19 Things that Caught My Eye: Abortion & the Midterms, Ukraine, Bono on Faith & Art, and More

1. Ukrainian archbishop tells pope Russia wants to destroy, not negotiate

Pope Francis has continued to call on Russian and Ukrainian leaders to negotiate an end to the war, but the head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church told him Russia wants only the destruction of Ukraine.

Ukrainian Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv-Halych met Pope Francis Nov. 7 at the Vatican, the first time the two have met in person since Russia started the war in late February, although they have spoken on the phone many times.

Archbishop Shevchuk gave the pope “a fragment of a Russian mine that destroyed the facade of the Ukrainian Catholic church building in the town of Irpin, near Kyiv, in March,” the archbishop’s office said. “It is a very symbolic gift, not only because Irpin was one of the first ‘martyr towns’ affected by the Russian aggression against Ukraine, but also because similar pieces of landmines are extracted from the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers, civilians and children, a visible sign of the destruction and death that war brings every day.”

Returning to the Vatican from Bahrain Nov. 6, Pope Francis had told reporters traveling with him that the Vatican is “constantly attentive” to what is happening in Ukraine and that the Secretariat of State continues to do what is possible and has worked behind the scenes to help arrange prisoner exchanges.

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“The war in Ukraine is a colonial war, and the peace proposals coming from Russia are colonial appeasement proposals,” the archbishop told the pope, according to his office. “These proposals involve the denial of the existence of the Ukrainian people, their history, culture and even the church. It is the denial of the very right to the existence of the Ukrainian state, recognized by the international community with its sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

2.  Supreme Court to hear case of Texas couple fighting to keep adopted Native American child

At the center of the controversy is the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a 1970s law meant to protect Native American children in state custody proceedings.

“There are Americans out there who are eager to help these children out, and the Indian Child Welfare Act says they are not allowed to because their skin is the wrong color,” Timothy Sandefur, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, told Fox News Digital.

“That’s outrageous and unconstitutional,” he said. Sandefur wrote a brief for the Goldwater institute supporting striking down ICWA.

ICWA was a reaction to high rates of Native children being adopted by non-tribal members –- often with little process and unjustly.

It prioritizes placing Native children with extended family members, members of their tribe, and if that’s not possible, with another Native family. Exceptions for “good cause” are allowed but not defined.

3. Robin Atkins: NPR’s broadcast of an abortion was horrifying, not empowering

As a young, homeless, addicted woman in an abusive relationship, uneducated about reproduction or how pregnancy worked, I was told that Planned Parenthood would give me something to prevent pregnancy. Instead, I was given an abortion pill at the clinic and a pill to take at home the next day. I was told that I would experience something like a heavy period. Instead, over the next 48 hours, as I moaned in agony, vomited repeatedly, and hemorrhaged the contents of my uterus, including my son, I was convinced I was going to die. This was nothing like a heavy period. This was violent death. The same violent death we hear in the NPR piece flowered with euphemisms and lovely imagery of female empowerment.

Women are not empowered when they are denied truth and informed consent. Women are not empowered when they are coerced into a procedure. Women are not empowered when their trauma and grief over the loss of their child through an abortion is ignored. We deserve better than this.

4. Louisiana residents potentially blunt impact of state’s abortion ban with abortion pill requests

After Louisiana abortion clinics closed their doors permanently in August, requests for medication abortion pills surged to new heights in the state, potentially blunting the impact of the state’s near-total abortion ban as women sought other means to end their pregnancies.

Requests for pills shipped from overseas to Louisiana residents rose by nearly 170%, according to a new analysis of the shipments of abortion pills that was published in JAMA on Monday.

The data came from Aid Access, a nonprofit telemedicine group that mails medication from overseas for self-managed abortions. Shipping to states with bans like Louisiana takes one to three weeks and costs about $105.

Before the ban, the organization got between 5 and 6 requests per 100,000 female Louisiana residents between 15 and 44 years old weekly, according to the analysis. That comes out to about 51 requested pills per week.

After the U.S. Supreme Court voted in June to overturn Roe v. Wade, a ruling that led Louisiana and around a dozen other states to enact stricter limits on the procedure or effectively ban it outright, Louisiana led every other state in requests with about 136 pill requests per week, or 14.9 per 100,000.

Mississippi had the second-highest number of requests. Those increased from 2.2 weekly requests for pills per capita to 7.8 after the decision, about half of what Louisiana requested.

5. Emma Waters: Michigan’s Proposition 3 Is Bad News for Women. Here’s Why 

6. Sarah Parshall Perry: 1 State Seeks to Prevent Its Own Roe Among Midterm Choices on Abortion

In Kentucky, midterm voters are considering a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would do precisely the opposite. It states: “Are you in favor of amending the Constitution of Kentucky by creating a new Section of the Constitution to be numbered Section 26A to state as follows: To protect human life, nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion?”

Voters’ approval of the constitutional amendment would ensure that Kentucky’s existing laws on abortion—namely the Human Life Protection Act, the Heartbeat Law, and other pro-life measures—are largely insulated from legal challenges under state law.

Approval of Kentucky’s amendment also would prevent citizens’ tax dollars from being used to fund abortions. It simultaneously would tie the hands of activist judges who otherwise might have used the existing terms of the Kentucky Constitution to “creatively” confer a right to abortion, regardless of any pro-life legislation passed by the Kentucky Legislature.

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8. Christianity Today: Uniquely Pro-Life: Focusing on Women Changes Everything

For many women facing unplanned pregnancies, being pro-life or pro-choice isn’t defined by a single decision. Each story is layered with unique relational, emotional, and socio-economic factors. Countless are uninsured or already struggling to survive financially. Many are supporting family members or other children and would face immense time and resource challenges if they welcomed a baby. Some have health concerns that pose severe medical threats to both mother and child. Each pregnancy carries a myriad of questions and choices, and so much of that decision-making can be clouded with panic, anxiety, and fear.

Valerie Millsapps meets women like this every day. She runs a pregnancy resource center in Tennessee, and her staff provides support for all stages of pregnancy. “Most of the needs we see are from those who are unexpectedly pregnant and unsure about what to do,” says Millsapps. “But whatever road they pick, we are going to be here to love and support them.”

Pregnancy centers like Millsapps’ provide pro-life care that is catered to each woman. These centers offer help finding an obstetrician and navigating insurance. Many of them have support groups, life coaching, and Bible studies. Women who find the centers after having an abortion can receive trauma and grief counseling.

9. AP: Pope calls female genital mutilation a crime that must stop 

ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE — Pope Francis called female genital mutilation a “crime” on Sunday and said the fight for women’s rights, equality and opportunity must continue for the good of society.

“How is it that today in the world we cannot stop the tragedy of infibulation of young girls?” he asked, referring to the ritual cutting of a girls’ external genitalia. “This is terrible that today there is a practice that humanity isn’t able to stop. It’s a crime. It’s a criminal act!”

10. AP: Pope in Bahrain: Treatment of prisoners a measure of society 

MANAMA, Bahrain — Pope Francis wrapped up the first-ever papal trip to Bahrain on Sunday by encouraging priests and nuns to keep ministering to the Gulf kingdom’s tiny Catholic flock. He specifically mentioned its prisoners, saying “the way in which these ‘least ones’ are treated is a measure of the dignity and the hope of a society.”

Francis again raised the plight of prisoners in Bahrain in the final event of his four-day trip. Human rights groups had urged Francis to use his Bahrain visit to call for an end to capital punishment and to advocate for political prisoners, hundreds of whom have been detained since Bahrain violently crushed the 2011 Arab Spring protests with the help of neighboring Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.

Francis praised the prison ministry undertaken by some of the Catholic Carmelite nuns in Bahrain during a meeting with clergy and religious sisters at Sacred Heart Church in the capital Manama. Sister Rose Celine told Francis that her congregation works specifically with women prisoners, offering them counseling and religious direction.

Francis thanked her for her ministry and recalled that whenever he meets with inmates, he asks himself the same question: “Why them and not me?”

According to the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, Bahrain in 2017 ended a de-facto moratorium on the death penalty and has executed six prisoners since. The group and Human Rights Watch have documented a “dramatic increase” in the number of death sentences being handed down since 2011, with 26 people currently on death row, half for political activities.

Upon arriving in Bahrain on Thursday, Francis called for authorities to refrain from recourse to the death penalty and to ensure basic human rights are guaranteed for all citizens. The government told The Associated Press the country has a “zero-tolerance policy towards discrimination, persecution or the promotion of division based on ethnicity, culture or faith.” Still, the crackdown largely has targeted the island’s Shiite majority and those calling for governmental reforms.

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13. Richard V. Reeves: Why Men Are Hard to Help

 Kalamazoo, Michigan, holds a special place in the hearts of both Glenn Miller fans and public-policy scholars. In 1942, Miller sang that he’d “got a gal” in Kalamazoo. Today, policy wonks have something even more precious: a well-evaluated free-college program. And it works — but only for women.

Thanks to a group of anonymous benefactors, students educated in the city’s K-12 school system receive paid tuition at almost any college in the state. Other cities have similar initiatives, but the Kalamazoo Promise is unusually generous. It’s also one of the few programs of its kind to have been robustly evaluated — in this case by Timothy Bartik, Brad Hershbein, and Marta Lachowska of the Upjohn Institute. They found that the Kalamazoo Promise made a major difference in the lives of its beneficiaries — more so than other, similar programs made in theirs.

But the average impact disguises a stark gender divide. According to the evaluation team, women in the program “experience very large gains,” including an increase of 45% in college-completion rates, while “men seem to experience zero benefit.” The cost-benefit analysis showed an overall gain of $69,000 per female participant — a return on investment of at least 12% — compared to an overall loss of $21,000 for each male participant. In short, for men, the program was both costly and ineffective.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell said the mark of a civilized man was the ability to weep over a column of numbers. For a policy wonk, these data might just do the trick.

I asked Hershbein what was behind the massive gender gap in Kalamazoo. Because he is a true scholar, his answer was, “we don’t know.” What he means is that the gap cannot be explained statistically, at least with easily observable factors like test scores or family background.

And it’s not just the Kalamazoo Promise; a startling number of social programs seem to work well for girls and women, but not for boys and men — among which are a student-mentoring scheme in Fort Worth, Texas; a school-choice program in Charlotte, North Carolina; an income boost to low-wage earners in New York City; and many more.

The failure of these programs to help boys and men is a big problem, given that in many cases they are the ones who need the most help. But the problem rarely receives any attention, not least because almost nobody knows about it.

So why is this happening? Why are boys and men harder to help? Men themselves frequently provide a psychological explanation. “It’s a mental thing,” says Jonathan, a college junior who discussed the Kalamazoo Promise program with me over coffee. “The motivation for men is just not there anymore.”

For what it’s worth, I think Jonathan is onto something crucial. Women have fought a long battle against misogyny from without; now men are struggling to find motivation from within. Rather than external pressures, the challenge facing men is one of internal drive and direction. This makes the challenge of helping men rise and thrive in American society distinctly difficult for those in charge of public policy.

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16. Christianity Today interview with Bono: Bono’s Punk-Rock Rebellion Was a Cry of Hopeful Lament:

“The wounds that loss opened up in my life became this kind of void that I filled with music and friendship,” Bono tells me. “And really, an ‘ever increasing faith,’” he adds with a big grin, “as the Welsh evangelist Smith Wigglesworth would tell you.”

The friend that renamed him “Bono” introduced him to the kind of Christianity that has shaped his life. Derek Rowen, aka “Guggi,” was a serial nicknamer, and most of the kids who passed through their gang of friends got a new name at some point or another. (One of them, David Evans, got the moniker “the Edge” because of his sharp Welsh features. That one stuck too.)

Bono writes, “Guggi introduced me to the idea that God might be interested in the details of our lives, a concept that was going to get me through my boyhood. And my manhood.”

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“I had a Bible, and I remember highlighting Ephesians 6: For our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual powers and principalities, therefore take up the full armor of God, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, the shoes of the gospel of peace. … It made a huge impression on me. And, as an 18-, 19-year-old, I thought, That’s the real fight that’s going on. The rest is an expression of that. And, by the way, I didn’t think religious people understood their own Scripture because they were often using their religion—certainly in Ireland—as a club to beat the others down. I mean, the Catholics and Protestants … it’s kind of ridiculous, if you think about it. Yeah, we picked a more interesting fight.”

He sits up and laughs. “If you’ll spare an earnest Irish rock singer quoting their own lyrics, there’s a song on No Line on the Horizon called ‘Cedars of Lebanon,’ and I think it’s ‘Choose your enemies carefully because they will define you. Make them something interesting because in some ways, they will mind you.’ And then it goes, ‘They’re not there in the beginning, but when your story ends. Gonna last with you longer than your friends.’ I think what U2 probably got right was we just … we picked a fight with a much more interesting enemy than the more obvious for punk rock.”

It reminded me of something Bono once said in an interview with David Fricke in Rolling Stone. Fricke was covering U2’s 1992 tour for their album Achtung Baby, in which the band was indulging in wild, absurdist, self-parodying glam. Commenting on the contradiction between critiquing the excesses of rock-and-roll while also indulging them, Bono said, “Mock the devil and he will flee from thee.”

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“I don’t think we should allow ourselves into this binary view of the world between progressive and conservative. I think that’s very divisive,” he says. “We’ll find common ground by reaching for higher ground.”

“We need to get through it to a place of wisdom,” Bono continues. “And I predict revival.” In fact, he predicts that churches, of various denominations, “could be filled instead of emptied. But it depends on how they’re used. We have to hope that people will live their faith, rather than just preach it. We have to preach it. If you’re a preacher, preach it. But if you can’t live it, stop.”

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