Commentary

by Frederica Mathewes-Green; January 22, 2016

Abortion Ruled the Day – but Sooner or Later, That Day Will End.

At the time of the Roe v. Wade decision, I was a college student — an anti-war, mother-earth, feminist, hippie college student. That particular January I was taking a semester off, living in the D.C. area and volunteering at the feminist “underground newspaper” Off Our Backs. As you’d guess, I was strongly in favor of legalizing abortion. The bumper sticker on my car read, “Don’t labor under a misconception; legalize abortion.”

The first issue of Off Our Backs after the Roe decision included one of my movie reviews, and also an essay by another member of the collective criticizing the decision. It didn’t go far enough, she said, because it allowed states to restrict abortion in the third trimester. The Supreme Court should not meddle in what should be decided between the woman and her doctor. She should be able to choose abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.

But, at the time, we didn’t have much understanding of what abortion was. We knew nothing of fetal development. We consistently termed the fetus “a blob of tissue,” and that’s just how we pictured it — an undifferentiated mucous-like blob, not recognizable as human or even as alive. It would be another 15 years of so before pregnant couples could show off sonograms of their unborn babies, shocking us with the obvious humanity of the unborn.

We also thought, back then, that few abortions would ever be done. It’s a grim experience, going through an abortion, and we assumed a woman would choose one only as a last resort. We were fighting for that “last resort.” We had no idea how common the procedure would become; today, one in every five pregnancies ends in abortion.

Nor could we have imagined how high abortion numbers would climb. In the 43 years since Roe v. Wade, there have been 59 million abortions. It’s hard even to grasp a number that big. Twenty years ago, someone told me that, if the names of all those lost babies were inscribed on a wall, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the wall would have to stretch for 50 miles. It’s 20 years later now, and that wall would have to stretch twice as far. But no names could be written on it; those babies had no names.

We expected that abortion would be rare. What we didn’t realize was that, once abortion becomes available, it becomes the most attractive option for everyone around the pregnant woman. If she has an abortion, it’s like the pregnancy never existed. No one is inconvenienced. It doesn’t cause trouble for the father of the baby, or her boss, or the person in charge of her college scholarship. It won’t embarrass her mom and dad.

Abortion is like a funnel; it promises to solve all the problems at once. So there is significant pressure on a woman to choose abortion, rather than adoption or parenting.

A woman who had had an abortion told me, “Everyone around me was saying they would ‘be there for me’ if I had the abortion, but no one said they’d ‘be there for me’ if I had the baby.” For everyone around the pregnant woman, abortion looks like the sensible choice. A woman who determines instead to continue an unplanned pregnancy looks like she’s being foolishly stubborn. It’s like she’s taken up some unreasonable hobby. People think, If she would only go off and do this one thing, everything would be fine.

But that’s an illusion. Abortion can’t really “turn back the clock.” It can’t push the rewind button on life and make it so she was never pregnant. It can make it easy for everyone around the woman to forget the pregnancy, but the woman herself may struggle. When she first sees the positive pregnancy test she may feel, in a panicky way, that she has to get rid of it as fast as possible. But life stretches on after abortion, for months and years — for many long nights — and all her life long she may ponder the irreversible choice she made.

Abortion can’t push the rewind button on life and make it so she was never pregnant. It can make it easy for everyone around the woman to forget the pregnancy, but the woman herself may struggle.

This issue gets presented as if it’s a tug of war between the woman and the baby. We see them as mortal enemies, locked in a fight to the death. But that’s a strange idea, isn’t it? It must be the first time in history when mothers and their own children have been assumed to be at war. We’re supposed to picture the child attacking her, trying to destroy her hopes and plans, and picture the woman grateful for the abortion, since it rescued her from the clutches of her child.

If you were in charge of a nature preserve and you noticed that the pregnant female mammals were trying to miscarry their pregnancies, eating poisonous plants or injuring themselves, what would you do? Would you think of it as a battle between the pregnant female and her unborn and find ways to help those pregnant animals miscarry? No, of course not. You would immediately think, “Something must be really wrong in this environment.” Something is creating intolerable stress, so much so that animals would rather destroy their own offspring than bring them into the world. You would strive to identify and correct whatever factors were causing this stress in the animals.

The same thing goes for the human animal. Abortion gets presented to us as if it’s something women want; both pro-choice and pro-life rhetoric can reinforce that idea. But women do this only if all their other options look worse. It’s supposed to be “her choice,” yet so many women say, “I really didn’t have a choice.”

I changed my opinion on abortion after I read an article in Esquire magazine, way back in 1976. I was home from grad school, flipping through my dad’s copy, and came across an article titled “What I Saw at the Abortion.” The author, Richard Selzer, was a surgeon, and he was in favor of abortion, but he’d never seen one. So he asked a colleague whether, next time, he could go along.

Selzer described seeing the patient, 19 weeks pregnant, lying on her back on the table. (That is unusually late; most abortions are done by the tenth or twelfth week.) The doctor performing the procedure inserted a syringe into the woman’s abdomen and injected her womb with a prostaglandin solution, which would bring on contractions and cause a miscarriage. (This method isn’t used anymore, because too often the baby survived the procedure — chemically burned and disfigured, but clinging to life. Newer methods, including those called “partial birth abortion” and “dismemberment abortion,” more reliably ensure death.)

After injecting the hormone into the patient’s womb, the doctor left the syringe standing upright on her belly. Then, Selzer wrote, “I see something other than what I expected here. . . . It is the hub of the needle that is in the woman’s belly that has jerked. First to one side. Then to the other side. Once more it wobbles, is tugged, like a fishing line nibbled by a sunfish.”

He realized he was seeing the fetus’s desperate fight for life. And as he watched, he saw the movement of the syringe slow down and then stop. The child was dead. Whatever else an unborn child does not have, he has one thing: a will to live. He will fight to defend his life.

The last words in Selzer’s essay are, “Whatever else is said in abortion’s defense, the vision of that other defense [i.e., of the child defending its life] will not vanish from my eyes. And it has happened that you cannot reason with me now. For what can language do against the truth of what I saw?”

The truth of what he saw disturbed me deeply. There I was, anti-war, anti–capital punishment, even vegetarian, and a firm believer that social justice cannot be won at the cost of violence. Well, this sure looked like violence. How had I agreed to make this hideous act the centerpiece of my feminism? How could I think it was wrong to execute homicidal criminals, wrong to shoot enemies in wartime, but all right to kill our own sons and daughters?

The truth of what he saw disturbed me deeply. There I was, anti-war, anti–capital punishment, even vegetarian, and a firm believer that social justice cannot be won at the cost of violence.

For that was another disturbing thought: Abortion means killing not strangers but our own children, our own flesh and blood. No matter who the father, every child aborted is that woman’s own son or daughter, just as much as any child she will ever bear.

We had somehow bought the idea that abortion was necessary if women were going to rise in their professions and compete in the marketplace with men. But how had we come to agree that we will sacrifice our children, as the price of getting ahead? When does a man ever have to choose between his career and the life of his child?

Once I recognized the inherent violence of abortion, none of the feminist arguments made sense. Like the claim that a fetus is not really a person because it is so small. Well, I’m only 5 foot 1. Women, in general, are smaller than men. Do we really want to advance a principle that big people have more value than small people? That if you catch them before they’ve reached a certain size, it’s all right to kill them?

What about the child who is “unwanted”? It was a basic premise of early feminism that women should not base their sense of worth on whether or not a man “wants” them. We are valuable simply because we are members of the human race, regardless of any other person’s approval. Do we really want to say that “unwanted” people might as well be dead? What about a woman who is “wanted” when she’s young and sexy but less so as she gets older? At what point is it all right to terminate her?

The usual justification for abortion is that the unborn is not a “person.” It’s said that “Nobody knows when life begins.” But that’s not true; everybody knows when life — a new individual human life — gets started. It’s when the sperm dissolves in the egg. That new single cell has a brand-new DNA, never before seen in the world. If you examined through a microscope three cells lined up — the newly fertilized ovum, a cell from the father, and a cell from the mother — you would say that, judging from the DNA, the cells came from three different people.

When people say the unborn is “not a person” or “not a life” they mean that it has not yet grown or gained abilities that arrive later in life. But there’s no agreement about which abilities should be determinative. Pro-choice people don’t even agree with each other. Obviously, law cannot be based on such subjective criteria. If it’s a case where the question is “Can I kill this?” the answer must be based on objective medical and scientific data. And the fact is, an unborn child, from the very first moment, is a new human individual. It has the three essential characteristics that make it “a human life”: It’s alive and growing, it is composed entirely of human cells, and it has unique DNA. It’s a person, just like the rest of us.

Abortion indisputably ends a human life. But this loss is usually set against the woman’s need to have an abortion in order to freely direct her own life. It is a particular cruelty to present abortion as something women want, something they demand, they find liberating. Because nobody wants this. The procedure itself is painful, humiliating, expensive — no woman “wants” to go through it. But once it’s available, it appears to be the logical, reasonable choice. All the complexities can be shoved down that funnel. Yes, abortion solves all the problems; but it solves them inside the woman’s body. And she is expected to keep that pain inside for a lifetime, and be grateful for the gift of abortion.

Many years ago I wrote something in an essay about abortion, and I was surprised that the line got picked up and frequently quoted. I’ve seen it in both pro-life and pro-choice contexts, so it appears to be something both sides agree on.

I wrote, “No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.”

Strange, isn’t it, that both pro-choice and pro-life people agree that is true? Abortion is a horrible and harrowing experience. That women choose it so frequently shows how much worse continuing a pregnancy can be. Essentially, we’ve agreed to surgically alter women so that they can get along in a man’s world. And then expect them to be grateful for it.

Nobody wants to have an abortion. And if nobody wants to have an abortion, why are women doing it, 2800 times a day? If women doing something 2,800 times daily that they don’t want to do, this is not liberation we’ve won. We are colluding in a strange new form of oppression.

***

And so we come around to one more March for Life, like the one last year, like the one next year. Protesters understandably focus on the unborn child, because the danger it faces is the most galvanizing aspect of this struggle. If there are different degrees of injustice, surely violence is the worst manifestation, and killing worst of all. If there are different categories of innocent victim, surely the small and helpless have a higher claim to protection, and tiny babies the highest of all. The minimum purpose of government is to shield the weak from abuse by the strong, and there is no one weaker or more voiceless than unborn children. And so we keep saying that they should be protected, for all the same reasons that newborn babies are protected. Pro-lifers have been doing this for 43 years now, and will continue holding a candle in the darkness for as many more years as it takes.

I understand all the reasons why the movement’s prime attention is focused on the unborn. But we can also say that abortion is no bargain for women, either. It’s destructive and tragic. We shouldn’t listen unthinkingly to the other side of the time-worn script, the one that tells us that women want abortions, that abortion liberates them. Many a post-abortion woman could tell you a different story.

The pro-life cause is perennially unpopular, and pro-lifers get used to being misrepresented and wrongly accused. There are only a limited number of people who are going to be brave enough to stand up on the side of an unpopular cause. But sometimes a cause is so urgent, is so dramatically clear, that it’s worth it. What cause could be more outrageous than violence — fatal violence — against the most helpless members of our human community? If that doesn’t move us, how hard are our hearts? If that doesn’t move us, what will ever move us?

In time, it’s going to be impossible to deny that abortion is violence against children. Future generations, as they look back, are not necessarily going to go easy on ours. Our bland acceptance of abortion is not going to look like an understandable goof. In fact, the kind of hatred that people now level at Nazis and slave-owners may well fall upon our era. Future generations can accurately say, “It’s not like they didn’t know.” They can say, “After all, they had sonograms.” They may consider this bloodshed to be a form of genocide. They might judge our generation to be monsters.

One day, the tide is going to turn. With that Supreme Court decision 43 years ago, one of the sides in the abortion debate won the day. But sooner or later, that day will end. No generation can rule from the grave. The time is coming when a younger generation will sit in judgment of ours. And they are not obligated to be kind.

Originally published by the National Review.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued an important pro-Life ruling on Tuesday, overturning a bad precedent from the 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals.  The Supreme Court ruled that states do have the authority to require the decent treatment of human remains from an abortion.  The statute at issue comes from Indiana.  That state responded to the scandal of Planned Parenthood’s trafficking in aborted baby parts by insisting that abortionists operating in the state provide proper burial of the preborn children they destroy.

There are several important details in this development. One is the fact that this decision was agreed to by 7 of the sitting justices – including pro-abort liberals Kagan and Breyer.

The other noteworthy development was contained in the original AP report of the decision. The mainstream media actually reported that the Supreme Court ruling had the effect of requiring the burial of aborted babies “as if they were human”.  The story was written in such a way as to make it obvious that the reporter was unconscious of his/her gross bias.  But the phrasing is nevertheless instructive.

Obviously, there is no other possible description of the life growing within that womb than ‘human’.

The ideology of being pro-abortion requires a suspension of science and reason. The preborn “fetus” cannot possibly be “human” – because that would lead to certain uncomfortable moral problems.  And even in her dissent, the Supreme Court’s leading abortion cheerleader, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, asserted that a woman who seeks an abortion is “not a mother”.  That woman may not be a proper mother, she may not want to be a mother – but the biological and spiritual reality is that she is – and will forever be – a mother by the act of conception.

We must continue to challenge the illogic and irrationality of our opponents, even as we celebrate the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding Indiana’s right to defend decency. The ruling may indicate the Court will be generous in affording state’s greater latitude in protecting preborn children from the horrors of abortion going forward.  Let us pray so.  And may the Lord grant us the mercy of seeing the monstrous ruling of Roe v. Wade soon discarded by the high court.

Since taking control of the House this year, Congressional Democrats have shown they have two priorities: Sabotaging President Trump and defending their friends at Planned Parenthood.

Nancy Pelosi’s very first action as Speaker was to marshal a vote seeking to restore Planned Parenthood’s international funding from American taxpayers. Fortunately, that effort was thwarted by Senate Republicans and President Trump.

Now, Democrats are busy crafting a bloated budget that would require the Trump Administration to restore Title X funding of Planned Parenthood. Mr. Trump has led a drive to enforce federal law, requiring a separation between abortion facilities and agencies receiving “family planning” services.  The new HHS rules will force Planned Parenthood to choose between its abortion business and its dependence upon American taxpayers.

Pelosi’s budget would also increase the amount of subsidies for “family planning” by some $114 million – to something over $400 million each year.

Those Democrats crying about the “threat to women’s health” are executing a blatant propaganda campaign which is lacking in facts or truth. The simple fact is that President Trump did not end Title X funding – or even reduce the amount of money the federal government is pouring into “family planning”.  He has simply re-directed that money away from the Abortion Industry.  In fact, some of the money has already been awarded to pro-Life pregnancy care centers – an astonishing development.

We can only pray that the American people will restore a conservative majority to the U.S. House next year after we have all paid the price for allowing Pelosi to regain the Speaker’s gavel; two years’ worth of radical dysfunction should be enough to convince voters that we are simply not being served by the Democrat majority.

Unplanned, the motion picture, continues to challenge the assumptions of Hollywood and the modern American culture.  It tells the story of Abby Johnson, an ostensible Christian southern woman, who became ensnared by Planned Parenthood while yet a student in college.  The independent film has expanded to over 1500 screens and is generating enough revenue to presently rank #4 in America, beating out a number of studio-backed productions.

I was able to see the film yesterday, and I am still processing it emotionally.

The film is well-acted and well produced. That is an important part of its appeal to a culture accustomed to slick production values.

I was also impressed by the decision of the film’s makers to avoid preaching pro-Life values at the audience. Abby Johnson’s story lends itself well to letting the dark reality of abortion and our cultural confusion speak for itself.  The film allows Planned Parenthood to be judged by its own words and actions.  And it presents the emotional struggle many women and girls face in dealing with an unplanned pregnancy with resonating compassion.  But the film won’t let the audience rest there. Unplanned shows, without blinking, that abortion does not resolve that struggle; rather, the lies of Planned Parenthood transform it into something much bigger, much more painful – a solution which cannot be undone.

The film is an exercise in truth-telling. It shows the slow-walk of Abby Johnson from accepting a “woman’s right to choose”, to rationalizing her work for Planned Parenthood as a way to reduce to abortions, to finally realizing that a human being is killed in an abortion.  It exposes the callous treatment women receive at the hands of their “liberators” – Planned Parenthood.

But the powerful heartbeat of this film is the inescapable truth that abortion stops a baby’s heart from beating.

After some forty-five years, no lawsuit or rally or bumper sticker has been able to alter that reality. Or to silence the voice of those crying out for justice on behalf of God’s little ones.

This film has the potential of altering the entire abortion debate in this nation. I encourage pro-Lifers to see the film, and to bring friends with them.  Even those with different views on the most important challenge of our time.  Let the truth of this film do its work in their lives

– David Ripley

An amicus brief was filed yesterday by 77 members of Congress in a landmark case before the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals.  The case involves a lawsuit brought by Planned Parenthood against the State of Texas because it has been disqualified by that state from receiving Medicaid funds.

Senator Jim Risch and Congressman Russ Fulcher are among those represented in the brief by legal counsel from Americans United for Life.

In the brief, the members of Congress argue that the states have broad and shared authority under the Medicaid program to operate the health care system within their borders. Congress recognizes the sovereignty of the states as partners in the program, the brief argues, with the right to disqualify providers it deems unfit.

And that is exactly the authority Texas exercised when it chose to exclude Planned Parenthood from the state’s Medicaid program as a “qualified provider”.

This is a landmark case because Planned Parenthood has been quite successful in pushing federal courts over the past decade into defending their “right” to taxpayer monies – especially under Medicaid and Title X. Such edicts have trampled upon States’ rights and placed legislators and taxpayers in the untenable position of choosing between helping low-income neighbors with health care costs and financing the Abortion Industry.

We applaud Risch and Fulcher for fighting this insidious trend in federal courts.

Guest Post from Tony Perkins:

What do cats have that newborn babies don’t? Democrats’ support. In one of the sickest ironies no one is talking about, Senate liberals picked this moment — 17 days after they voted to kill America’s perfectly healthy infants — to fight for the humane treatment of kittens. Maybe the DNC’s strategists are out to lunch, or maybe the Left really is this shameless, but I can’t wait to see some of these politicians standing on debate platforms next year telling the American people that when it comes to protecting living things: We chose cats over kids.

For sponsors like Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the optics are nauseating. Here he is, arguing that America “must stop killing kittens,” when, three weeks ago, he stood in the U.S. Capitol and agreed with 43 Democrats that human beings should be put down. “The USDA’s decision to slaughter kittens after they are used in research is an archaic practice and horrific treatment, and we need to end it,” Merkley said with a passion that he and his colleagues couldn’t muster for a generation of perfectly healthy newborns. His Kittens in Traumatic Testing Ends Now — or KITTEN – Act wouldn’t stop the research, but it would keep the animals from being destroyed.

“The KITTEN Act will protect these innocent animals from being needlessly euthanized in government testing,” Merkley told reporters, “and make sure that they can be adopted by loving families instead.” Does he even hear himself? They should be treated and adopted? That’s exactly what Americans have requested for living, breathing babies. Democrats said no. Killing a child is a “personal decision,” they said, and Congress shouldn’t get in the way. What a comfort for abortion survivors like Melissa Ohden to know that, given the choice, Democrats would save a stray cat over her.

“The fact that we need a piece of legislation to tell the federal government to stop killing kittens is ridiculous on its face,” Congressman Brian Mast (R-Fla.) argued. But “ridiculous” doesn’t begin to describe a party that tells America to back away from the tables of crying newborns while it rushes to the rescue of kittens instead. I suppose we should also tell firefighters when they run into burning houses to look for the pets first? After all, on the Democrats’ sliding scale of “wantedness,” shouldn’t we find out how loved someone is before we decide if they’re worth saving?

Just incredible.

If “enviro-socialism” has overwhelmed the brains of the modern Democratic Party, then Planned Parenthood is its heart. We saw that deep emotional commitment to darkness when every Democrat in the U.S. Senate voted to protect infanticide just last week.

This week brought news that the passion for Planned Parenthood’s death agenda runs through every artery and vein of the “new” Democrat Party.

Various elected Democrats in Washington, Oregon, Connecticut, New York and California announced that they were banding together to use taxpayer dollars to defend Planned Parenthood’s access to Title X money in federal court. The level of corruption is just astounding – given that each of these office holders is the direct beneficiary of Planned Parenthood’s political operation.  We have now reached a new low in America – Planned Parenthood doesn’t even have to file its own lawsuits.  Debased Democrats will do the work for them, by abusing their offices and taxpayers.  What a scandal.

The backdrop for this story is the new rule change President Trump implemented on the use of Title X funds. It enforces a federal statute requiring that agencies receiving Title X funds maintain separate physical facilities if they also provide abortion.  That same statute requires that each of the facilities – one offering family planning services, the other abortion services – maintain separate staff.  The federal law was intended to get at the on-going problem of taxpayers subsidizing Planned Parenthood’s abortion operations.  President Reagan ordered his Department of Health & Human Services to enforce this law.  President Clinton revised the rule and officially determined to “look the other way”.  And no president, including President George W. Bush, chose to revise the rules and enforce federal law.  Until President Trump.

We learned that disturbing history after members of the U.S. Senate – including Idaho’s Mike Crapo and Jim Risch – called on President Trump to carefully review the rules governing Title X because they conflicted with federal law. The Trump Administration has responded by returning to the old Regan rules, and the rule of law.

The “Reagan Rules”, adopted in 1988, also include a prohibition of any Title X agency from treating abortion as a legitimate method of family planning. That would include abortion referrals from the staff or office of a Title X recipient to the “abortion side” of the building.  Planned Parenthood screamed that this amounted to a “gag rule” and, of course, sued.

The good news is that the U.S. Supreme Court has already upheld the old “Reagan Rules” in a 1991 decision (Rust v. Sullivan).  Thus, we can be fairly hopeful that the Democrat lawsuit(s) on behalf of Planned Parenthood will ultimately fail.

But how do we address the underlying corruption which animates the Democrat Party?

UPDATE: The list of Democrat-led states filing lawsuits against the Trump Administration has now grown to 22:  California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Washington, DC, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin.  What a despicable turn of events and abuse of taxpayers.

New York, abortion and a short route to chaos

By Bishop Robert Barron

It was the celebration that was particularly galling.

On the 46^th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, signed into law a protocol that gives practically unrestricted access to abortion, permitting the killing of an unborn child up until the moment of delivery. In the wake of the ratification, the legislators and their supporters whooped, hollered, and cheered, a display depressingly similar to the jubilation that broke out in Ireland when a referendum legalizing abortion passed last year.

Of course, all of the rhetoric about women’s rights and reproductive health and empowerment was trotted out, but who can fail to see what was at stake? If an infant, lying peacefully in a bassinet in his parents’ home, were brutally killed and dismembered, the entire country would rightfully be outraged and call for an investigation of the murder. But now the law of New York confirms that that same child, moments before his birth, resting peacefully in his mother’s womb, can be, with utter impunity, pulled apart with forceps. And the police won’t be summoned; rather, it appears, the killing should be a matter of celebration.

An ideology, taken in the negative sense, is a conceptual framework that blinds one to reality. The purpose of any ideational system, obviously, is to shed light, to bring us closer to the truth of things. But an ideology does the reverse, effectively obfuscating reality, distancing us from truth. All of the buzz terms I mentioned above – women’s rights, reproductive health, empowerment – are ideological markers, smokescreens. Or if I can borrow the terminology of Jordan Peterson, they are the chattering of demons, the distracting hubbub of the father of lies.

I recall that during the presidential campaign of 2016, Hillary Clinton was asked several times whether the child in the womb, within minutes of birth, has constitutional rights, and this extremely intelligent, experienced, and canny politician said, over and over again, “That’s what our law dictates.” Therefore, by a sheer accident of location, the unborn baby can be butchered, and the same baby, moments later and in the arms of his mother, must be protected by full force of law. That many of our political leaders can’t or won’t see how utterly ludicrous this is can only be the result of ideological indoctrination.

As I watched film of Andrew Cuomo signing this repulsive bill into law, my mind drifted back to 1984 and an auditorium at the University of Notre Dame where Cuomo’s father, Mario – also governor of New York at the time – delivered a famous address. In his lengthy and intellectually substantive speech, Gov. Cuomo presented himself, convincingly, as a faithful Catholic, thoroughly convinced in conscience that abortion is morally outrageous. But he also made a fateful distinction that has been exploited by liberal Catholic politicians for the past 35 years. He explained that though he was personally opposed to abortion, he was not willing to pursue legal action to abolish it or even to limit it, since he was the representative of all the people, and not just of those who shared his Catholic convictions.

Now this distinction is an illegitimate one, which is evident the moment we draw an analogy to other public matters of great moral import: “I’m personally opposed to slavery, but I’ll take no action to outlaw it or limit its spread”; “I personally find Jim Crow laws repugnant, but I will pursue no legal strategy to undo them”; etc. But at the very least, Mario Cuomo could declare himself deeply conflicted, anguished, willing to support abortion law only as a regrettable political necessity in a pluralistic democracy.

But in a single generation, we have moved from reluctant toleration to unbridled celebration, from struggling Mario to exultant Andrew.

There is a simple reason for this. A privatized religion, one that never incarnates itself in gesture, behavior, and moral commitment, rapidly vanishes. Once-powerful convictions, never concretely expressed, devolve, practically overnight, into pious wishes – and finally disappear altogether.

In Robert Bolt’s magnificent play regarding St. Thomas More, [ITAL]A Man for All Seasons, we find a telling exchange between Cardinal Wolsey, a hard-bitten, largely amoral politico, and the saintly More. Wolsey laments, “You’re a constant regret to me, Thomas. If you could just see facts flat on, without that horrible moral squint, with just a little common sense, you could have been a statesman.” To which More responds, “Well…I believe when statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties … they lead their country by a short route to chaos.” Abandoning the convictions of one’s conscience in the exercise of one’s public duties is precisely equivalent to: “I’m personally opposed but unwilling to take concrete action to instantiate my opposition.”

And this abandonment – evident in Mario Cuomo’s 1984 address – had indeed led by a short road to chaos, evident in Andrew Cuomo’s joyful celebration of a law permitting the murder of children.

Bishop Robert Barron currently serves as the Auxiliary Bishop of the Catholic Diocese in Los Angeles.

Idaho’s new congressman, Russ Fulcher, was among 169 Members of Congress signing a letter to President Trump, urging him to stand strong in defense of the pro-Life policies he has initiated since becoming president. A similar letter came from 49 Republican members of the U.S. Senate, including Idaho’s Jim Risch and Mike Crapo.

The letter comes in response to the early pro-abortion salvos launched by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In one of her very first actions in the new Congress, she inserted language into an emergency government spending bill that would restore tax funding of Planned Parenthood International.  That cynical attempt to re-open all of the federal government has been blocked by the Republican Senate.  Some national leaders of the pro-Life movement have expressed concern that Speaker Pelosi may try to blackmail the president into backing away from one or more of his pro-Life policies in order to end the government shutdown.

The letter from Congressman Fulcher and others urges the president to use his veto pen to uphold pro-Life protections like the Mexico City Policy and the Hyde Amendment; the latter restricts the use of federal funds to pay for abortions. Pro-Life advocates believe that some two million babies have been saved from abortion through the Hyde Amendment alone.

Congressman Mike Simpson was not one of the signatories.

On the first day of her restored reign as House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi made a down-payment on her debt to the Abortion Industry.

As hundreds of thousands of federal employees sit at home, Pelosi made an historic pitch to restore funding of Planned Parenthood International as the first priority of her plan to reopen parts of the government. As new caravans of central American immigrants threaten to launch yet another caravan, Pelosi decides that national security can be ignored – but the demand for more money to Planned Parenthood cannot be.

Border agents overwhelmed at the southern border with illegal immigrants, drug cartels and threats of international terror can just get by with the resources they have … but Planned Parenthood’s desire to destroy more innocent lives across the globe is a crisis which must be addressed. The Mexico City Policy must be overturned!  Today!

As profoundly disturbing as it is to see Pelosi’s radical agenda on display, we can’t claim surprise or shock. The folks who just took over the House of Representatives owe a profound debt to the Abortion Industry.  And they clearly intend to make good by helping Planned Parenthood destroy more innocent lives. Thank the Lord that we have a pro-Life president who won’t tolerate such despicable priorities.