendent.  For better or worse, it’s also why so many young families seek out the beauty and mystery of the old Latin Mass.

We need beauty to ennoble our imagination, to guide our scientific intuitions, and to poke through the blather and venom of “wokeness.”  We need it to see reality clearly.  We need beauty because it keeps us human.  Beauty tells us that despite our sins and failures, Creation is good.  And behind it is a Creator who loves us.

The post The Face of God appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

The clusterf*ck in the US House of Representatives this past weekend is surely the final straw. The dreadful grip of the UniParty on national security policy has finally produced sheer madness in a single package. To wit: $95 billion of foreign aid boondoggles that do not benefit America’s homeland security in the slightest. An extension … Continue reading "The UniParty’s Day of Infamy"

The post The UniParty’s Day of Infamy appeared first on Antiwar.com.

When blasphemy and heresy meet sodomy…

Queer in Trier: ‘Bishop’ Ackermann Presides Over Ecumenical Rainbow Service for Aberrosexuals

In the Vatican II Sect, the Modernist layman Stephan Ackermann has been playing ‘Catholic bishop’ of Trier, Germany, since 2009. It was then that ‘Pope’ Benedict XVI appointed him to succeed ‘Bishop’ (now ‘Cardinal’) Reinhard Marx, who had been promoted to become ‘Archbishop’ of Munich and Freising.

Every year the Tier diocese celebrates the so-called Heilig-Rock-Tage. It is a 10-day church festival centered on the relic of the Holy Tunic (Heiliger Rock) of Jesus Christ. This year, the festival took place from Apr.… READ MORE

The name Francis X. Maier may not be well-known outside the inside circles of ecclesiastical life because he has worked diligently but effectively behind the scenes. He served for twenty-three years as senior aide to Archbishop Charles Chaput in the Archdiocese of Denver and then in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Before that, he served for fifteen years as editor-in-chief of the National Catholic Register newsweekly, and earlier as a screenwriter and story analyst based in Los Angeles. He is currently a senior fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Maier has written an excellent book, True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church, just released by Ignatius Press, that should rightfully make his name better known. In this concise and readable book, Maier summarizes the frank and in-depth interviews that he conducted with 103 bishops, clergy, religious, and lay men and women from various backgrounds over a seventeen-month period, from December 2020 through May 2022. While the persons interviewed do not hesitate to point out the shortcomings that they see in the life of the Church as well as her strengths, they do so out of love for the Church and a fervent desire to fix the flaws of the human failings of its leaders and members.

In his introduction to the book, Archbishop Chaput writes: 

At heart, the Church is a “she”, not an “it”: the Bride of Christ; a mother of tenderness and the teacher of truth. And even in an age that derides her and dismisses the need for a God; even in an age when her weakness is often brutally obvious, the Church is younger, stronger, and more beautiful than her enemies have the capacity to understand or see.

Then Archbishop Chaput added a personal note about Maier. He wrote: 

In Denver, in the early days of our collaboration, I sometimes stopped by Fran’s office at the end of the day to think out loud or exchange ideas. I asked him once why he worked for the Church when he could do something else that paid more. He looked at me quizzically, and then said, “Because I love her.” 

In Chapter One of the book, Maier then explains why he loves the Church:

I love the Church because she is my home, my extended family, the mother who takes us back whatever our failures and mistakes. I love her for the grandeur of the art, music, law, architecture, and literature she has inspired. I love her for the brilliance of her intellectual legacy, which has no parallel in human experience. I love her for the good that remains in the civilization she shaped. I love her for her patience and mercy. I love her because she treasures and refuses to abandon the weak. I love her above all because what she teaches is salvific and true. There has never been a Christianity without the Church. She’s essential to the Christian life. The Church preceded the Gospels, not the other way around. And the Christian faith has never been merely a personal relationship with God, as important as that is. It has always been, beginning in the Upper Room, an assembly of believers, an ekklesia—a Church. I love the Church despite the sins of her leaders and her people, including my own.

The various chapters of the book consist of asking different audiences why they love the Church and what they would do to correct any perceived shortcomings in the leadership or life of the Church. While two chapters are interviews of priests, deacons, and bishops (not including me), the vast majority of people interviewed are lay Christian faithful, including a diocesan finance officer, the president of an investment advisory firm, university professors, theologians, legal scholars, business people, social scientists, journalists, immigrants, philanthropists, leaders of lay apostolates, husbands, wives, homeschooling mothers, and non-Catholic Christians. He asks them questions like:

Do you love the Church? If so, why, and what do you love about her?

What are your impressions of the Church, and have they changed over the years?

What are the biggest mistakes a diocese or parish typically makes?

What do you see as the major problems in the Church right now?

What issues, particularly in the United States, need to be addressed for a renewal of the Church to take place?

When you look for practical sources of hope right now, what are they?

Since so many people offer their opinions in this book, it is not surprising that they do not all agree, nor do all share the same advice. But that is one of the attractive qualities of this book, in that the reader will hear a variety of voices, some of whom they may identify with and others with whom they may not. A key indicator of what readers might expect in these answers is the number of times the following words appear in this book: Church–732, God–152, Jesus–70, faith–255, hope–63, and love–116.

The title of the book comes from the 1981 film True Confessions, based on the crime novel of the same name by John Gregory Dunne. As Maier explains in the final chapter, True Confessions is 

not a happy portrait of the Church, her people, or her clergy. . . . The heart of both the novel and the film is the fractious relationship between two Catholic brothers: Des and Tom Spellacy. Des, played in the film by Robert De Niro, is a rising young monsignor, chancellor of the archdiocese, right hand to the cardinal, and on the fast track to be a bishop. Tom (Robert Duvall, in one of his finest roles) is an LAPD detective; the “black sheep” son of their Irish Catholic family. Cynical toward life in general and the Church in particular, Tom Spellacy is the lens through which the story unfolds. Tom is a complicated soul: resentful of his brother’s perceived goodness, calloused by the meanness of the streets, but also protective of his brother’s reputation. Des Spellacy is no less complex: smart, shrewd, ambitious, and (when necessary) ruthless—and also keenly aware of his own sin of pride, masked by a veneer of priestly piety. Onto Tom’s police plate drops the case of the murdered young woman. Where it leads provides the rest of the drama.

His point is that 

alongside the great good that can be achieved through Christian engagement in public leadership, great harm can be done to the Church and her mission when her people and her clergy confuse material success with service to the Gospel. A comfortable Church, a colluding Church, a publicly esteemed Church can very easily become a dead Church. And when faith is merely skin deep, it’s worth remembering that societies sooner or later shed their dead skin.

To prevent this disintegration of the Church’s vitality, Maier proposes nothing less than the call to sainthood: “We moderns tend to think that the era of the saints is over. But we’re wrong. It’s always the era of the saints.” This imperative of personal sanctity is not confined to clergy or consecrated religious, but extends to each and every person: “The task of any ‘new reformation,’ any purifying re-formation of Church and world, begins with each believer.”

In the end, a good book leaves the reader hungry for more, and that is how I felt when I reached its end. We hear directly from Maier only in the preface and chapters one and eleven, while the rest of the chapters are a blend of interview responses with Maier’s brief commentary. Those interviews provide a helpful cross-section of views on the strengths of the Church and suggestions for addressing the weaknesses of ecclesial life. But I found myself wanting to hear more from Maier himself because he obviously has a lot of wisdom to share.

For example, I took solace as a bishop in these words: 

Bishops in the Church tend to get blamed for everything. And sometimes they earn it. But bishops didn’t invent the birth control pill. They didn’t create the sexual anarchy that flowed from it. Bishops didn’t invent the transistor, or the microchip, or the cell phone, or video games, or gay dating apps, or the internet cocoon of pornography that’s destroyed millions of families and vocations. And bishops don’t have a magic wand to cancel out the massively negative influence of popular culture on their people.

Maier also has sound advice for everyone else in the Church when he says that we are 

harvesting the effects of a century of Catholic assimilation and naïve optimism about the compatibility of Catholic teaching and American culture. I’ve always believed in our potential as Catholic Christians to be a leaven in American life. It just hasn’t worked out that way. Of course, that can change. But it requires leaders, and their people, who think in terms of the long haul and commit to missionary witness as their first priority in thought and deed.

Maier’s love for the Church comes through in this book and is why others who love the Church will want to read it. Perhaps we can hope for a sequel in which we will get to hear more of Maier in his own words. 

Image by sidneydealmeida and licensed via Adobe Stock.

Judicial Watch has the receipts… and yes, the vaxx was being developed right along with the weapon. Turns out neither worked very well, but I’ll bet they do better next time. -nvp

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today it received 5 pages of records from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that show an April 2020 email exchange with several officials in the bureau’s Newark Field Office referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China as including “gain-of-function research” which “would leave no signature of purposeful human manipulation.”

Judicial Watch obtained the records in response to a May 17, 2023, FOIA request for: emails and text messages of the Newark Field Office, including to Special Agent David A. Miller, containing the terms “gain of function,” “GoF,” “R01A|110964,” and/or “EcoHealth.” Judicial Watch sent the FOIA request to follow up on uncovering the FBI Newark Field Office’s investigation of the Fauci agency’s gain-of-function grants after the Covid-19 pandemic began.

On April 23, 2020, an email exchange with the subject “Follow up call” takes place between several unnamed Newark Field Office FBI officials. A person whose name is redacted writes:

Details of the current NIAID [Fauci’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases] grant for WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] bat coronavirus surveillance and WIV bat coronavirus gain-of-function research are available at: https://projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_description.cfm?aid=9819304&icde=49645421&ddparam=&ddvalue=&ddsub=&cr=1&csb=default&cs=ASC&pball= [summary of NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance for Project 2R01AI110964-06]. The key activity for bat coronavirus surveillance is ‘Aim 1 … We will sequence receptor binding domains (spike proteins) to identify viruses with the highest potential for spillover which we will include in our experimental investigations. (Aim 3).’

The key activity for bat coronavirus gain of function is “Aim 3 … We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that 0/0 divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.” Translated into lay language, this equates to: “In Aim 3, we will use de novo synthesis to construct novel viruses encoding different spike proteins in an otherwise-constant genomic context, and we will test the ability of the resulting novel viruses to infect human cells in culture and to infect laboratory animals. We hypothesize that there is a direct correlation between the receptor binding affinity of the spike protein and the abilities to infect human cells in culture and to infect laboratory animals. We will test this hypothesis by asking whether novel viruses encoding spike proteins with the highest receptor-binding affinity have the highest abilities to infect human cells in culture and to infect laboratory animals.”

The reason I am writing is that the experimental strategy proposed in Aim 3 (“infectious clone technology”), if performed using commercial or in-house gene synthesis to prepare the infectious clones, *** would leave no signatures of purposeful human manipulation***.

(All the emails are here) 

Adam Fadel is a licensed clinical therapist and, after many years of practice, he’s concluded what we know to be true: abortion trauma is real. The founder of the Charlotte clinic “The Corner: Institute for Transformation” explained what he had learned about the trauma that so often goes undiagnosed in a column written for The Fayetteville Observer.

He writes, “As state lawmakers consider the issue of abortion, they need to keep people like Sarah [a pseudonym] in mind — women who aren’t shouting their abortion, but instead are silently grieving.”

In one powerful paragraph Fadel explains

But traumas associated with abortion aren’t ended by the procedure. In fact, many of them begin there. A study conducted by Support After Abortion found that 34% of women suffer “adverse impacts” like anger, shame and regret from medication abortions. Most of these women said they had nobody to talk to afterwards, and had no idea where to go to understand and address their complicated grief. [Underlining added.]

This study results contrast sharply with the endlessly lauded “Turnaway Study.” Fadel explains, “The Turnaway Study is regularly cited by major media outlets as a rebuttal against the idea that abortion harms mothers who terminate their pregnancies.” 

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According to the study, women who were able to have an abortion were compared to women who were turned away — thus the name. It “found that just 5% of women regret their abortions.”

Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon, NRLC’s Director of Education & Research, has demolished the study in multiple stories written for NRL News Today. As he pointed out in the conclusion to his five-part critique of the “Turnaway” study,

“Within a week after their ‘denial,’ even before the baby was actually born, 35% of those women were no longer willing to say that having the abortion would have been the right decision. After the birth, we know that 86% were living with the baby; 59% perceived their relationships as good or very good; and nearly half (48%) had full-time jobs.”

But even if we grant, for purposes of argument, that “only” 5% of women regret their abortions, it’s “a huge number,” Fadel writes. “Guttmacher estimates that 23.7% of women have abortions, which using the Turnaway Study’s numbers means that nearly two million women regret their abortion. Leaving these women to suffer in silence is a disservice to them, their families, and their communities.”

Sarah “was also hesitant to approach me because like most women who want to seek healing after abortion, she preferred anonymity out of fear of rejection and judgment.” Fadel concludes

Sarah deserved better than to suffer years of silent regret and shame. I was grateful to be able to help her learn how to address the traumas she had endured, and to heal. As abortion continues to be debated across the state, therapists, lawmakers, abortion advocates, and abortion opponents must put aside differences and make people like Sarah a priority.

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.

The post Women Who Regret Their Abortions are Suffering Years of Regret and Shame appeared first on LifeNews.com.

Joe Biden took his presidential campaign to Florida today and promoted abortions – because apparently killing one million babies a year in abortions is not enough.

He told the handful of pro-abortion voters gathered for the small event that they should hold Donald trump accountable for overturning Roe so states could set their own policies on protecting babies from abortions.

“Donald Trump is worried voters are going to hold him accountable for the cruelty and chaos he’s created,” Biden said. “The bad news for Trump is that we are going to hold him accountable. He should be held accountable.”

Biden also urged those in attendance to support a statewide amendment that would legalize abortions up to birth.

However, polling data in the Sunshine State shows voters support Trump over Biden.

A Florida Atlantic University PolCom Lab/Mainstreet Research poll released last week found Trump leading Biden by 10 points, while an Emerson College poll earlier this month had Trump leading by 15.

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Students for Life of America told LifeNews that Biden has little to campaign on other than promoting more abortions. And it chided him for keeping the details of the event low key to avoid pro-life advocates protesting the event.

“As always, with the Biden-Harris Administration, they will talk a big game of their love for abortion, while keeping event details secret,” said Students for Life Action President Kristan Hawkins.

“Florida’s importance as a swing state explains in part the get-out-the-vote effort radical abortion extremists are engaging with a ballot initiative that would strip away legal protections for a baby with the universal sign of life – a heartbeat – to open the door to intentional abortion through a pregnancy. With a strong pro-life presence in Florida, SFLAction will rally and feature our brand-new video billboard truck to send Biden a special message,” she said.

“Biden may hide his location from us, but he can’t hide plans for abortion from the young voter generation, and he must answer for the abortion pollution ignored by his FDA’s negligently reduced standards for distributing the deadly drugs,” stated Hawkins. “Nine in 10 Gen Z and Gen Y voters reject the No Test, Online Distribution of Chemical Abortion Pills pushed by the Biden Administration. The youth vote is waking up.”

The post Joe Biden Campaigns in Florida for More Abortions appeared first on LifeNews.com.

Campaigners are calling on MPs to reject a new amendment tabled by Labour MP, Stella Creasy, to the Criminal Justice Bill that would make extreme changes to abortion laws.

The amendment (NC40) proposes making the biggest changes to abortion laws since the Abortion Act was introduced in 1967.

The proposed change to the law would make it more likely that healthy babies are aborted at home for any reason, up to birth, by removing key deterrents against performing an abortion at any point right through to birth.

The amendment would remove the possibility of custodial sentences for abortions after 24 weeks and by not suggesting any meaningful alternative sanctions, the amendment would remove a key deterrent against late-term abortions.

The amendment would also require the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) personally to approve prosecutions of women or abortion providers who perform abortions after the legal limit up to birth. This would introduce an extra hurdle before prosecutions can take place, which may deter police investigations, making abortions up to birth more likely. It would also likely lead to unreasonable pressure being placed on the DPP.

These changes to the law would likely lead to a significant increase in the number of women performing late-term abortions at home, endangering the lives of many more women.

They would also likely lead to an increased number of viable babies’ lives being ended well beyond the 24-week abortion time limit and beyond the point at which they would be able to survive outside the womb.

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Making it easier to cover up infanticides

Stella Creasy’s amendment would remove key deterrents against hiding the body of a dead baby included in Section 60 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861.

Section 60 makes it an offence to conceal the birth of a child by hiding the dead body of a child after its birth, including in circumstances when the baby has been killed through infanticide. This law change could make it easier to cover up infanticides.

Removing a series of key safeguards provided by the Abortion Act

The amendment would also remove a series of key safeguards provided by the Abortion Act through to 24 weeks.

It proposes making this law change by removing offences for women and doctors committed under sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act (OAPA) and the Infant Life (Preservation) Act (ILPA) through to 24 weeks.

As the Abortion Act was passed to create exemptions to sections 58 and 59 of the OAPA and the ILPA, removing such offences committed under sections 58 and 59 of the OAPA and the ILPA would make key safeguards provided by the Abortion Act 1967 redundant through to 24 weeks.

This means abortion would be available on demand, for any reason up to 24 weeks.

If the proposal becomes law, sex-selective abortion would become legal in England and Wales. Sex-selective abortion usually targets baby girls due to a preference among certain parents and some cultures for having sons. The Government maintains that, under our current legislation, abortion on the grounds of the sex of the baby is illegal because it is “not one of the lawful grounds for termination of pregnancy” set out in the Abortion Act, which stipulates that abortion can only be performed under specific grounds.

Under the proposed law change, the Abortion Act and the grounds under which abortion is permitted would effectively be made redundant up to 24 weeks, allowing abortion on demand, for any reason, including sex-selective abortion.

Section 1(3) of the Abortion Act restricts abortion to hospitals or places approved by the Secretary of State. Without this safeguard, there would be no legal restrictions on places where abortions could be performed up to 24 weeks.

The amendment would also result in there being no legal requirement that abortions take place under the care of a qualified doctor. Currently, the Abortion Act requires that an abortion takes place under the care of a registered medical practitioner (qualified doctor) who leads or directs the abortion process.

Under the proposed law change, there would also be no legal requirement that two qualified doctors certify an abortion. Section 1(1) of the Abortion Act requires two registered medical practitioners (doctors) to certify that an abortion is legal and is being performed under one of the grounds set out in the Abortion Act. Without this safeguard, there would be no legal requirement that two doctors certify an abortion up to 24 weeks.

Strong opposition from the public and medical professionals

Polling undertaken by ComRes, shows that only 1% of women support introducing abortion up to birth and 70% of women would support a reduction in the time limit from 24 weeks to 20 weeks or below. The same polling showed that 91% of women agree that gender-selective abortion should be explicitly banned by the law.

Polling published by the Daily Telegraph shows that more than half of the general public agree that it should remain the case that a woman is breaking the law if she has an abortion of a healthy baby after the current 24-week legal time limit up until birth. Only 16% disagreed.

Over 750 medical professionals have now signed an open letter to MPs opposing making extreme changes to abortion legislation part of the Criminal Justice Bill.

A number of high-profile commentators in the media, some of whom take a pro-choice position on abortion, have come out against making extreme changes to abortion legislation, saying the proposals go “too far”.

Major campaign launched to oppose abortion up to birth

Following the tabling of Stella Creasy’s extreme abortion amendment, pro-life organisation Right To Life UK, has launched a major nationwide No To Abortion Up To Birth campaign focused on defeating attempts to hijack the Criminal Justice Bill that would introduce extreme changes to our abortion laws.

Right To Life UK is encouraging members of the public around the country to urgently contact their MP using the tool at www.righttolife.org.uk/uptobirth to ask their MP to oppose the introduction of extreme abortion laws.

Right To Life UK spokesperson, Catherine Robinson, said:

“These extreme changes to the law would remove key deterrents against performing an abortion at any point right through to birth. This would make it more likely that healthy babies are aborted for any reason, including sex-selective purposes, right up to and during birth”.

“It would likely lead to a tragic increase in the number of viable babies’ lives being ended through late-term abortions performed at home well beyond the 24-week abortion time limit, as well as the lives of many more women being endangered”.

“These extreme and radical abortion amendments have no place in the UK. Recent polling clearly shows that the public does not support these changes to the law. We are calling on MPs to reject these amendments and instead support Caroline Ansell’s amendment to lower the time limit, for which polling shows widespread public support”.

“We are calling on members of the public around the country to urgently contact their MP using the tool at www.righttolife.org.uk/uptobirth to ask them to oppose the introduction of extreme abortion laws”.

The post Pro-Life Groups Ask British Parliament to Defeat Measure Legalizing Abortions Up to Birth appeared first on LifeNews.com.

Xavier University’s health insurance plan not only appears to cover abortion – it looks like the school specifically added it into the coverage.

But the Catholic Cincinatti university denies its student health insurance plan covers abortion.

A “policy endorsement” on the plan appeared to delete an “exclusion” of abortion.

The plan lists abortion as a “Non-EHB [Essential Health Benefit] benefits added to plan via additional endorsement.” It includes, like other covered benefits, the amount the plan pays for in-network and out-of-network providers.

The following page shows the “policy endorsement” appears to be signed by university President Colleen Hanycz.

“Benefits will be paid at the benefits levels indicated in the schedule of benefits,” the endorsement states.

The Jesuit university’s public relations specialist said “no” when asked if the plan covers abortion. He said “nothing has changed regarding this policy from previous years.” He said there are few enrollees in the plan.

The College Fix asked for clarification since the language appears to indicate abortion is coverage. The Fix said there was possibly confusion on its end due to the double-negatives of deleting exclusions.

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“The confusion regarding the wording is definitely understandable — but again, the answer to your question is, no, elective abortions are not a covered benefit under the policy,” spokesman David Hamilton said in late March.

He did not respond to another inquiry sent two weeks ago that asked why the plan includes deductible amounts for a non-covered benefit.

United Healthcare has not responded to multiple email and phone contacts in the past weeks that sought clarify on what the policy says.

The Archdiocese of Cincinnati has also not responded to multiple requests for comment on the policy.

The Catholic Church has always condemned abortion as a serious evil.

“Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church states. “This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law.”

Pro-life group American Life League criticized the plan’s apparent endorsement of abortion.

“Catholic teaching is explicitly clear that abortion is never ok…The Catholic Church never allows for any exceptions for abortion,” Director of Communications Katie Brown told The Fix via a media statement. “Abortion is the intentional killing of a child, every single time.”

When asked what the university should do to reconcile this apparent coverage, Brown said “Xavier should swiftly redact this policy. We encourage the Bishops in Ohio to hold the college accountable for promoting this evil.”

She called it “discouraging,” as a Catholic to see the university “make policies that directly contradict our faith.”

“However it’s a great opportunity for our Bishops and Church leaders to remind the laity why abortion is always evil, and what incredible life affirming options exist,” Brown said.

Other Catholic universities cover abortion in their health plans, including St. Xavier University in Chicago and the University of San Diego, as previously reported by The Fix.

LifeNews Note: College Fix contributor William Hurley is a student at Hope College where he studies political science and theology. He is active in many clubs including Hope Republicans, Hope Catholics, and Students Cherishing Life. He has written for the Hope College student newspaper, The Anchor. This column originally appeared at The College Fix.

The post Catholic Xavier University Puts Abortion in Its Health Insurance Plan appeared first on LifeNews.com.

Catholics Answers just announced the release of the “Father Justin” interactive AI app, which will “provide users with faithful and educational answers to questions about Catholicism.” I have to admit, I have a lot of conflicting thoughts on this. As a former tech geek, I still get excited by advances in technology. On just that basis, it’s amazing what these apps can do. I took “Father…

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Tomorrow, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States, two consolidated cases questioning whether the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) supersedes Idaho’s near-total abortion ban and can force physicians to perform abortions in emergency situations.

Idaho’s “Defense of Life Act” was enacted in 2020 and took effect when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. The law makes it a felony for doctors to perform an abortion unless it’s necessary to save the life of the mother. Soon after Roe’s overturning, the Biden administration sued the State of Idaho arguing EMTALA trumps the state’s abortion law and requires doctors to perform abortions under a broader set of exceptions than just to preserve the life of the mother. U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill agreed and prevented Idaho from enforcing the law where it conflicted with EMTALA. A three-judge panel at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals briefly overturned that decision stating even if EMTALA does preempt Idaho’s law, its exemption for the life of the mother was sufficient to keep the laws out of conflict. However, the full Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed and quickly reversed that ruling forcing the State and Idaho Speaker of the House Mike Moyle to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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In January 2024, the High Court agreed to hear the case and granted Idaho’s emergency request to enforce the ban in hospital emergency rooms while it decides the issue, which temporarily denies a Biden administration effort to force hospitals to perform abortions in the state.

Under EMTALA, Medicare-funded hospitals are required to provide necessary emergency care to pregnant women without discrimination, including if they cannot pay for the treatment. Even though the scope of EMTALA only deals with discrimination and does not even mention abortion, Secretary Xavier Becerra of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has interpreted the law differently. He issued policy guidance in July 2022 to hospitals stating that EMTALA preempts state abortion laws and requires hospitals receiving Medicare funding to perform emergency abortions.

The guidance set forth an interpretation that state abortion laws with more narrow exceptions than EMTALA are “preempted,” and that physicians “must” perform an abortion if they feel abortion is “the stabilizing treatment necessary” to resolve an emergency medical condition. Under the guidance, hospitals could lose federal funding for failing to comply.

While the Biden administration argues that the HHS “guidance” is just clarifying existing federal law, the Idaho legislature and state officials called the disputed HHS guidance an “unauthorized power grab” and stated it would have been “odd” for Congress to negate “state abortion laws” in a provision that “does not even mention abortion.”

Now that SCOTUS has allowed Idaho’s protections for unborn babies to remain in effect for the time being, doctors who perform abortions are subject to penalties ranging from two to five years in jail, fines, and suspension or revocation of their medical licenses.

The outcome of this case will likely affect a nearly identical dispute in Texas. In January 2024, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the Biden administration cannot use EMTALA to override Texas’ near-total abortion ban and force Texas doctors to perform abortions. In Texas v. Becerra, a three-judge appeals court panel called the guidance “unlawful” and unanimously upheld a lower court ruling that struck down the guidance.

Authoring the ruling, Circuit Judge Kurt Engelhardt determined that EMTALA does not discard the unborn child during a life-threatening medical emergency, and he noted that the law requires hospitals to “stabilize both the pregnant woman and her unborn child.”

“The question before the Court is whether EMTALA, according to HHS’s Guidance, mandates physicians to provide abortions when that is the necessary stabilizing treatment for an emergency medical condition. It does not,” wrote Judge Engelhardt. “EMTALA does not mandate medical treatments, let alone abortion care, nor does it preempt [state] law.”

Dr. William Lile, who is board certified in Obstetrics and Gynecology and who has delivered thousands of babies, told Liberty Counsel that the goal in treating a pregnant woman is always to preserve the lives of both the mother and her unborn baby when possible.

Dr. Lile stated, “It’s the delivery of the baby that cures the mother’s condition, it’s not the stoppage of baby’s heart and the killing of the baby that helps the mother.”

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act does not preempt state abortion laws, nor does it require the killing of an innocent life. Emergency rooms are only required to stabilize patients, which includes the unborn patient. This so-called ‘guidance’ by the Secretary of Health and Human Services is another lawless act of the Biden administration that will be struck down.”

The post Supreme Court Should Shut Down Joe Biden’s Attempt to Force ERs to Do Abortions appeared first on LifeNews.com.

Recently, a colleague sent me a new report published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, which is the professional journal of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine. The report is a retrospective cohort study on all assisted reproductive technology cycles reported to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology via their Clinic Outcome Reporting Systems. Data was gathered on embryo transfers done to U.S. gestational surrogates from 2014 to 2020 and compared surrogacy between surrogates and commissioning parents in both domestic and international arrangements.

First, it struck me as strange, that the report referred to the patients who were in fact the intended parents. Seems to me the surrogate mother and by extension, the baby(s) she carried would be the patient. But this is just another example of diminishing the mother-child dyad and centering the moneyed interests as the focus of the report.
The actual results were striking too, in reporting not only the rise in international purchasing parents using American women, but also who these people are who are hiring American women.

Of 40,177 embryos transferred during 2014 to 2020, 32% of these arrangements were foreign contracts. In 2014, the figure was 22%. In 2019, it was 39.8%. And then in 2020, the figure decreased to 31.8%, which was probably due, in part, to the Covid travel bans. The profile of the international intended parent(s):

• More likely to be a male (41.3%)
  Largely from China (41.7%) then France (9.2%) and Spain (8.5%)
• U.S. gestational carriers for international arrangements were younger than 30 years (42.8%)
• Cycles for international arrangements more often used donor eggs (67.1%)
• More often used introcytoplasmic sperm injection (67.1%)
• Preimplantation genetic testing used (79.0%)

As many countries prohibit surrogacy, these restrictive (and good) laws only encourage the explosion in Big Fertility here in the U.S. I can see all sorts of ethical and legal risks in the role the U.S. plays in the international reproductive tourism landscape. First, it should be a red flag that many of these arrangements are with single men. My pedophile, baby trafficking radar is on high alert. Second, the high percentage of Chinese nationals hiring women to buy a baby that has the bonus of U.S. citizenship, what is commonly referred to as “anchor babies.” As we fight for the abolition of the baby trade, we would do well, to close our borders to these international nefarious arrangements that exploit women at home. What a big dent we could make in the multi-billion-dollar baby markets if we just closed our borders. Seems like something our State Department should investigate.

The post The Rise of International Gestational Surrogacy in the U.S. appeared first on The Center for Bioethics & Culture Network.

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