Twenty Things That Caught My Eye Today: Abortion & F. Scott Fitzgerald & More

1. Jeanne Mancini:  Relaxing FDA Restrictions on Abortion Pills Was a Mistake

2. Kelsey Bolar: After Competing Against Transgender Athletes, Mom and Daughter Fight for Fairness in Women’s Sports

“I would have won my first-ever high school track meet if it weren’t for this athlete,” (daughter) Margaret says of her transgender competitor. “It was very disappointing.”

3.  Toddler died of starvation in his car seat after his mom fatally overdosed

4. Mississippi attorney general Lynn Fitch: Mississippi’s People Should Choose Its Abortion Laws

When it comes to regulating abortion, the nearly 50-year history of court precedent since Roe has not provided clear guidance. Rules based on the viability of the life of the unborn child are fluid. It was long considered impossible for a baby to survive outside the womb before 28 weeks. Now we read with increasing regularity about babies born at 21 weeks who survive and go home to celebrate their first Christmas with their families.

Rapid advances in medical technology have made the benchmark of viability increasingly unstable. If we know anything about the march of science, medicine will not retreat; it will continue to advance. This makes the question before the Supreme Court in Dobbs all the more important: Can the people, acting through their state legislature, establish restrictions on abortion—restrictions that protect legitimate interests of the state—before this uncertain and disintegrating line called viability?

5. Biden’s budget is poised to fund abortion advocacy around the world

6. Why Would Planned Parenthood Care About Donor Disclosure Laws When HHS Is Handing Them Millions of Taxpayer Dollars?

7. Young Children Are Being Targeted With Sexual Content

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10. Poverty hurts the boys the most: Inequality at the intersection of class and gender

Most strikingly, boys raised in families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution are less likely than girls either to be employed or to move up the income ladder once they become adults.

11. Aaron Kheriaty and Gerard V. Bradley: University Vaccine Mandates Violate Medical Ethics

Even soldiers, whose rights are constrained when they join the service, aren’t being compelled to take a Covid vaccine. … These coercive mandates violate basic principles of medical ethics. Even if the vaccines receive full FDA approval, no sensible understanding of herd immunity can justify forcing vaccinations on healthy young adults who are at minimal risk of hospitalization or death from Covid, especially those who already had Covid. We don’t immunize children against diseases that primarily harm the elderly in hope of reducing transmission risks for the elderly. That would use the recipients as a means to another end, which is unethical.

12. The lost children of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

According to Sara Mayfield, a friend of the Fitzgeralds and author of the 1971 Exiles from Paradise: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, this abortion was not the last, but rather the “first of three similar incidents, each of which drove another wedge into their marriage.”

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14. Karen Swallow Prior: The social-media-examined life is not the one that sustains us

Our new digital age magnifies in new ways what we see — the public personas, portrayals and projections — immeasurably, often distorting reality beyond recognition. A socially mediated life severs the outer public person and the inner private self; cultivates unrealistic expectations that lead to disappointment and bitterness from hopes unfulfilled; purveys plastic people and distorted dreams. … For lack of a vision, the people perish. And with a malnourished vision, the fruit withers. In this way, the call of each of us is the same: to inhabit our souls, souls formed by God for our good and his glory, and to nourish the inward life that yields the fruits of the outward one.

15. The Rise of Black Homeschooling

Around three per cent of Black students were homeschooled before the pandemic; by October, the number had risen to sixteen per cent.

16. Naomi Schaefer Riley: No, ‘systemic racism’ is not why so many Black kids are in foster care

According to analysis from the Institute for Family Studies, 74 percent of white children and 61 percent of Hispanic children live with married parents, compared with only 36 percent of black children. Moreover, even when the parents of Hispanic children aren’t married, they are more likely to be living with their cohabiting biological parents. And (though you’re not supposed to say it these days) the presence of a father in the home is a big protective factor.

17. Ramesh Ponnuru: A Scary Plan to Revise the Definition of Death

The Shewmon statement contends that the current guidelines pose an unacceptably high risk of classifying people as dead when they aren’t.

18. Robby Soave: A Composer Condemned Arson. Now No One Will Hire Him.

19. Cardinal Pell: I wasn’t sure “justice and respect for evidence would prevail”

20. Couple finds 94-year-old veteran living in van, asks for help getting him back on his feet

ALSO, upcoming Thursday: