Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch was among the honorees of Live Action’s Life Gala in Dana Point, California, on Sept. 17, 2022. / Screenshot of ETWN YouTube video
Denver, Colo., Jan 20, 2023 / 10:10 am (CNA).
This year’s National March for Life is the first since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1973 pro-abortion precedent Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022.
Among its scheduled speakers is Lynn Fitch, attorney general for the state of Mississippi, who helped defend Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban before a court primed to revisit precedent in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The court sided with Fitch and other critics, overturning Roe in a 5-3 decision.
1. For Fitch, the Dobbs era is a new chapter for America.
“This year’s March is unlike any other,” Fitch told CNA on Thursday. “We are saying goodbye to one chapter of American history and starting a new one. In this new Dobbs era, the task now falls to us to ensure our laws reflect the compassion we have always felt for woman and child.”
“As we march into this new chapter, we do so with the same hope and resolve to ensure our laws empower women and their families and respect the dignity of all life,” Fitch said.
Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban passed in 2018, before Fitch had announced her campaign for attorney general. Challenges to the ban proceeded through the federal courts, and in 2019 an appeals court struck down the law. When she won the election in November 2019, it was left to her, the first woman to serve as Mississippi attorney general, to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the law.
2. Fitch grew up on a farm.
Fitch is Mississippi’s first Republican attorney general since 1878 and the first woman to serve in the role.
The 61-year-old is a native of Holly Springs, Mississippi, near the Tennessee border. There, her father inherited land on the former Galena Plantation and worked to restore the family farm, BBC News reported. Fitch Farms became a famous hunting destination for figures including the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, another skeptic of the Supreme Court’s Roe precedent.
As a young woman, Fitch’s interests included riding horses and hunting quail on the farm. Her former campaign manager Hayes Dent told BBC News she was the “prototypical popular girl… leader, cheerleader, athletic, the whole nine yards.”
She attended the University of Mississippi, where she joined a sorority and earned an undergraduate degree and a law degree. After graduation, she worked for the state attorney general’s office before entering private practice. Her hard work, and some family connections, aided her ascent in Mississippi politics.
Before she took office as attorney general, she served as Mississippi state treasurer from 2012 to 2020. She previously served in the administration of Gov. Haley Barbour and as a legal counsel to the Mississippi House of Representatives Ways and Means and Local and Private Legislation Committees.
She was a member of the 2016 Republican National Convention platform committee and worked for pro-life principles there, World Magazine reported in November 2021.
Her official biography reports her support for charities for first responders and juvenile diabetes. She also supports Goodwill Industries and the American Red Cross. Fitch is co-chair of the National Association of Attorneys General Human Trafficking Committee.
According to her 2020 campaign website, she and her family are “active members” of Madison United Methodist Church in the city of Madison, Mississippi.
3. Her campaign theme was “Empower Women, Promote Life.”
After her divorce, Fitch raised two daughters and a son as a single mother. Her personal success, and the success of many mothers, helped inspire her campaign to defend Mississippi’s abortion ban and overturn Roe. For this campaign, she used the motto “Empower Women, Promote Life.”
One of her arguments against Roe v. Wade is that women’s situations have much improved since the 1970s.
In a Sept. 19, 2021, opinion essay for the Dallas Morning News, Fitch invoked the “Olympic Supermoms,” peak athletes who are also mothers.
“As a single, working mother, I raised three children and went from launching the Mississippi Bar’s first Women in the Profession Committee to becoming our first female attorney general. I know from experience that there is nothing easy about this, which is why I commend those Olympic Supermoms for proudly displaying their motherhood while the spotlight is on their professional accomplishments.”
“Abortion policy has been tethered to 1973, but women, men, and the workplace have all changed, facilitating our ability to have both a full family life and successful career,” she said.
“Over the past five decades, revolutions in cultural norms and public policy have opened opportunities for women who were previously told you could be a mother or a career woman, but not both,” Fitch continued. She noted that mothers of young children had doubled their workforce participation from 1975 to 2016.
“Technology and the advent of the gig economy have only increased options for freelancing, part-time work, and independent contracting for women to have more choices in life,” the attorney general said.
4. Fitch authored Mississippi’s Supreme Court brief for the Dobbs case.
Fitch made her case in favor of the Mississippi law and against Roe in a written submission to the court, leaving oral arguments to Mississippi solicitor general Scott Stewart.
She emphasized the need to strike down Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. They “shackle states to a view of the facts that is decades out of date,” she wrote.
“It is time for the Court to set this right and return this political debate to the political branches of government,” she said. “State legislatures, and the people they represent, have lacked clarity in passing laws to protect legitimate public interests, and artificial guideposts have stunted important public debate on how we, as a society, care for the dignity of women and their children.”
She repeated her case that women’s situations, and the ability to care for families, have much improved.
“A lot has changed in five decades. In 1973, there was little support for women who wanted a full family life and a successful career. Maternity leave was rare. Paternity leave was unheard of. The gold standard for professional success was a 9-to-5 with a corner office. The flexibility of the gig economy was a fairy tale,” she said. “In these last 50 years, women have carved their own way to achieving a better balance for success in their professional and personal lives.”
5. Fitch is continuing her legal efforts against pro-abortion federal policy.
After Dobbs, Fitch has continued legal efforts to challenge the spread of abortion.
On Jan. 18 of this year, she joined a brief supporting a Texas nurse’s lawsuit in a challenge to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA is implementing the Biden administration’s plan to allow abortion at its hospitals, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported.
“In direct contravention of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs, President Biden has taken abortion policy away from state legislators, Congress, and, most importantly, the people and given it to political appointees in his own administration,” Fitch said in a statement. “The Dobbs decision was about the rule of law. This VA rule is precisely the opposite.”
Seventeen other states’ attorneys general have joined the brief.
6. Fitch supports a “safety net” for women and babies.
After the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, a different Mississippi ban on abortion took effect, barring the procedure except in cases of rape or when the mother’s life is in danger.
In response to the new political and cultural landscape created by Dobbs, Fitch insisted on the need for a strong safety net.
“Now, we must all work together to strengthen the safety net that women need not only for healthy pregnancies but also as they build families where both they and their children thrive,” she said in July 2022. “We need our laws to reflect our compassion for these women and their children.”
She called for action to help address the affordability and accessibility of child care, child support enforcement, and requirements for fathers to be equally responsible for their children, workplace policies like maternity and paternity leave, streamlining adoption, and improving foster care.
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“As that suggests, what this Senate vote tells us about the 2020 election is deeply disturbing. Barring some drastic, unforeseen development, we are likely next year to witness a replay of 2016, which saw an ardent advocate of legalized abortion, Hillary Clinton, pitted against Donald Trump, who as president has delivered on the life issues while also becoming an intensely polarizing figure.
For some, this means the choice in 2020 will likely be as painful as in 2016, when they resolved the dilemma for themselves by not voting or backing marginal candidates or write-ins.”
Polarized thanks to the MSM, which is in the hands of the “leftists.” Why? Because Donald Trump is too “moderate,” too “America first” for them, not because he is the “right-wing” monster they make him out to be.
“But if a harebrained court-packing scheme advocated with the aim of advancing ideological interests, whether ultra-liberal or ultra-conservative, ever in fact becomes the “level of intellectual and policy ambition” of either major party, God save the United States.”
The United States is already in trouble. Abortion is just one issue pitting the left against what remains of the historic American nations. Catholics will have to pick a side, and to advocate some form of civic nationalism, even if it is a religious version of it, is increasingly to side with the leftists.
Is the fanaticism equivalent as suggested by the picture?
If infanticide is not monstrous, what on earth could be? To relegate it to political maneuvering makes it even more heinous. Mr. Shaw is part of the problem and until we are willing to call murder out for what it truly is we will go down in the history books as one of the most self gratifying nations of all time.
A good question. And the last paragraph equates the very real Leftist court-packing endorsed by prominent public figures and aspirants to the Democratic presidential nomination with a purported “ultra-conservative” court-packing that has not been advocated by the Trump administration or anyone prominent in Congress, and is otherwise non-existent. This is spurious even-handedness.
The only fanaticism is in the left’s desire to kill children before they are born. Science has proven that an unborn baby is a separate life & unique being, separate from the mother, not “her body”. Let’s not forget that the woman expressly invited the possibility of a new & separate life to grow by her willingness to have unprotected relations. So that new life is not some chimera that spontaneously appeared, but was expressly invited to begin. The case is further proven by the left’s absolute blocking of the protection of the baby once it is born, resulting in actual infanticide. THAT is fanaticism, not the wishes of those with properly grounded morals who know, without a doubt, that, firstly, even an unborn human being is just that – a human being; & secondly, that once a baby is actually BORN, it can still be murdered if it survived the abortion (murder) attempt. These abortion fanatics even admit that the unborn is a human life, & yet still wish to murder it both before it is born, & then after it is born. This puts the left in the same camp as Hitler’s Germany, except we’ve already murdered 10X more babies than Hitler did to the Jewish people. THAT’S fanaticism.
Your lead sentence: “Let us agree that the 44 Democratic senators whose votes last month blocked the Born Alive Protection Act aren’t monsters.” No. They ARE monsters. The problem is, over the last 40 years, we’ve allowed “being monsters” to be okay. And because we have, the monsters have gotten worse. This is a watershed moment, a turning point. Just like the sex abuse crisis in the clergy. If we don’t accept what is really going on, then we will never be able to combat it.
I am not sure about them not being monsters. They are certainly beyond being bad christians. Pagans were for infant sacrifice, so I have no problem thinking of them as pagans. In order to solve a problem we must accurately identify the problem. A Catholic News Service article appearing in my diocesan newspaper managed, in a lengthy article on the subject, not to mention that all 44 votes were from democrats, and that 10 of them were Catholic. I admire Mr. Shaw and have read some of his books. But I, for One, will not find it at all painful in 2020 to vote for a very, very pro life president as opposed to a very, very pro death challenger.
Since he has dropped out as a potential presidential candidate for 2020, is Holder now looking for a new job on the U.S. Supreme Court?
Those who vote for infanticide are monsters. Trump is the most pro-life President we have had. Action not words count. Instead of constant harping on global warming and immigration, our Bishops should be speaking of the mortal sin of voting for those who support child murder.
Sure, the senators that voted against this measure are not monsters, they just follow orders…
That aside, though, if you think republican senators are any better at protecting life than their democratic colleagues, then let me remind you that it was a certain, now deceased, republican senator from Arizona who was the key to derailing the effort to get rid of obamacare…
So, as author succinctly put it, “backing marginal candidates or write ins” is the most reasonable choice from the point of view of changing the status quo.
Casting your vote for a candidate from either of the 2 “established” parties will yield more of what’s already “established.”
What seems conveniently omitted here is that state abortion legislation where ‘late-term’ abortions are permitted, each law that I know of doesn’t permit 3rd trimester abortions by right of option. These cases must have a valid medical justification to permit the procedure. As it stands, 3% of abortions occur in the final trimester and all are deemed necessary for the mother’s health. If a women is going to get get an abortion, their plan is not generally to delay the procedure for as long as possible. So, any measure that tends to criminalize a rare result in a rare but medically necessary procedure goes too far.