U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to reporters after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Vice President’s ceremonial office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on July 25, 2024, Washington, D.C. / Credit: Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jul 26, 2024 / 10:05 am (CNA).
Here’s a roundup of pro-life-related developments in the U.S. this week.
Harris pledges to codify Roe in federal law
Since replacing President Joe Biden as the presumptive presidential nominee for the Democratic party, Vice President Kamala Harris has already made abortion a major focus of her campaign, pledging in several speeches to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law.
In a Wednesday night speech in Indianapolis, Harris bashed former President Donald Trump for nominating three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe.
“When I am president of the United States and when Congress passes a law to restore those freedoms, I will sign it into law,” she said.
“We who believe in reproductive freedom will fight for a woman’s right to choose,” said Harris, “because one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree that the government should not be telling her what to do.”
Harris has used this line repeatedly during her “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms Tour” in which she slammed states with pro-life laws as “immoral” and advocated for a national pro-abortion law.
Iowa heartbeat law to take effect July 29
Iowa District Judge Jeffrey Farrell lifted a block on the state’s six-week pro-life law, clearing the path for the measure to finally take effect on July 29.
The Iowa “heartbeat” law was passed by the legislature in 2023. It protects unborn life from abortion once a baby’s heartbeat is detectable, which is typically around six weeks.
Planned Parenthood and several other abortion groups launched a lawsuit over the law and it was blocked by a district court shortly after passage. Polk County District Judge Joseph Seidlin ruled in 2023 that the law was likely invalid because it imposed an “undue burden” on abortion.
The Iowa Supreme Court, however, ruled on June 28 that the law is likely not unconstitutional because abortion is “not a fundamental right under the Iowa Constitution.” The high court returned the case to lower courts for further deliberation.
Commending the state supreme court’s ruling, Iowa’s Catholic bishops said: “For us, this is a question of the common good and human dignity. Human life is precious and should be protected in our laws to the greatest extent possible.”
Arkansas Supreme Court rules on abortion petition
The Arkansas Supreme Court ordered that signatures as part of an abortion ballot initiative be counted after Secretary of State John Thurston said the documentation was improperly submitted.
This comes after Thurston denied abortion advocates their petition to add a broad pro-abortion amendment to the November ballot. The prosecutor said the activists failed to identify their paid canvassers or to indicate that the canvassers had followed state law regarding gathering signatures.
The state high court’s decision issued on Tuesday ordered Thurston to resume counting petition signatures gathered by volunteers by July 29.
The group claimed to have gathered over 100,000 signatures — well over the 90,700 required to add an amendment proposal to the ballot. Thurston, however, said that after subtracting the signatures allegedly invalidly obtained by paid canvassers, the group only had 87,382 signatures, more than 3,000 short of the minimum required.
The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that the petition’s signatures could be counted but only those not gathered by paid canvassers, meaning the petition may fail to reach the necessary threshold for the November ballot.
Currently, Arkansas protects unborn life beginning at conception, only allowing abortion in cases in which the mother’s life is in danger.
If successfully passed, the abortion amendment would mandate that the state not “prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict” abortion before 18 weeks of pregnancy. The amendment would further prohibit the state from restricting abortion at all stages in cases of rape, incest, fetal anomaly, or health of the mother.
Federal court denies effort to restrict abortion pill
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied an appeal by seven Republican-led states to challenge the federal government’s recent loosening of restrictions on mifepristone, the pill that accounts for over 60% of all U.S. abortions.
The seven Republican states — Idaho, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah — argued that the federal government’s loosening of mifepristone restrictions, such as allowing mail-order abortions and prescriptions via telemedicine, undermines their pro-life laws and harms women in their jurisdictions.
The states claimed they had standing to sue because the increase in women needing medical care after unsupervised chemical abortions would result in increased Medicaid expenses.
The 3-0 decision issued by a panel from the Ninth Circuit Court on Wednesday, however, denied the states had standing and dismissed their challenge.
The circuit court’s ruling cited the June 13 AHM v. FDA Supreme Court decision that unanimously rejected an attempt to impose stricter regulations on mifepristone because the doctors bringing the challenge lacked standing.
This comes as a coalition of seventeen Democrat-led states and the District of Columbia are suing to block any further efforts to restrict mifepristone.
Lawsuit by Texas woman wrongly imprisoned for abortion proceeds
U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton this week denied several requests to dismiss a lawsuit brought by a Texas woman who was wrongly imprisoned over her abortion.
The woman, Lizelle Gonzalez, was improperly jailed for murder by the county sheriff for three days in 2022. She was dismissed after the county found the charges were unfounded.
Texas law protects unborn life from conception. However, the law explicitly states that pregnant mothers cannot be prosecuted for their abortions.
Gonzalez is now seeking $1 million in damages from Starr County, which is in south Texas on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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We read: “At the event, Wester called Pope Francis’ statement that nuclear weapons are immoral ‘groundbreaking’ and asked the faithful to ‘to speak the truth’ on the matter.”
“Immoral?” Not to question the precarious military state of the world today, and the incomprehensible magnitude of any nuclear war, is it still possible to responsibly pause at the slogan of Pope Francis? In the circumstances of the 1960s and the then nuclear arms race, the SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL took a position regarding the possession of nuclear weapons—and approved the schema by a vote of 2111 to 251.
During DEBATE, it was noted by Archbishop Nannan that the impression given in schema to the average reader was that “the possession of nuclear arms is condemned as immoral.” But in further explanation, “the rebuttal of Bishop Schroffer and Archbishop Garrone claimed that ‘nowhere in Articles 80 and 81 is the possession of nuclear arms condemned as immoral.’ The words of the text were selected with a purpose, they said, and must be accurately understood. Nor was it denied that freedom could be temporarily preserved through the possession and accumulation of nuclear weapons. It was only denied that the arms race was ‘a safe way to preserve lasting peace.’ Nor was it stated that nuclear arms were a ’cause of war’.[….] “This letter and reports to the general assembly] now stated that Article 81 did not intend ‘to condemn nuclear weapons indiscriminately,’ and that the text in no way intended to impose ‘an obligation of unilateral destruction of atomic weapons'” (Fr. Ralph Wiltgen, SVD, “The Rhine Flows into the Tiber,” 1967, p. 281).
TODAY is not the 1965 of the Cold War nuclear arms race—which now is replaced by a proliferation of nuclear powers.* And, no one today is counseling unilateral disarmament. Still, beyond the great value of the prayer vigil, it might be more credible to not invoke—as “groundbreaking”—a preemptive one-liner.
(* United States, Russia, China, France, United Kingdom, India, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea; formerly Ukraine and not yet Iran).
Wester is just another woke Catholic bishop. Just a little information, Wester. Abortion has killed thousands of times more human persons than nuclear bombs have. Yet, how much effort do you expend changing minds and hearts against the holocaust that is going on under your nose? More moral posturing by our feckless bishops.
That’s right: Only one person will ever go to Hell, and that’s whoever personally kills the most people, right? Judas Iscariot will back you up on that one!
Or, if you prefer, it is often necessary to kill thousands of innocents to honor the memory of your deceased ruler or to insure military victory. Once you accept that principle, it’s just a matter of practicality to do this with technology, rather than cutting out their still-beating hearts and tossing the lifeless bodies down the steps of a pyramid. But the important thing remains: the worship of Huitzilopochtli.
“To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about them…. But with the idea of employing the demons who get things done, a new idea appears more worthy of the demons. It may indeed be truly described as the idea of being worthy of the demons; of making oneself fit for their fastidious and exacting society. Superstition of the lighter sort toys with the idea that some trifle, some small gesture such as throwing the salt, may touch the hidden spring that works the mysterious machinery of the world. And there is after all something in the idea of such an Open Sesame. But with the appeal to lower spirits comes the horrible notion that the gesture must not only be very small but very low; that it must be a monkey trick of an utterly ugly and unworthy sort. Sooner or later a man deliberately sets himself to do the most disgusting thing he can think of. It is felt that the extreme of evil will extort a sort of attention or answer from the evil powers under the surface of the world.”
Of course, Chesterton was too woke to join in the worship of Huitzilopochtli. He even wrote, “In any case it is clear enough that the painted and gilded civilisation of tropical America systematically indulged in human sacrifice. It is by no means clear, so far as I know, that the Eskimos ever indulged in human sacrifice. They were not civilised enough. They were too closely imprisoned by the white winter and the endless dark. Chill penury repressed their noble rage and froze the genial current of the soul. It was in brighter days and broader daylight that the noble rage is found unmistakably raging. It was in richer and more instructed lands that the genial current flowed on the altars, to be drunk by great gods wearing goggling and grinning masks and called on in terror or torment by long cacophonous names that sound like laughter in hell.” Worship of Huitzilopochtli requires a more pragmatic man, nicht?
As usual, your ramblings suggest you’re tormented. Peace be with you.