It was revealed this week that a 78-year-old former member of Parliament in England, Ann Widdecombe, was brutally murdered earlier this month by being hit on the head 21 times with a hammer as she was eating lunch at home.

CNN also notes this:

Two lawmakers have been murdered in the past decade: Jo Cox of the Labour Party in 2016, and David Amess, a Conservative, in 2021. A man who had expressed white supremacist views was convicted in Ms. Cox’s death, and an Islamic State sympathizer in Mr. Amess’.

Obviously, the murderer is a sick man, overcome by evil. And how was he influenced by a culture that regularly, casually throws away human life? Where even medicinal protocols — abortion, assisted suicide — are for killing?

Widdecombe was a pro-life, Christian (Catholic convert) politician, with a sense of humor. That this elderly stalwart died in such a barbaric way does seem to flow from what we allow in our culture. I wish I could interview her and get her thoughts on how to dismantle the culture of death — but it killed her first.

Here she is on BBC warning of the dangers of assisted suicide.

Suicidal Tendencies

You’ve likely read by now that the Little Sisters of the Poor are going to court again. They are one of four religious communities of women (“nuns”) who are pleading for a religious accommodation from New York State and its assisted-suicide law currently set to be implemented on August 5. Catholic nuns who care for the elderly and dying — or anyone else, for that matter — can have nothing to do with helping patients kill themselves. That should be quite obvious. And, frankly, if America 250 celebrations this year mean anything, the Empire State should not be coercing nuns into doing such things — they, of course, will refuse and therefore will be in violation of state law. The Becket Fund is asking for a delay in the law’s launch until this can get a full hearing in court.

Here’s a conversation with a sister and a lawyer about it.

The Kids Need Us to Stop and Talk About Surrogacy

Remember all the controversy over Adriana Smith in Georgia? It was — and is — an agonizing story. The beautiful young mother of a son was pregnant with another when she wound up on life support. The hospital kept her alive long enough, based on its interpretation of the post-Dobbs state of law, to be able to have the baby born relatively safely. Adriana was removed from life support a few days later and died. The whole ordeal was and is tragic and made all the worse by politics and media getting involved in Smith’s hospital room (quite literally).

I even had the surprise of talking with her brother — when he was my Uber driver last year — about the sorrow of it all. There are many things to say about it, but for current purposes I’d like us to remember that pro-abortion entities kept railing against Smith’s being used as an “incubator” for the baby.

Forgive the impolite question: But isn’t that what surrogacy is? In the latter case, she’s a well-intentioned woman, possibly in need of money. Even in the best surrogacy circumstances, the woman who carried the child in her womb will not be raising the child.

I ask the question because one could get a wee bit of whiplash from all of the surrogacy stories in the news. Some of the more prominent headlines involve same-sex couples, but not exclusively.

If there can be relatively happy surrogacy stories, Fox News commentator Guy Benson announcing a second baby in his life would be one of them; he and his husband are already raising one girl born by a surrogate and now a second. And it is only right to wish them well, as many have, and to pray that the children have the love they need. The two seem to have plenty of people in their lives — including women who are mothers. And there is, of course, a good and self-sacrificing intention in many surrogacy stories: to love a child.

But it also involves the commodification of a child and, often, the removal of the mother from the child’s life after nine months of the bonding that happens during gestation. Surrogacy is not the same as a teenager getting pregnant without intending to and choosing an adoption plan over raising the child or aborting the child. In such a scenario, the child is already cooking in the oven, so to speak. Yes, there is a separation from the mother, but the baby is already in existence. Surrogacy is something else entirely. A contractual decision is being made, with money involved and service expectations on paper.

Same-sex marriage obviously exists. And parenthood followed. And yet, it is legal — and healthy — to believe that mantra: Every child deserves a mother and a father.

Mom and Dad, of course, doesn’t always happen. The man may walk away from any responsibility. A beloved family of four children close to me lost their father to leukemia. That wasn’t planned, was never desired. She happens to be a remarkable mother with brothers geographically near, so they do what they can with God’s grace, but it wasn’t chosen for Andrew not to be playing catch with them, and all the rest.

I say this all because to question whether surrogacy should be a thing is not to pick on same-sex couples. (I also recently saw that Guy’s mother is suffering from Alzheimer’s — I know I’m not alone in praying for the family.) But it should not be ignored that it’s not only Christian conservatives who believe something is wrong in the surrogacy market in the United States and elsewhere. There is a reason a number of European countries have instituted prohibitions.

There are, of course, the awful surrogacy stories in the news. Here’s one of way too many examples of a surrogacy nightmare:

Two strangers arrived at Kyla Simpson’s Florida home in March 2025 to collect the three baby boys she had carried in her womb, brought into the world, and nurtured for four and a half months. They claimed they had been sent by the children’s intended father — a Chinese citizen who had commissioned the surrogacy but had never traveled to the United States.
Kyla refused to answer the door and contacted authorities. The babies had spent several months in her care while the intended father repeatedly delayed retrieving them. Months after the strange visit, tragedy struck when one of the triplets died unexpectedly.
Kyla and her family grieved while cooperating with standard law enforcement and child welfare investigations. They were cleared. When he died, it was Kyla — not the intended father — who arranged his funeral and buried him. The intended father, she says, remained absent.
Kyla grieved and buried the child she had been told was never really hers. Kyla continued raising the two surviving boys at her home in Florida until they were unexpectedly taken away from the only home and family they knew in June of this year. Kyla said she is unsure who exactly is taking care of the boys or where they are located during court proceedings, and she has stated that the intended father is trying to relocate the boys to California and ultimately on to China. . . .
Kyla’s story is not an aberration. It is a warning about an industry that increasingly operates across international borders with little public scrutiny.

More about Simpson’s surrogacy experience can be read here, in a piece by Kallie Fell, a perinatal nurse and the executive director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network and program director of the Paul Ramsey Institute.

Also in surrogacy news:

The London Guardian had a series of surrogacy-advocacy pieces in recent days, including:

‘We need to talk about how difficult it is’: why one couple are pinning surrogacy hopes on Mexico

German conservative politician resigns after pressure over surrogate baby

And a not-so-warm “egg donation” story for the road: A woman on TikTok is contacted by a gal who thinks the woman might be the egg donor who made her possible. The response? “Egg donation is a confidential, anonymous business transaction. I signed my parental rights away 19 years ago. I am not your mother.” She later regretted the harshness of her initial response, but this is the thing: It’s a transaction. It’s an industry. But it’s still human life.

Around National Review

• Liz Murrill & Kristen Waggoner: Doing Nothing about ‘Cooked’ FDA Safety Standards Isn’t an Option

• Wesley J. Smith: Nuns Sue New York over Forced Complicity in Assisted Suicide

• Kamden Mulder: Pro-Life Leaders Urge Republicans to Defund Planned Parenthood

Me:

• New York Nuns vs. the Empire State’s Culture of Death: A video interview with Sr. Catherine Marie, from the Hawthorne Dominicans and Benjamin Fleshman from Becket

• Mocking Women’s Looks Only Makes the Mockers Look Bad

• Antisemitism Is Always Evil

Other Things

• ‘This is a miracle’: Pensacola Navy vet awakens days before funeral

• Chuck Donovan: Horizons of Hope for the Disabled Child

• Brain Surgery Carried Out on Baby in the Womb for the First Time

• Paralympian Jessica-Jane Applegate Shares Major Update on ‘Little Warrior’ Daughter Who Was Born at 23 Weeks

• Stopping Black-Market Abortion Drugs, a video from the Charlotte Lozier Institute

Upcoming

• July 25, 10–11 a.m. (PT), Hope for Brighter Tomorrows Online Prayer and Support Call with Kay Warren — for parents of children with mental illness. Register here.

• July 26 at 8 p.m. ET/PT: CNN’s Jake Tapper Reports in “Ben Sasse Is Going Home,” for The Whole Story With Anderson Cooper

• September 12: The new Gianna’s House in Yonkers, N.Y., will host a charity walk, “Pura Vida: A Walk for Life and Community.” It’s a family-friendly event with picnic options, lunch, games, and music on beautiful suburban grounds for those not up for the walking. Details and register here.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Do keep in touch ([email protected]) — and do something new this week to support a vulnerable human life.

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God bless you.