21 Things That Caught My Eye Today: Tragedy at Surfside, Caring for Actual Women’s Health & More

1.

2.

3. Shabbat in Surfside

“Right now I feel like I haven’t slept in days,” Bal Harbour resident Steve Eisenberg, a tanned retiree from New York told me. “I keep seeing my friend Brad in the rubble.” On a patio behind his condo building we faced an ocean of brilliant turquoise and deep navy, under an ethereal fleet of white clouds, inside a frame of tropical green. Eisenberg had signed the ketubah at Dr. Brad Cohen’s wedding. “All he ever did was acts of kindness for people … if someone was suffering he didn’t say, ‘call my office on Monday.’”

At daily minyan at The Shul, the red-domed Chabad megacenter across the street from Eisenberg’s apartment, he had befriended another one of the missing, someone who had lost both of his parents to COVID, and his wife to cancer. The Shul and life in Bal Harbour’s Jewish community had helped the man recover something of himself after a year of loss. “He said, ‘I’m so happy to be here, this is my next chapter of happiness.’” Now he was buried under the wreckage, along with one of his children.

Is there any sense to be made out of any of this? “The ways of God are mysterious. We don’t know them, they’re hidden so often,” Rabbi Lipskar said at Mincha.

4. Miami Catholic parish says 10 of its families still missing after collapse

Father Juan Sosa’s message to those affected by the crisis is to keep up hope and “keep your heart on the one who can grant us the opportunity to see our loved ones, and that is God. Keep your hearts open so you will be able to feel and experience, in the midst of grief, the healing presence of the Lord,” Father Sosa said.

5. New book looks at ‘dark side’ of euthanasia in Netherlands

6. Henry Olsen: It’s About Time Lawmakers Focus on Pregnant Women Beyond the Abortion Debate. Here’s a Bill that would do that.

The bill has four basic provisions. First, it would make unborn children eligible for the child tax credit. Under current law, that means every expectant mother would get $3,600 she otherwise would not. Second, it would establish a federal-state partnership that assesses and catalogues all available resources and programs that an expectant mother is eligible for. Participation in the program would be voluntary for states, but those that do would commit to providing each expectant mother with that list at an appropriate time during her pregnancy, letting her know that the community is ready to care for her and her child. Third, it would provide federal grants for the advancement of maternal housing, job training and other educational opportunities. Finally, it would provide incentives to improve maternal health and child health outcomes.

7. Feminists for Life: CARE FOR HER: An Interview with Rep. Jeff Fortenberry

8. More on the Care for Her Act from an OB/GYN: Doublespeak on Abortion Helps Neither Women nor Children

It was her fifth pregnancy. The first two had ended with surgical abortions, but the next three were all wanted pregnancies. Tragically, she was unable to carry any of these children to term owing to the cervical damage caused by previous abortions. We did everything we could to keep the fifth child alive, including a special procedure to strengthen the mother’s cervix so she could carry the baby until she was viable. But this too ended in heartbreak. Her daughter was born just prior to 21 weeks—too small to survive—and she passed away within minutes, being held in her mother’s arms.

I remember weeping with my patient, who was now grieving the loss of her fifth child. The pain she felt in that moment went far deeper than anything I knew how to treat as a physician. She felt hopeless—and I, unable to comfort her, felt helpless. Over and over she said, “I don’t think I can do this again.” She couldn’t go through another pregnancy, knowing almost certainly that the outcome would be just as tragic as the first five. Like so many millions of women across the country, my precious patient had been sold the idea of abortion under the banner of “women’s health.” She had been sold a lie.

This is what the pro-choice lobby doesn’t want you to know: according to the Guttmacher Institute’s own numbers, the overwhelming majority of abortions in the U.S. are performed for socioeconomic and not medical reasons. Even so, pro-choice advocates pretend that abortion and women’s health are one and the same. They are not, and in fact, there are thousands of cases each year of abortions causing lasting damage to a woman’s health.

9. Convivium: Missing Marriages, Empty Baby Carriages

10. How autism has helped one man connect with God

While he struggles to understand concepts like culture, Jory Fleming believes his autism helps free him from some of our current societal trappings. He does not feel beholden to ideology, and is sharply critical of the way it clouds people’s judgment about reality. In a world marked by collective anger, Fleming says that he’s chosen to cultivate a personality marked by radical optimism. 

11. Ellie Krasne: Black families matter

Across the globe and throughout history, families have been the source of economic and social stability. Particularly in the United States, two-parent nuclear families are the leading preventers of poverty and abuse.

In a February 2020 article in the Atlantic, University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox and Brigham Young University associate professor Hal Boyd note: ”One federal report found that children living in a household with an unrelated adult were about nine times more likely to be physically, sexually, or emotionally abused than children raised in an intact nuclear family.” That hardly makes the case for undoing family and outsourcing familial duties to a collective of strangers.

Moreover, AEI’s Ian Rowe tells us that intact families are the leading driver of poverty prevention. Indeed, their significance among the black community is astounding. “Being raised in a married-couple household led the poverty rate for black children to go down 73 percent compared to mother-only households and 67 percent compared to father-only households,” Rowe notes.

The data are clear: Children, especially black children, raised in two-parent households are better off. BLM and those parroting its claims would be well served to reconsider their call to dismantle the most effective anti-poverty program that African Americans, and all other people for that matter, have ever known.

12. Homeschooling: How Forming Good Readers Enhances the Whole

13. The Death of Gratitude in the American Classroom

At the final bell of the year, a handful of students used to give me a handshake or a hug, a hearty statement of thanks, and yes, even a letter or a card. These have all but vanished. The bell rings for the last time, they wave goodbye, and off to summer vacation they giddily trot.

My real concern is that gratitude may no longer be part of the lives of young Americans. They seem to believe that their blessings—technology that is the stuff of science fiction, unparalleled wealth, unfathomable comforts and forms of communication, bountiful freedom, and opportunities unrivaled in human history—are owed to them. They see no need to be grateful; it makes no sense to them.

The decline of gratitude portends a disturbing pivot in our culture. I worry not that my own world may be crumbling, not that civilization’s decline may be imminent, but that unless the younger generation learns the virtue of gratitude, they will not find joy in life. They will not believe the world is, to quote Hemingway, “a fine place and worth fighting for.”

14. On first-ever day of prayer, Pope implores mercy for the Middle East

15. Texas’s Camping Bans Will Help the Homeless

16.

17. Dallas Police Chief García’s strategy could become a national model

18. As the nation re-opens, social and mental health disparities weigh on younger Americans

19. Banjoist Winston Marshall: Why I’m Leaving Mumford & Sons 

20.

21. Let Jack Phillips Bake Cake