Baby Charlie is meeting his grandmother. His mother has been talking with her throughout his pregnancy.
I suppose I should be grateful the ad for the new 2wai app making the rounds acknowledges human life as it develops in the womb. I guess I am. But this ad, this app, this temptation is sinister.
Imagine taking a video of a living relative now. Maybe someone getting on in years. The reason? To feed it to this app that will use the video to create conversations she could have with you in the future when she’s dead.
Except she can’t.
This is an app.
This is a computer.
This is not real.
And yet, as the ad goes on, you can see how you could get drawn in. For years, I had a recording I made on a cassette tape of my father’s cellphone message. I never wanted to forget his voice. This was an archaic first-generation cellphone. We were not making videos on our phones as second nature. But I just wanted to hear him.
Baby Charlie goes for a walk with an , who died before he was born. Years later, he shows her an ultrasound image of his own child. “She” references how “she” used to sing to him in utero. Nope. She was dead. It was an app. His mom held her phone up to her baby bump.
The people who made the ad understand why you’d ache to share your life with someone you’ve lost. But that ache is for them — their life, their heart, their mind, their soul. It’s not for a computer simulation.
Think we all seem to be on anxiety medication now? Just wait until we make it routine to be in denial about death, using our screens to pretend that our loved ones are still with us.
Dr. Kristin Collier, associate professor of medicine at the University of Michigan and director of the Medical School’s Program on Health, Spirituality & Religion, quoted Deuteronomy 18:10-12 in response to the ad:
Let no one be found among you . . . who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens . . . or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord.
Dr. Collier also noted this the same day:
Was just on a zoom call about AI. folks kept saying “it’s just a tool.”
I reminded them that no one has ever confused my screwdriver or other tools of being a person.
My screwdriver doesn’t pose a threat to me by risking impoverishing myself of my ability to write or reason.
Leo and the Latin (and Every Other Kind of) Woman
’s ongoing Latin American trip is overflowing with the majestic beauty of truth and love and courage. He’s currently in Peru, which he adopted as his second homeland as an Augustinian missionary priest. Thursday outside the cathedral in Lima, he highlighted the treasures of human life and man-and-woman/mother-and-father family. And he took on machismo culture a bit, so as to insist on the cherishing of women.
He said (from the official Vatican English translation):
Recognition of human dignity also requires that we effectively promote the presence, respect and participation of women. Their contribution to every sphere of society and the Church is indispensable. It is sad to see that machismo persists, manifested in the absence of fathers from family life, in abuse and violence against women. This mentality disregards the newness of Christianity, which recognizes and proclaims that men and women possess equal dignity and responsibility (cf. Benedict XVI, Inaugural Address to the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, 2007).
Women living in poverty or belonging to Indigenous and Afro-American communities are liable to suffer a double marginalization (cf. Aparecida Document, 454). For this reason, it pains us to see that violence against women — who could be our grandmothers, mothers, sisters or daughters — continues to be a reality that wounds all of humanity.
I would like to renew an ardent appeal, not only to my brothers and sisters in the faith but to every man and woman of good will: let us value women! Let us protect and respect girls!
There’s a lot more at the link where that came from, and throughout the visit, which continues.
Please Help Appreciate Pregnancy Help
So this week, I did the thing I tend to do: I mentioned how the low-hanging fruit of pro-life action/commitment we can all take is simply knowing and supporting our local pregnancy-care center and maternity home.
is a good place to start. They have a worldwide directory of their affiliated clinics here.
Knowing this will give you something to talk about if you find yourself in an abortion debate or conversation. It means if someone comes to you looking for advice when facing an unplanned pregnancy, you’ll have some resources to refer to, or to take a woman or girl to.
But when I said this — self-identifying as a broken record on this front — a successful conservative man in the audience, an entrepreneur who owns his own business, admitted to me this was the first he had ever heard of such a thing as a pregnancy-resource center.
There we are: I am even taking for granted that a conservative crowd even knows what I am talking about.
This week is Pregnancy Help Appreciation Week. Yes, I know if you pay attention, just about every day is an excuse to sell Hallmark cards. But I’m pretty sure you won’t find any for your local pro-life resource.
I was at one of Loreto House’s two locations outside Dallas Thursday, and the two center’s directors assured me that they never run out of a need for diapers of all sizes. When a mom comes by for parenting classes or other regular offerings, she always walks away with diapers.
All of Loreto’s resources are free — thanks to private donations and grants. They even go above and beyond with signs of love for their moms including little gift bags and home-baked cookies.
Ask your local pregnancy center what they need. It may be your time — an administrative assistant was stuffing envelopes for their end-of-year campaign — and sometimes homeschooled children do a little volunteer time chipping in on this and other things.
And when you find out the basics, make sure you share the love. Don’t assume people know. They likely don’t.
A National Adoption Month (November) Window into Pregnancy Help
From a former Syracuse, N.Y., pregnancy-center and adoption-agency director, writing for National Right to Life:
One of the things I valued about having both a pregnancy center and an adoption agency was recognizing that while these ministries sometimes intersected, they served women at different points in their decision-making. The goal of our pregnancy center was never to move a woman toward an adoption plan simply because we also had an adoption agency. It was to provide a caring environment where she could talk openly about her circumstances, explore her options, and receive the support and information she needed.
Many of the pregnancy-center workers I meet are some of the most patient, least judgmental people you are ever going to encounter. And some of them have the extra serving of gratitude for their own lives that comes from being adopted themselves — and the younger they are, the more clearly they see that as having been spared from abortion.
Other Things
Alliance Defending Freedom: “NY court frees pregnancy centers to talk about life-saving abortion-pill reversal”
While I was in Texas this week, the rollback efforts on post-Dobbs pro-life protections began. I definitely heard uncertainty, at best, about the newly elected Lone Star sheriffs. “The fear is the unknown,” one pro-lifer with years of experience praying and counseling outside of abortion clinics, told me.
From the Houston Chronicle: “She was operated on before she was even born. Now, she’s thriving.”
Camille doesn’t know it yet, but she’s already a fighter.
At just 24 weeks in the womb, she underwent a groundbreaking surgery at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston — a procedure that doctors say has never been performed anywhere else in the United States. Today, she’s three months old, hitting every developmental milestone, and giving her parents in Lafayette, Louisiana something they once weren’t sure they’d have: hope.
When Caitlin Kidder was pregnant, she received news no expectant mother wants to hear. Her unborn daughter had been diagnosed with gastroschisis — a serious birth defect where a baby’s intestines develop outside the abdomen through an opening in the abdominal wall. . . .
Dr. Sundeep Keswani, the surgeon who performed the procedure, explained that gastroschisis is actually connected to something that happens in all of us early in development. . . .
Operating on a fetus’s exposed intestines requires extraordinary precision. The tissue is incredibly fragile — Keswani compared it to overcooked pasta.
The London Telegraph: “Surrogacies double in decade”: “Rise in applications to be parent of a baby born by surrogate comes as campaigners call for law change.”
Jonathon Van Maren: Abortion’s New Back Alley
Abortion activists have facilitated a de facto back alley; they will now insist that its very existence means that legal abortion is essential to solve the problem they have deliberately (and, in most cases, illegally) created.
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone: “Staying Human in the AI Age”
AI is an artifact, the work of human hands. It is not a creature made in the image and likeness of God. It was not endowed by Him with an immortal soul and, for that reason, with inalienable rights. AI is sometimes described as an alien mind, but it is a set of algorithms, trained in human thought and speech, and programmed to mimic them. We must therefore refuse to grant it legal personhood, and treat it as a tool that remains the responsibility of those who build and use it. We must also recognize that, lacking both body and soul, it can never be a moral agent, and so can never hold the rights that belong to human beings.
Charles Camosy: “The midterms’ shocking embrace of abortion extremism”
More Camosy: “It’s Time for Pro-Lifers to Engage the AI Revolution”
Susan Ciancio: “The gift of adoption: One mother’s love can change two families forever”
Around National Review
Wesley J. Smith: The Government Should Not Pay Taxpayers for Their Kidneys
Me again: These Nuns Won’t Kill. How About Defending Their Rights and Following Their Lead?
Upcoming & More
November 16. 8:30 a.m. Eastern. World Day of the Poor. Pope Leo visits a shelter in Lima, Peru, run by the Little Sisters for Abandoned Elderly People.
November 18. 12:00-1:00 p.m. Eastern. “Navigating Adoption: Relationships Across a Lifetime.” National Council for Adoption. Virtual. Register here.
Also Nov. 18. 2 p.m. Eastern. “A Community for Every Child: Strengthening Families Together.” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Center for Faith. Virtual. Registration here.
November 21. National Adoption Day.
December 5, 3:00-4:30 p.m. Eastern. Join the Global Catholic Disability Theology Network for an Advent Prayer Service. Sign up here.
January 21–22. National Prayer Vigil for Life. Begins at 5 p.m. Eastern. The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.
Your Commission
Sorry for the later delivery of The Lifeline today. (Sign up here if you don’t already receive it in your inbox weekly.) Getting back from Dallas didn’t go according to schedule. But isn’t that the standard for air travel? Just grateful to be alive and in your inbox or otherwise on your screen! Before you move on from here and Pregnancy Help Appreciation Week, why don’t you let me know any pregnancy resources you’d like to brag about? Have you seen something that inspires you in support of innocent and vulnerable human life? Send me your nominees and testimonies. I’ll report back on what you send me.
Thank you, and you are in my prayers. Keep praying for America and those people most in need of prayer.
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