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2. Grazie Pozo Christie: Pregnancy Care Centers in the Crosshairs
What would it be like to go to work in the morning and find a death threat spray-painted across the façade of your office? What would it be like knowing that a facility just like yours was recently fire-bombed near Buffalo, New York? Would you keep showing up? Would you continue to put yourself in danger?
Maybe you could, if you knew you were saving fragile lives and helping vulnerable women and girls each day. Maybe you could, if you were very brave.
These are the hard questions facing the volunteers and staff at a pregnancy care center in South Florida where I volunteer. It was recently vandalized with spray-painted threats. Like other pregnancy care centers, our facility assists under-resourced pregnant women and families. Our clients are already struggling to make ends meet. Unlike the nearby Planned Parenthood, our center offers real choice. While Planned Parenthood offers exactly one solution for parents in this situation – abortion, and cash up front, please! – our center offers material necessities, parental education, assistance in accessing obstetric care, ultrasounds, and adoption referrals for those who don’t feel they are prepared to parent. All free, of course. And the mothers who nevertheless choose to have an abortion are always welcomed back with open arms for post-abortion grief counseling when and if they need it.
These are the works of mercy that have sparked the ire of hate groups like the one that claimed responsibility for the recent arson at a Wisconsin pregnancy care center. The vandals scrawl a variant of the same phrase at each site: “If abortions aren’t safe, then you aren’t either.” The group’s name – Jane’s Revenge – was painted across our facility’s wall. Their communique, as issued via journalist Robert Evans, reads, in part: “We have run thin on patience and mercy…we [shall] adopt increasingly extreme tactics to maintain freedom over our own bodies.” These are the kinds of words used by ideologues and extremists who are, indeed, ready to use violence to cleanse the world of the people who disagree with them.
3. Daily Signal: Churches, Pro-Life Organizations Attacked 41 Times in Past 6 Weeks
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6. Ryan Anderson and others talk about Jay Greene’s new Heritage Foundation study “The Effect of Access to Puberty Blockers and Cross-Sex Hormones on Youth Suicide Rates.” The report is here.
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8. AP: Trans kids’ treatment can start younger, new guidelines say
9. By the Numbers: How Many Men in California Prisons Identify as Women
California’s prison population includes 1,115 biological males who say they identify as women, according to the state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
About 1 in 3 in that population has requested transfers to women’s prisons, but only about 1 in 10 of those requests have been approved, the corrections department says.
California’s prison agency provided the statistics in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Oversight Project, the government watchdog division of The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)
A women’s advocacy group sued the state of California in November to overturn a law allowing biological males to be housed in women’s prisons after a female inmate said she was raped by someone the prison called a “transgender woman with a penis.”
A section of the corrections department’s website devoted to “frequently asked questions” includes this question: “Does a transgender person have to have gender-affirming surgery to be housed at an institution that matches their gender identity?”
The department provides this response: “No. All housing for incarcerated people is evaluated on a case-by-case basis, which includes their criminal history, behavior, rehabilitation opportunities, medical and psychiatric needs, [and] program needs as well as their safety and security.”
10. Gulchehra Hoja for Radio Free Asia: Pakistani Student Muhammad Usman Asad holds a one-man protest against China’s repression of Uyghurs.
11. Life After Dobbs — Dr. Aaron Kheriaty on How Abortion Harms Good Medicine and Women’s Health
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14. 190 attacks against Church in Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega since 2018, report says
15. In Russia, a Christian religion is punished, over and over again:
The Jehovah’s Witnesses are a Christian religion in which believers submit to the authority of a single God and eschew military service. They have existed in Russia since 1891 and were criminally prosecuted for practicing their faith in Soviet times. After the Soviet collapse, they worshiped openly and were registered under Russia’s laws, growing to approximately 400 local congregations and 175,000 members. Russia’s 1993 Constitution guaranteed freedom of religion.
16. Wilfred M. McClay: Can We Become a Serious Country Again?
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18. Norm Ornstein and Steve Leifman: Locking People Up Is No Way to Treat Mental Illness
Shawnte Mallory didn’t want to abort her third child. But once she announced her pregnancy, the baby’s father left her. She lost her job and had to move out of her apartment. She moved in with her parents, and her mother soon scheduled her for an abortion. “Of course I didn’t want to have an abortion, I love my kids,” said Mallory. “But at that time, my back was against the wall. I didn’t want that responsibility of having to bring a child into the world struggling and not knowing how I was going to feed my other kids.”
Then Mallory found Mary’s Shelter, a maternity home in Fredericksburg. When she arrived in 2014, she felt at home. “It was very warm, it was very welcoming, I had never experienced anything that beautiful,” she said. “I was able to be somewhere safe and be able to give birth to a child and also have my other children with me as well. They didn’t even know they were in a shelter.”
20. WSJ: The Cafe That Helps Beat Writer’s Block—by Fining You $22
Students working on book reports, comic-book illustrators, authors and corporate warriors with a presentation due have been flocking to the cafe, which opened in April in an artsy Tokyo neighborhood.
Mr. Sasanuma started co-writing his book last year while cooped up in his apartment. He was fretting about his lack of progress to his chess partner, who suggested the cafe. It seats 10, and costs around $2 an hour, or $4.50 an hour for a premium seat facing a brick wall.
Mr. Sasanuma arrived one day in early May and signed up for a four-hour session, telling Mr. Kawai that his goal was to write three pages. On his first try, the lawyer-author walked away triumphant. He has returned several times since, writing up to four pages each time.
“Maybe it’s the atmosphere, maybe because I’m paying, but I sit down and immediately start typing,” Mr. Sasanuma said.
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