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6 things to know about March for Life speaker Lynn Fitch, champion of Dobbs case

January 20, 2023 Catholic News Agency 2
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.

[…]

No Picture
News Briefs

Twin sisters with a special bond speak out for the unborn

January 20, 2023 Catholic News Agency 1
Sister Mary Casey O’Connor, a Sister of Life, and her twin sister, Casey Gunning, teacher’s assistant and lifelong athlete in the Special Olympics / Courtesy of Sister Mary Casey O’Connor

Washington D.C., Jan 20, 2023 / 08:40 am (CNA).

Sister Mary Casey O’Connor has more than 100 sisters. But only one of them is her twin sister: Casey Gunning, who has Down syndrome.

“I wish everyone had someone like her because she just taught me what it means to love and to not expect anything back,” O’Connor told CNA. “And I mean, that’s ultimately our experience of God … Casey, for me, is an expression of God’s love.”

The sisters were featured speakers at Friday’s Life Fest and the 50th annual March for Life in Washington, D.C.

Each of them advocate for life, even if in different ways: O’Connor is a member of the religious community Sisters of Life, while Gunning serves as a teacher’s assistant and an athlete in the Special Olympics.

Describing her sister’s pro-life witness, O’Connor explained that “it’s not even like a conscious thing, she is constantly choosing just to live life to the full — and she receives the gift of her own life, and that, I think, is the most powerful kind of witness that she gives off.”

For her part, O’Connor joined the Sisters of Life, an order dedicated to promoting the inherent dignity and worth of every human person, in 2015.

The late Cardinal John O’Connor founded the Sisters of Life in New York in 1991. Based in the New York area, the order has sisters in Denver; Philadelphia; Phoenix; Washington, D.C.; and Ontario, Canada. The community of more than 100 Catholic religious women profess four vows: poverty, chastity, and obedience, and “to protect and enhance the sacredness of human life.”

Among other things, the sisters dedicate their lives to serving women vulnerable to abortion, offering life-affirming support to pregnant women in need, hosting retreats, evangelizing, practicing outreach to college students, and helping women who suffer after abortion.

O’Connor took her last name from the founder of the Sisters of Life. But her middle name, she said, comes from her sister.

“She was so honored that I took her name that she started going by Casey Mary,” she said, adding that “Mary” is Gunning’s confirmation name.

Even their shared age is a celebration, O’Connor revealed. While she clarified that they are 39 years old, Casey, she said, is “so happy to be [turning] 40.”

“She loves getting older because she really loves life,” O’Connor explained, saying that every year they spend six months preparing for their birthday, and, every year, they spend another six months winding down from their previous birthday.

In other words, she said, Casey “loves life.”

The youngest siblings in a family of four children grew up in Littleton, Colorado. The two older siblings were adopted, and the twins came as somewhat of a surprise — they were born after their mother was told that she could not have children. 

They have been inseparable ever since.

“Just her presence in my life has had one of the biggest effects on just shaping my worldview and my view of life, my view of the faith, my view of the human person,” O’Connor said. 

Casey, she said, helped her gain perspective on life.

“She’s kind of helped ground me in things that are important, and, kind of unintentionally, invited me to let go of things that are not as important, especially eternally,” she said. “And I mean, love literally is oozing out of her.”

Sister Mary Casey O'Connor and Casey Gunning, teacher’s assistant and lifelong athlete in the Special Olympics as babies. Courtesy of Sister Mary Casey O'Connor
Sister Mary Casey O’Connor and Casey Gunning, teacher’s assistant and lifelong athlete in the Special Olympics as babies. Courtesy of Sister Mary Casey O’Connor

“She places no judgment, she always forgives, she always gives the benefit of the doubt,” O’Connor continued. “She always sees the good in the other. And I desperately want that for myself and realize how far I am from that.

“But being in her presence invites me to do it, because she just does it naturally.”

Her sister’s presence also had an impact on her vocation.

“Once I met the Sisters of Life, it kind of all made sense that God had been preparing my heart for so many years, learning how to kind of look at each person for who they were, to see the good in them, to see past what, oftentimes, the world fails to see past,” she said. 

O’Connor shared her approach for instances where she might encounter a pregnant woman expecting a baby prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome — a woman who might feel scared or tempted to choose abortion. She said she would, first of all, listen.

“Because I think it’s so important just to be a space where someone can express the fears, and the sadness, and the sorrow and the kind of maybe a letdown of expectation — and just receive it and validate it,” she said.

“And then, I couldn’t help but share my own experience of Casey and invite a woman to … trust that God gives us gifts in ways that we don’t always expect or want or would choose for ourselves.”

“On a tangible, concrete, human level, Casey has been the tremendous — the tremendous — blessing of my life, and I just want to invite someone else to step out in faith and trust that God desires to be generous in the unknown,” she said.

If people remember one thing from their speeches on Friday, O’Connor said, she wants it to be that “God doesn’t make mistakes, that he knows what he’s doing.”

“And he has a great desire for us to need him, and he actually wants us to need each other,” she added. “That is what Casey and I — the gift that we have in each other — is that he kind of wrote that into the fabric of our relationship from the very beginning.” 

[…]