Twenty-Five Things That Caught My Eye Today: Pregnant in Louisiana & More (August 27, 2020)

1. Chinese Hospitals Kill Newborns, Force Abortions to Eradicate Uighurs, Doctor Says

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3. Uighur women sexually abused, raped in China: ‘This will not stop with just the Uighurs,’ activist warns

“They are literally declaring the need to rewrite the Bible and the holy Quran to be compatible with communist atheistic ideology,” she said. “While China is openly conducting genocide, the world is muted as China buys basically the compliance of the business world. . . . The tragedy of the Uighur people will be the future of the entire world if this threat is not addressed and if we don’t take action.”

The CCP specifically targets Uighur women, Abbas said, citing a recent report that documented dropping birth rates among Uighurs because of practices such as forced sterilization, abortion, and even the killing of babies born alive.

In concentration camps, many women are subject to mental and physical torture, including rape, Abbas said. Additionally, women are “forced to take some unknown medications that make them mentally cloudy to stop their reproductive cycles,” she revealed.

4. Thirty babies born to surrogates stranded in Russia

5. Mindy Belz in Beruit: An explosive reckoning for Beirut

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8. How Chaos in Kenosha Is Already Swaying Some Voters in Wisconsin

9. First Things: Advice for Students in a Time of Strife

In standing strong for your rights and the rights of others to think for yourselves and make up your own minds, it is important to avoid becoming an ideologue, or seeing ideological conflict in every encounter or conversation. You came to college to be challenged, and the critical exchange of ideas is not victimization, it is a privilege.  Insist on your right to free speech, but remember that other people have that right too. They do you no wrong in challenging and criticizing your beliefs — even your deepest, most cherished, identity-forming beliefs — just as you do them no harm in challenging their beliefs. Quite the contrary. We do one another a service by intelligently challenging one another’s convictions.

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11. Wesley J. Smith: At Last: An Anti–Assisted-Suicide Speech at a Republican Convention

When we accept assisted suicide, we are not really being compassionate, but rather are tacitly validating surrender to darkness. But by opposing the “give them the pills” expedient (that’s what it really is), and instead committing unequivocally to caring for the terminally ill with loving concern, we can insure that dying people are not made to feel like burdens or allowed to believe we will allow them to wallow in misery. In doing so, we value their equality and uphold the intrinsic dignity of their lives.

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14. Five families adopt nine children during Back to School Adoption Day

15. Children suffer as COVID-19 ravages our nation

16. Families with foster children juggle online school, parenting challenges

“Foster parents are really struggling right now,” said John DeGarmo of Jasper County, founder of the Foster Care Institute advocacy group. “The kids in foster care, during COVID-19, they’re not getting the services they need, they’re not getting the professional therapy sessions they need, they’re not getting the face-to-face visitation. Instead, they’re doing it online, which is much harder for them. Many of them are not getting the school services they need.”

 

17.  J. C. Derrick: Fostering changes

“The degree of emphasis Assistant Secretary Johnson has put on adoption has been greater than her predecessors,” said Nate Bult, senior vice president for government affairs for Bethany Christian Services, the nation’s largest evangelical adoption agency. “It’s not that previous assistant secretaries were hostile, but Johnson has put it at the top of her agenda.”

18. Fostering the Good: Hillsdale College Alumna starts scholarship for former foster youth

In between leaving the foster care system and coming to Hillsdale, [Tori] Petersen attended a different college. But she began to feel she wasn’t growing in her faith. When her track coach was fired, she took that as a sign that things needed to change.

“I Googled ‘most religious colleges in America’ and Hillsdale came up as number two, so I emailed the track coach and told him I needed a full-ride scholarship and told him my times,” she recalled. “I really wanted to go to Hillsdale because I wanted to be somewhere I could figure out who I was in Christ and how to live that out.”

19. Karen Swallow Prior: Let Liberty University Be A Lesson In Unchecked Power

One need look only to Matt Lauer, Harvey Weinstein, and Jeffrey Epstein — media, Hollywood, and Wall St. darlings, respectively — to be reminded that sexual abuse by those whose power is unchecked by the systems that uphold them knows no doctrine or creed. As the nineteenth century historian Lord Acton sagely observed, “Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.” . . .

I don’t marvel at the depravity or licentiousness of any one individual. After all, I believe the orthodox Christian doctrines about humanity’s sinful nature. But I find it inexplicable that a body of people legally, ethically and morally responsible for the health of an institution — no matter how large or how small — would for so long — whether by acts of omission or commission — allow to run rampant a leader who has brought shame time and time again to their own institution.

20. Uzbekistan Releases Former Tashkent Imam After 15 Years In Prison

His release has been welcomed by international human rights activists as a major development in the struggle for “prisoners of conscience” who’ve been jailed for their religious or political views.

21. A lesser-known “Ave Maria” that’s just as beautiful as Schubert’s

22. Buenos Aires priests struggle to fill spiritual void with no public Mass

23.  How St. Monica gave us the phrase, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”

24. Hurricane Laura made me evacuate my home at 9-months pregnant. I’m still trusting God.

25. Joy arrives with a wail