Fourteen Things That Caught My Eye Today: Continued Nursing Home Isolation, Margaret Sanger, and Rootedness

1. Such cruelty: Vaccinated and Still Isolated: The Ethics of Overprotecting Nursing Home Residents

Consider an 85-year-old nursing home resident with dementia who is fully vaccinated and asymptomatic, but is required to isolate in her room after an asymptomatic staff member tests positive. With current restrictions in place, even having been vaccinated against Covid, she is not allowed to visit a neighbor or participate in a music program with other nursing homes residents. The social isolation and the disruption of her routine is traumatic, causing increased anxiety, despair, and worsening confusion. She stops eating and drinking, facing a risk of dehydration and serious illness. These are preventable harms caused not by Covid-19, but by the regulatory response to it.

If this same woman were able to live at home, she would have few limitations after vaccination. She would be able to visit with a neighbor, perhaps go to the lobby of her building and enjoy music or conversation, and indeed see, touch, and hug her vaccinated family members. For fully-vaccinated people living in the community, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers guidance for safe visitation and socialization with others. This is in stark contrast to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services guidance for fully-vaccinated people living in nursing homes The significant disparity in guidance for these two populations is problematic and unjust.

2. Young Woman Dies After Getting Legal Abortion in Argentina

María del Valle González López was a 23-year-old student in the town of La Paz in Mendoza Province, Argentina. According to the Argentine newspaper Clarín, the young woman went on April 7, to the Arturo Illia hospital in La Paz for an abortion.

“There she was prescribed a medication — presumably misoprostol — and on Friday she began to feel ill. She was referred to the main healthcare facility in the eastern area of Mendoza, Perrupato Hospital, where they diagnosed a general infection that may have caused her death,”  Clarín reported.

3. I don’t always agree with him, but thanks be to God for Nicholas Kristof. He does some real good others cannot. People who oppose porn should pray for him and thank him. 

Nicholas Kristof: Why Do Corporations Profit From Rape Videos?

Heather Legarde, a young woman in Alberta, felt the world crashing down on her last August. She had discovered that her ex-husband had posted intimate videos of her online, she told me, and people around the world were gazing at her naked body.

“I’m all over the internet,” she told me sadly. “Not what I wanted to be famous for.”

. . .

Some 200,000 people had watched her being assaulted while she was drugged and unconscious. So on that day in August, mortified and dizzied by her discovery of the betrayal, Legarde prepared to tie a noose.

4. Newsweek: Gynecologist Exiled From China Says 80 Sterilizations Per Day Forced on Uyghurs

“A lot of women were put on the back of a truck and sent to the hospital,” Gülgine said. “The [sterilization] procedure took about five minutes each, but the women were crying because they did not know what was happening to them.”

5. The Wall Street Journal: Islamic State Seeks Revival in Christian Countries

After its dreams of imposing draconian Islamist law in a self-declared state in Syria were crushed, Islamic State successfully injected itself into localized conflicts in Nigeria, Libya and across the Sahel, the semiarid belt running east-west along the southern edge of the Sahara. Those initial forays, as in Syria and Iraq, were launched in largely Muslim territories.

Now it is starting to target Christian-dominated countries, grafting onto Islamist terrorist groups that have emerged among disenfranchised Muslim minorities. No longer vowing to seize and hold territory, Islamic State instead has embraced guerrilla tactics, co-opting local leadership and dramatically improving training, tactics and propaganda—and giving the impression it can strike at Western interests in unexpected places.

6. Crux: Majority of world’s population live in countries that violate religious freedom, report says

The 2021 Religious Freedom Report by Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) found that around 5.2 billion people live in countries where there are grave violations to religious freedom, including three of the world’s most populous countries: China, India and Pakistan. In most of these countries, religious minorities are the most targeted, and in recent years, the faith-based persecution by authoritarian governments has intensified.

The report also highlights and denounces the increase of sexual violence used as a weapon against religious minorities – crimes against women and girls who are abducted, raped and forced to convert to another religion.

7. Clyde Prestowitz: Is Your iPhone worth China’s tyranny?

Cook and his Apple loudly tout liberal values and minority rights in the West. But when it comes to China’s imprisonment of a million Uighurs in concentration camps, the repression of Tibet, the killing of Hong Kong’s free society and the stifling of international probes into the origins of the novel coronavirus, Cook’s Apple keeps curiously mum.

The silence is damning. And it mirrors the corrupt bargain the West has struck with the Chinese Communist Party, which is open about its hostility to our values. 

8. As Jimmy Lai Is Sentenced to 14 Months in Prison, Hong Kong Catholics’ Concern Grows

He was sentenced to 15 months in prison for the first demonstration, reduced by three months in mitigation, and an eight-month sentence for the second, of which he will be required to serve two months. 

But he also faces two additional charges which could prolong his time in jail. Prosecutors said Friday these involve conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and conspiracy to obstruct the course of justice, according to Reuters. 

. . .

Simon told the Register April 16 that the suspended sentences “essentially take these major public figures out of circulation, so what you’ve got are political charges, a political trial and political sentences.” 

The Catholic human rights advocate Lord David Alton, who knows Lai, Lee and Ng personally, called them “remarkable and courageous people – lifelong advocates for human rights, democracy, an independent judiciary and the rule of law.

9. Pro-life advocates: Planned Parenthood can’t just wish away Margaret Sanger’s racism, eugenics

Angela Franks, author of “Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility,” told CNA in an interview that Planned Parenthood “is trying to have it both ways,” by appeasing to progressive activists without “getting to the heart of the problem with Sanger.”

“In some ways it’s a cheap attempt to repurpose the organization within the progressive lobby,” Franks said.

Black pro-life activist and former NFL player Benjamin Watson also said that Planned Parenthood’s action “rings hollow” unless the organization takes the “next step.”

“Whether they personally identify with Sanger’s ideology or not, they continue to carry out her mission, by serving as the leading executioner of our children,” Watson said in a written statement on Sunday. 

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12. Cornel West and Jeremy Tate: Howard University’s removal of classics is a spiritual catastrophe

Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.

The Western canon is, more than anything, a conversation among great thinkers over generations that grows richer the more we add our own voices and the excellence of voices from Africa, Asia, Latin America and everywhere else in the world. We should never cancel voices in this conversation, whether that voice is Homer or students at Howard University. For this is no ordinary discussion.

13. Charles C. Camosy, Gracy Olmstead: Is ‘rootedness’ an answer to the throwaway society?

14. Mom creates ‘The Down Syndrome Diary’ to help struggling parents

Freeman says the moment Benny was born, she fell in love, and six months later, while looking at her baby, an idea came to her. 

“What if me now, as Benny’s mom at six months could’ve sat in a room and held Jamie’s hand at 16 weeks pregnant and told her all the wonderful things that were going to come because of this diagnosis,” said Freeman.