It’s one of those strange days today. As you well know, it’s been 25 years since the September 11 attacks on the United States.
As the New York police commissioner commented earlier this week, there’s some clarity that has been lost.
Some clarity, however, is inscribed in the three memorials and is read every year as we remember each individual victim: There were ten unborn children murdered that morning by terrorists. Most of them were killed in New York, but one was at the Pentagon, and another in Shanksville, Pa.
Some congressmen even argued that the unborn children should have been considered as full victims for purposes of the national victim-compensation fund.
Let’s remember them, just briefly:
Deanna Lynn Galante and her unborn son, Matthew.
Died in the North Tower of the World Trade Center at age 32. She was six weeks away from maternity leave.
Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas and her unborn child.
She was three months pregnant when they died aboard United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. She had been on standby, returning from her grandmother’s funeral.
She was able to leave a message for her husband, Jack: “I just wanted to tell you I love you. We’re having a little problem on the plane. . . . I just love you more than anything, just know that. . . . I’m not uncomfortable and I’m okay . . . for now. . . . I just love you. Please tell my family I love them too. Bye, honey.”
According to one report, Jack saw the blinking red light on the answering machine and realized that
“what she was trying to do was protect me, if things didn’t work out. . . . It was a kind of a message in a message. She stopped herself twice when she said ‘I’ll,’ as we all do like to say, ‘I’ll call you back.’ Because she wasn’t sure.”
Images on the news showed another plane crash. This time near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Jack saw the smoking crater and burned trees.
No one could have survived that, he thought.
“It was surreal and it was shocking,” he said. “I mean it dropped me to the floor. ‘She’s, she’s gone. Our baby is gone.’”
Jennifer L. Howley and her unborn child.
She was five months pregnant when they died in the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
Helen Crossin Kittle and her unborn child.
She was five months pregnant when they died in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Vanessa Lang Langer and her unborn child.
She was four months pregnant when they died in the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
Patricia Ann Cimaroli Massari and her unborn child.
She found out that morning that she was pregnant. They died in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
As captured in the New York Times:
Patricia and Louis Massari had just learned that morning that she was pregnant with their first child. They were talking on the phone when the first plane hit, very near her office. Mrs. Massari said, ”Oh my God,” and the connection was cut forever.
”She had seen something, she felt something,” Mr. Massari said. ”I kept saying, ‘Not now, not my wife, not just when we heard this news about the baby.”’
Renée A. May and her unborn child.
They died on American Airlines Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon; she was a crew member. She was reportedly seven weeks pregnant but had not yet been able to share the news with her family.
Sylvia San Pio Resta and her unborn child.
Died — as did her husband — in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. She was seven months pregnant.
Rahma Salie and her unborn child.
Salie was seven months pregnant. She and her husband, Michael Theodoridis, died on American Airlines Flight 11, which hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Dianne T. Signer and her unborn child.
She was three months pregnant and died in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. She was getting married that coming Saturday.
Jimmy Breslin wound up writing about the Mass they had that Saturday at her parish instead:
At the altar, somebody got up and said he was sorry that there was no wedding and that he missed Dianne and prayed they would find her and he thanked the people for coming.
This was the first time that people in St. Pancras could recall a woman dying in war and leaving her partner mourning. Through the wars the neighborhood knew, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the man always died and the woman carried the flag home. Now the woman dies and the man holds a mass for her. Danny Collins wondered if this would be the way of the new war.
After the mass, the fiancé, Paul Mauceri, said he had known Dianne Signer for 14 years. He is a carpenter. On Tuesday, as part of union participation, he was a poll watcher at a voting place in Hillcrest. The radio was on. The announcer reported that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. He went to Manhattan and started looking for Dianne Signer, the girl he was supposed to marry.
Ten years after the attacks, Newsday reported:
“I’m so happy the baby is mentioned,” said [Dianne] Signer’s mother, Patricia Signer, 68, of Middle Village. “Because that baby will always be in my heart.”
Acknowledging the unborn underscores how deeply the attacks devastated families and their futures, said 9/11 memorial president Joe Daniels.
“It’s a special part of the memorial,” he said. “It reinforces that message about the whole project that the folks were just like us, that they were about to start these lives. . . . It reminds us that they were who we are.”
He said memorial officials asked victims’ next of kin about the prospect of noting pregnancies after learning that Smith’s unborn child was mentioned on the 1993 bombing memorial that was destroyed on 9/11.
The Oklahoma City National Memorial honoring victims of the 1995 bombing is another precedent. It lists three unborn children under the names of mothers-to-be in the Field of Empty Chairs.
There were likely more . . . pregnant victims of the 9/11 attacks, though not all their families would have known about pregnancies and not all would have wanted the fact mentioned, Daniels said.
Brian Howley said Wednesday that his late wife, Jennifer, and their unborn child will be included in the annual reading of the names of the dead on Sept. 11. Louis Massari, whose wife, Patricia, 25, of Glendale, Queens, learned on the morning of 9/11 that she was pregnant, told Newsday in 2002 that the couple had cried tears of joy before she went to work at the World Trade Center and never returned.
“Two things were taken from me on that day,” the then-Lynbrook resident said. “I was looking forward to being a father.”
Patricia Signer said yesterday she envisioned her unborn grandchild would inherit Dianne’s thick red mane, vivid blue eyes and vivacious nature. She said she finds solace in caring for two great-nieces who were named for her late daughter: Kayla Dianne, 8, and Emily Dianne, 7.
“I was so looking forward to baby-sitting that baby,” she said, noting she still mourns the grandchild she never knew.
The memorial at Ground Zero in New York includes the name of Monica Rodriquez Smith and an acknowledgement of her unborn child. They were murdered during the bombing of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993. It was her last day at work before her maternity leave, and she only went in for her baby shower. She and her husband had named their son who died that day Edward. She was born in Ecuador, and her husband described her as “the embodiment of the American Dream.” He said she was “a vivacious, outgoing person who was full of energy. She was the life of the party. At the same time, she was a natural mom to the people around her.”
Abortion Pills in America: Ongoing Efforts to Protect Women from Additional Misery and Abuse
On Friday, a Texas orthopedic surgeon’s medical license was revoked for prescribing an “abortive” medication to a patient he’d had sex with.
On Wednesday, there was a Fifth Circuit hearing in New Orleans involving pills going through the mail from California to Louisiana.
Madeleine Kearns, a National Review alumna, has a characteristically excellent piece in the Free Press, “When Abortion Pills Become the Weapons of Abusers.”
“There was so much blood. They had to change the sheets, and it was all over my clothes, all over the bed,” Jona Affholder told Maddy. “It was probably the most humiliating thing that I have been through: leaving the hospital in a gown because I couldn’t put my clothes back [on].”
Her boyfriend, a medical doctor in Ohio, forced an abortion by shoving crushed pills in her mouth. He had obtained them by using his estranged wife’s identity.
This was 2024. It’s even easier to get pills in your hands now, woman or man. Pregnant or most obviously not.
In the midst of her reporting, Maddy found “that nonprofits built to protect women . . . seem reluctant to grapple with” the danger of abusers making use of abortion pills.
The availability of abortion pills is, frankly, a result of abortion groups taking advantage of Covid. That’s why a woman doesn’t need even a telehealth appointment. That’s why we can get pills by mail. I honestly don’t know if this can ever be rolled back by regulation or courts. Even if it is, the pills are out there. What we need is a sea change of education and virtue in the culture. That’s not a court case, though I’m praying the cases at least help on the awareness front. We must not let the suffering of courageous women like Rosalie Markezich, the plaintiff in the Louisiana case, be in vain.
Around National Review
• Ed Whelan: Virginia’s Amendment 1 Is Extreme and Deceptive
Wesley J. Smith:
• ‘World Suicide Prevention Day’ Hypocrisy
• Big Money to Be Made Assisting Suicides
• Suicide Rates Among Girls Increase
Me:
• Let’s Prevent Suicide! Let’s Legalize Suicide! Britain Currently Makes No Sense
• Let’s Never Get Over a Mother Viciously Killing Her Children
• Remember When Bill Clinton Wanted an ABC 9/11 Miniseries Shut Down?
• Mother Teresa Is Looking at You
Other Things
Chicago Tribune: Federal judge denies bid to block Illinois’ medical aid-in-dying law from taking effect Saturday
A federal judge on Thursday denied disability rights advocates’ request to block an Illinois law going into effect this weekend that lets terminally ill patients obtain prescription medication to end their lives.
The ruling came in a federal lawsuit filed earlier this year by two disabled patients, a doctor and several disability and patients’ rights organizations. They allege the state’s End-of-Life Options for Terminally Ill Patients Act violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, which bars discrimination against people with disabilities; the Affordable Care Act, which regulates healthcare costs; and the plaintiffs’ equal protection under the 14th Amendment.
This is nearly identical to what happened in New York days before our assisted-suicide law went into effect. Matt Valiere from the Institute for Patients’ Rights talked with me about the equal-protection argument last month here.
In surrogacy news this week, McKenna West, the Alaska surrogate mother who refused to abort the baby she was carrying, has asked the Supreme Court to intervene in her custody battle with the couple who first ordered the child they are now the legal parents of. West wants to ensure that he gets the medical interventions he needs; the parents will not guarantee that.
For a longer treatment of surrogacy, Helen Lewis writes in The Atlantic:
In my experience, many liberal Americans are surprised to discover that their country is an outlier in its enthusiasm for commercial surrogacy. In Britain, where I live, a ban on the practice enjoys substantial support among feminists, who worry about the power differential between paid surrogates and wealthy would-be parents. (Altruistic surrogacy, in which the surrogate carries a baby solely out of generosity, is less controversial and is permitted.) A recent UN report went even further, declaring that commercial surrogacy “constitutes the sale of children, which is a crime,” and that “surrogacy arrangements can amount to or resemble slavery.” In one recent scandal, Thai women who answered an advertisement for work as surrogates in the nation of Georgia had their passports confiscated and were coerced into donating their eggs.
Because so much can go wrong, every country in the European Union has banned commercial surrogacy. France’s centrist liberal president, Emmanuel Macron, has described the practice as “not compatible with the dignity of women.” . . .
In general, Europeans think of Americans’ enthusiasm for paid surrogacy the way we regard their fondness for guns and capital punishment: inexplicable. The piquant difference, however, is that surrogacy is a cause of the American left rather than the right.
Women are taking the abortion pill well beyond the FDA limit
U.S. Marshals recover 79 missing children in Ohio operation
Fox News: ‘You’re Fired’: Nearly 40 pro-life groups urge Trump admin to cut off Planned Parenthood funds
Upcoming
• September 16: Giving Permission to Grieve: Incorporating Exceptional Bereavement Care After a Reproductive Loss — a webinar hosted by Wisconsin Right to Life and Dr. Cara Buskmiller. Register here.
• October 9–10: Wisconsin Right to Life Pro-Life Summit, Wausau.
• Applications are open for Live Action’s North Star Fellowship through November 20. From the description:
Through academic formation, an in-person summit, mentorship, and a capstone project, fellows deepen their understanding of the issues shaping the pro-life conversation while cultivating the relationships and practical skills necessary to influence culture within their own fields.
That’s all for now. Please go do something lifegiving. Preferably without screens.
God bless you.