1. Philadelphia Catholic Foster Care Agency Can Once Again Help Children After Settlement with City Finally! Thank you, Becket Fund ! 2....
1. Philadelphia Catholic Foster Care Agency Can Once Again Help Children After Settlement with City
Finally! Thank you, Becket Fund!
2. Heidi Crowter: I’ll never stop fighting unfair laws for babies with Down’s syndrome
A few years ago my mum, Liz, told me that some people choose to abort babies with disabilities like Down’s syndrome – and it is legal to do so up to birth. This really upset me. Why should people like me be treated differently from other babies, who can only be aborted up to 24 weeks?
I firmly believe that a blood test or scan does not tell the whole picture. I might have Down’s syndrome but I can achieve lots and have a wonderful existence.
3. Woman with Down syndrome loses UK abortion law challenge
Abortion is legal for babies with Down syndrome up until birth.
4. Gloria Purvis: Abortion is integral to upholding systems that oppress women. That’s why I support the new Texas law.
5. The long five minutes: Abortion doulas bring comfort during a complicated time
On the first day of training, a doctor had come in, a chic, funny woman who walked through the mechanics of the procedure, passing around medical instruments: a tenaculum, metal dilators. On the second day, they went over a list of neutral phrases and topics for if they found themselves not knowing what else to say: “It is almost finished.” “You’re so strong.” “Are you watching anything good on TV?” Ask what patients were planning to have for dinner — they wouldn’t have eaten since the night before. Talk about their kids. Patients who already had kids loved talking about their kids.
….
From the back of the room, Grace half-raised her hand.
“A doula is water,” she said.
“Explain that?”
“Taking the shape of whatever role is needed,” Grace explained. “Like water.”
From the whiteboard, Lindsey nodded. “If someone getting an abortion calls it a baby, it’s a baby,” Lindsey said. “If she calls it a fetus, it’s a fetus. If she doesn’t say anything, don’t talk about it.”
She turned and wrote on the whiteboard: “A doula is water.”
….
If I had an abortion I would be ending a life, one question read.
“Death can exist without it being murder,” a doula replied, explaining how she could agree with the “life ending” statement but still believe in abortion. “I can love animals and still eat meat. I can do this kind of work because of these gray areas.”
6. [A Desperate] China [After Years of Forced Abortions] Restricts Abortions to Force Women Into Having More Babies
Between 2014 and 2018, Chinese doctors performed an average of 9.7 million abortions a year, according to the country’s National Health Commission. That’s an increase of 51 percent over the previous five years before the relaxation of China’s one-child rule governing family size in 2015.
Prior to that, Chinese couples were faced with difficult choices under the country’s strict one-child policy, which normalized gender-based abortions and sterilizations. Abortions were also largely considered to be undercounted during that era. According to 2020 census figures released in May 2021, males account for 51.27 percent of China’s 1.34 billion people.
On Sunday, China also did away with three other laws related to family planning that were created during China’s one-child policy era said to reflect what is perceived as a challenge of the country’s falling birth rate. Reuters reports that the laws optimize a “fertility policy” meant to “promote long-term balanced population development.”
7. Charlie Camosy: Catholic lawmakers can’t justify voting for the Democrats’ new abortion bill
From the perspective of Catholic moral theology and Catholic bioethics, there is no reasonable prudential judgement of conscience with regard to policy that could justify a vote for [the so-called Women’s Health Protection Act]. Active support for this bill puts a Catholic legislator—Republican or Democrat—outside the church community on a profound matter of justice.
8. Ashley McGuire: R. Kelly Verdict Spotlights Entertainment World-Abortion Link
Hollywood has been arguably the most vocal mouthpiece for the abortion lobby, especially in recent years as it is dogged by troubling exposés and a shrinking pool of clients. Hollywood has tried extra hard to give abortion a fresh and glossy look. Think Michelle Williams in a cute orange one-shoulder dress at the Golden Globes trying to convince us that women still need abortion to succeed.
In reality, nearly 50 years of Roe v. Wade in Hollywood actually looks like a sweaty Harvey Weinstein in an orange jumpsuit. The patriarchs of Hollywood have championed abortion because it has been an essential tool for them to use and abuse women, for money and for sex, while quite literally throwing away the vulnerable and innocent consequences.
In 2017, Matthew Woods applied for a lawyer position with the organization. The mission requires all of its employees to hold and live by the ministry’s Christian beliefs, but Woods was open about the fact that he does not profess Christianity. Woods sued the homeless ministry after he was not hired for the job.
The Washington Supreme Court ruled against the ministry, but now Chin is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take up his case and defend the religious freedom the organization has enjoyed for decades.
10. Italy’s San Marino legalizes abortion despite church protests
In the Sept. 26 referendum, citizens of San Marino voted overwhelmingly to legalize abortion, with the state’s Interior Ministry reporting 77 percent of ballots asking to decriminalize abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and beyond if there is a risk to the mother’s physical or psychological health, or due to fetal abnormalities or malformations.
11. Naomi Schaefer Riley: Higher education just isn’t built for men right now
Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that men are “giving up” on higher education. “At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.”
…
But then there’s another reason, I think, that our higher education system rewards the talents of girls more than boys now. Colleges today want multitaskers, not kids with a singular focus, and boys often do better with a singular focus.
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14. Timothy P. Carney: Authoritarians want to ‘democratize’ your parenting
15. Robert Royal: The Pelosi Dialogues
Here in America, we now have a strong example of being a pastor. San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone has called the misnamed “Women’s Health Protection Act” (which the House passed Friday and would provide abortion even to the “trans” and “non-binary”) nothing other than “child sacrifice.” The Senate is unlikely to advance it. But Cordileone was in line with the pope when he said, clearly aiming at Pelosi’s promotion of the bill, that it’s “surely the type of legislation one would expect from a devout Satanist, not a devout Catholic.”
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17. Daniel Darling: What Happens When Apps Replace the Offering Plate?
18. Chris Hayes: On the Internet, We’re Always Famous
The most radical change to our shared social lives isn’t who gets to speak, it’s what we can hear. True, everyone has access to their own little megaphone, and there is endless debate about whether that’s good or bad, but the vast majority of people aren’t reaching a huge audience. And yet at any single moment just about anyone with a smartphone has the ability to surveil millions of people across the globe.
19. Francis X. Maier: All You Need to Know About Sex
Put more simply: Frequency and partner variety have very little to do with enduring sexual happiness. In fact, they work in exactly the opposite way. As with so much else in life, too much of a good thing, at the wrong time in the wrong way, renders the “good” in it tedious and empty. Today’s sharp decline in sexual activity among the young has everything to do with the isolating cocoon of pornography and the collapse of any higher meaning in sexual relationships. Sex without love—real love, the kind that comes with obligations and unexpected burdens, but also unexpected joys—kills the taste for both.
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21. Father Roger J. Landry: Protecting Conscience
The true notion of conscience, on the other hand, is an inner organ trained to be sensitive to God’s voice, helping us to evaluate morally what to do or avoid. It’s a dialogue with God whose guidance resounds within in which we apply moral truths discerned through revelation, reason and prayer to past, present or future acts, leading to a judgment as to whether those actions are good or evil.
When people, therefore, come to me to speak about conscience objections to the COVID-19 vaccine, I generally ask, “So you believe God is telling you not to get the vaccine?”
For a few, especially those who have dedicated their life to opposing the evil of abortion and to fostering a culture of life, the answer is yes. Since every approved COVID vaccine now available is tainted in some way by being developed, manufactured or tested against cell lines derived from abortions decades ago, they believe that God would never want them to cooperate at all with that evil, even though the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith says that “remote, passive material cooperation” with the evil of those abortions is morally licit “if there is a grave danger, such as the otherwise uncontainable spread of a serious pathological agent — in this case, the pandemic spread of the … virus that causes Covid-19.” They believe God is asking them to give this form of witness to the sanctity of human life.
Most to whom I ask that question, however, honestly and humbly admit that they haven’t talked to God about it. Their opposition, they tell me, comes not from any interior divine illumination but from principled opposition on other grounds: because they don’t trust what is portrayed as “the science” by scientific spokesmen; don’t think the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks, especially at their age; object to the government’s forcing citizens to do something contrary to their principles; haven’t gotten satisfactory answers as to whether there’s a risk for present or future pregnancies; are suspicious as to the constantly changing goal posts in response to COVID; and believe that the seriousness of the disease, though real, has been exaggerated and absolutized against other important considerations.
Such justifiable principles and sincere concerns are not, however, the judgment of conscience.
22. Jana B. Berkessel: National religiosity eases the psychological burden of poverty
According to a fundamental assumption in the social sciences, the burden of lower socioeconomic status (SES) is more severe in developing nations. In contrast to this assumption, recent research has shown that the burden of lower SES is less—not more—severe in developing nations. In three large-scale global data sets, we show that national religiosity can explain this puzzling finding. Developing nations are more religious, and most world religions uphold norms that, in part, function to ease the burden of lower SES and to cast a bad light on higher SES. In times of declining religiosity, this finding is a call to scientists and policymakers to monitor the increasingly harmful effects of lower SES and its far-reaching social consequences.
Young people feel enormous pressure to do more exciting things, or to make as many amazing friends as the other people flooding their timeline. Never mind if the friendships online are secretly phony and kept up only for that group photo with hundreds of likes.
Girls say they understand that social media is a facade, that nothing is truly as good as it seems – and yet they still struggle to believe this. Worse, their desire to live up to impossibly high standards keeps them from being satisfied with their own body, lifestyle and relationships. They morph into the “online version” of themselves, and experience anxiety and depression when they realize they can’t keep up with their own curated online image.
24. Arthur C. Brooks: The Difference Between Hope and Optimism
25. Brad Miner: I Love Old Things
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