Welcome to The Lifeline, everyone. For those who missed the earlier announcement, this is my new weekly newsletter, which you can sign up for here, if you haven’t already. Without further ado, let’s get to it.
The Scourge of Assisted Suicide
New Yorker Dovie Eisner wrote a courageous reflection on what the possibility of the Empire State legalizing assisted suicide would mean for his life. It first appeared in UnHerd, and the New York Post published a version of it over the weekend.
He wrote, in part:
I was born with a recessive genetic neuromuscular condition called nemaline myopathy. Over the years, it’s developed to the relatively stable point where I use a portable ventilator to breathe — hence, my blacking out last September — and a motorised wheelchair to get around. I often require assistance with basic tasks. I’m not terminal — at least, not without taking into account that life itself is terminal, for all of us. But many times, my own body can feel like a straitjacket, and that’s without the physical pain that surges from time to time.
I don’t want to die, and God willing, I’ve got another couple of decades left, at the very least. Under the law as proposed, I wouldn’t be eligible, all things being equal. But all things aren’t always equal. Eighteen years ago, bedridden for a month after major back surgery, I wished more morphine than was necessary for pain relief had been available to me. Watching my late grandfather wasting away in his last six years in a hospital bed at around the same time, I could and still can empathise with those who favour medical aid in dying.
For others, such existential moments can tip into a yearning not to exist — to escape it all.
Over the weekend, Dovie was hospitalized. As I write, he remains unresponsive. I pray that by the time you read this, Dovie will be out of the coma and on the road to healing. Please pray for him and his family and honor his courage — which included living his daily life — by reading up on and having some conversations about assisted suicide and what it means for all of health care — and our most vulnerable. And, of course, please pray against this evil that preys on people at their most vulnerable.
Adrienne Is One Awesome Quitter
I reunited with an old fast friend in Hoboken, N.J., this week. Adrienne Moton was one of three former abortion workers who spoke about their conversion stories, with a plea that those who oppose abortion lead with love — it’s the only thing that’s going to get to hurting human hearts and give us a shot at ending abortion in the United States. Adrienne didn’t work in just any abortion clinic. She worked for Kermit Gosnell, now no longer a licensed doctor, in prison for life and then some. The Gosnell trial was so horrific that it should have shaken us out of legal abortion in America. While his “house of horrors,” as it has been dubbed, was a worst kind of case, it is where devaluing human lives leads. Adrienne is part of a ministry called And Then There Were None, which is dedicated to helping people leave the abortion industry and find new jobs and healing. When you get a little distance and reflect on how many abortions you have participated in on one level or another, it can be devastating. ATTWN doesn’t abandon those who walk away from the culture of death. ATTWN was founded by Abby Johnson, the former Texas Planned Parenthood director who famously left — she wrote a book about her pro-life conversion story, and there was a movie also based on it, both by the name Unplanned.
After the concluding prayers at an event at St. Ann’s Church in Hoboken, Adrienne ended the night by singing “Amazing Grace” — a highlight of our night. From the pits of hell, to praising God and his mercy. She’s got miles to go in her healing, but what a message: There is hope, whatever evil we get ourselves entangled with. And before you judge Adrienne — she and the other ATTWN women get plenty of derision because of their past — realize that in a nation that just emerged from 50 years of legal abortion, and it’s not close to over yet, even after Roe, most of us are entangled, most of us are compromised.
In giving talks — especially to make a point about the cruelty of abortion pills, now almost the leading way of getting an abortion in the U.S. today — I often point out that the Unplanned movie is rated R because of the scene in Abby’s bathroom when her baby leaves her body after the abortion-pill cocktail has done the work that it’s intended to do.
Listen to my not-quite professional recording of Adrienne on Wednesday night in Jersey here.
Adrienne and I first met a number of years ago when I moderated a panel about a movie that Abby Johnson had put together that includes Adrienne’s story about quitting the abortion industry. We had the conversation next door to Manhattan’s flagship Planned Parenthood — just about as close as you can get to the building next door.
She just learned that this clinic is closing, and she was shocked and overwhelmed with awe at what seems like a miracle. (I’ve written about the clinic here. You can see one of the images I will never get out of my mind about that clinic here. Planned Parenthood wasn’t happy when I posted that last photo, and many others like it, because it was a regular scene there.)
Motherhood: ‘It’s Brutal and Incredible’
At a Cannes Film Festival press conference, actress Jennifer Lawrence talked about her experience as a mother of two. She was with the cast of the new movie Die, My Love, in which she plays a mother with extreme post-partum depression and psychosis.
Despite the film, she does recommend parenthood and says it’s especially helpful for an actor who may be called on to portray every emotion.
Lawrence has been a vocal advocate for abortion, even producing a documentary with Hillary and Chelsea Clinton in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision ending Roe. She has also talked about the birth of her first child — after suffering miscarriages:
The morning after I gave birth, I felt like my whole life had started over. Like, Now is day one of my life. I just stared. I was just so in love. I also fell in love with all babies everywhere. Newborns are just so amazing. They’re these pink, swollen, fragile little survivors. Now I love all babies. Now I hear a baby crying in a restaurant and I’m like, Awwww, preciousssss.
Humanity has a grip on a mother, even when she has been dedicated to abortion advocacy. May it win her over yet, for the sake of the unborn and their mothers and fathers and our culture.
And please don’t miss a Mother’s Day piece we had on NRO regarding birth moms.
Fostering Lives: The Fierce Urgency of Forever Homes Now
May is Foster Care Awareness Month. Ronald Reagan established it in 1988 with this proclamation. I talked with Darcy Olsen, founder and president of the Center for the Rights of Abused Children, who has fostered ten children, adopting four of them. (I wrote about their little platoon of civil-society lives recently after a fire moved them temporarily out of their home here.) We talked about the lawyers she could use for her legal clinic, the kiddos who could use permanent homes, and much more. (She even has a Bill Buckley story that has to do with family.) Please watch and share. Here we are.
Closing and Defunding Time
One of these days, Congress will do something with a bill that may or may not be beautiful, but if it ends up with no funding for Planned Parenthood, that aspect will surely be a thing of beauty. This week a Hollywood celebrity petition demanded the funding continue. How about Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus, and all the rest spend their own money on ending the lives of unborn babies and giving minors puberty blockers? Don’t hold your breath for that.
Defunding Planned Parenthood, of course, isn’t enough. We need more support for women and children and families. But, as a Charlotte Lozier study highlights, Planned Parenthood is already outnumbered when it comes to providing women real health care. May we build on that as abortion clinics begin to become largely a grave relic (partially because of the rise of chemical abortion, truth be told).
Saving Jewish Babies’ Lives
Not too long before the October 7 attacks, I was in the Holy Land and got to visit the pro-life pregnancy center in Jerusalem, Efrat. It was a wonderful visit and a chance to talk with Efrat’s executive director, Nir Salomon, and his wife. Efrat is in the beginning stages of a footprint in Miami — including a maternity home — and I used that news as an excuse to catch up with Salomon and hear his testimony about the unexpected ways Efrat has been called upon during war to protect lives. We also remember the life of Tzeela Gez, who was just murdered by a terrorist in the West Bank. She was on the way to a hospital to deliver Ravid Haim, her fourth child, whose name she had chosen before she was killed. God help her husband and children.
Here’s my interview with Nir Salomon.
Other Things
In Maine, doctors may soon be able to opt out of having their names on abortion-pill prescription bottles. I wouldn’t want my name on poison either.
Delaware has made assisted suicide legal. “The new law will officially go into effect at the latest Jan. 1, 2026, unless the required regulations can be promulgated sooner.”
Do you know about some of Louisiana’s latest efforts to protect women and babies? Sarah Zagorski from Louisiana Right to Life talks about it and her foster-care survival story here. Dr. Grazie Christie talks about the prospective end of Planned Parenthood federal funding (after we gush about the new pope) here. We still haven’t discussed the fertility-clinic attack (here’s Rich Lowry on it), the heart-wrenching Georgia woman on life support and her child and suffering family, the White House and IVF, and much more. But this is why we return here every week now to another Lifeline.
Please make sure you are signed up for this soon-to-be-launched weekly email, and let me know anytime you have news, questions, invitations (to speak, to help at a fundraiser or on campus), or anything else. I’m at klopez@nationalreview.com. Let’s talk.
Foster Farewell
Here’s something for the road (and Foster Care Month). Please don’t mind the donation link at the end, the education and inspiration are the thing. No young man should have to endure endless moving. God bless DeMarion. (Click and watch and you’ll get a little sense of his story.) There are more boys and girls in need of loving stability. Who can you be home for? Who can you support? Most of us can do something, do more.
The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption has a guide to adoption here.
Information on the Christian Alliance for Orphans More Than Enough Initiative is here.
Have you seen the movie The Sound of Hope? It’s about an amazing Texas Christian congregation.
Have a wonderful life, until we meet again.