I was in a mood earlier in the week after watching the president’s last cabinet meeting of the year. I just happened to turn on at the right/wrong time. I know Donald Trump says things, and who knows what he means and what he doesn’t, but words do actually still matter. And he ended by talking about a population of people as “garbage.” No human being is garbage. As I rant about here, once you start determining that about classes and populations, where does it end? And it can’t start. If we don’t value life, we don’t value anything. And for the Christian, it’s all rooted in the imago Dei — that we are made in the image and likeness of God — or it’s all arbitrary and doesn’t mean much of anything.
Celebrities Run on Abortion?
So, I’m pretty sure that someone at the Center for Reproductive Rights is trolling someone at Live Action, or maybe it’s some kind of psychological jujitsu in reverse.
The pro-abortion group keeps posting celebrity clips from a year or more ago in support of abortion, prodding pro-life groups to respond. It was recently Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mac attributing some of the band’s fame to her abortion of a baby she conceived with Don Henley.
This week, the clip was of Maya Hawke on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, shortly after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which threw out Roe v. Wade (she was on June 29, 2022; the decision was issued — well, after the leak — on June 24). The Stranger Things actress is the daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. When she asked her mother for advice about going on The Tonight Show, Thurman told her daughter, naturally, to tell Jimmy Fallon how awesome it was that her sibling was aborted.
Without “abortion access . . . I wouldn’t exist” and “both of my parents’ lives would have been totally derailed if she hadn’t had access.”
She goes on to say “f*** the Supreme Court” twice and says “but we’re going to keep fighting and win like our grandmothers did!”
Live Action responds here.
If you watch the fuller clip, the conversation/segment begins with Fallon telling Hawke that he held her when she was a baby. He said his mother even probably held her.
I’m sorry, but like with Nicks, the whole thing just reeked of unprocessed grief. Generally speaking, you’re not allowed to grieve abortion, because you’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to pretend there is nothing to grieve. This is why there are post-abortion healing ministries, and more people need to know and feel welcome to it.
On Dads and Daughters
Oh my goodness, what a beautiful reflection Caitlin Flanagan has written for The Atlantic on her father. She remembers with wonderful detail going to the movies with him in San Francisco. She explains that he is the reason she writes. “What would I have become without my father? I’d be no one. I’d be nothing.”
She also observes:
We’re running out of stories to tell one another. I’m sure that Kung Fu Panda 4 breaks new ground in the Kung Fu Panda universe, but I also know that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that if you start out with a character you’ll end up with a type, but if you start out with a type you’ll end up with nothing. There used to be a million stories, but today the dead-last subject anyone wants to see a movie about is human nature. Jaws is about a shark, but it’s also about greed and courage. Disaster movies answer the question of how different kinds of people respond to crises. We don’t want to contemplate that question anymore, because we’re letting go of ourselves; we’re exhausted. To pervert Norma Desmond’s famous line: The movies are small, and we’re getting small too.
Things sound like they were never really small with her father.
I didn’t have movie rituals with my dad, but I was pretty much game for anything he was, if it meant spending extra time with him. Caitlin Flanagan lost her father shortly after she started writing, as did I. You never do have enough time. At least we were blessed to have conversations with our fathers. I think of one precious girl, Sabina, who has brothers but lost her dad to that evil cancer before she was even one year old. For all of those little girls, do pray. (The boys, too! But we’re on the topic of fathers and daughters.)
By the way, I remember our late beloved Kate O’Beirne reviewed Flanagan’s 2006 book To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewives
Kate began the review:
Caitlin Flanagan and I have never met, but I knew her mother. She was a classic 1960s housewife—skilled in household tasks, unflappable and frugal, never fretful, utterly devoted to her family while engaged with the wider world. Her daughters happily trotted around after her, “whiling away a childhood leaning on the counters of dry cleaners and shoe repairmen,” rather than expecting her to race them from ballet class to soccer practice. She didn’t care a whit about status and wasn’t flush with cash. Most of us remember her because, as for her daughter, “the work she did was wholly connected to the life we were living.”
I don’t think they ever did meet, but I often think when I read Flanagan that they would have enjoyed one another.
I noticed, by the way, that Flanagan had encouraging words for Ramesh Ponnuru in his cancer battle, when he made his announcement. And so I love her. She’s survived it herself. God bless them and all who don’t have readers to pray for them.
The Heart of the Pro-Life Movement Is Living Life
The heart of the pro-life movement is families — the work you may be doing this very day as a mother or father or aunt or uncle or friend — and accompanying women (and men, when they step up to the plate) in embracing life, for life.
The Supreme Court oral arguments this week in the New Jersey case in which the attorney general went after pregnancy centers just because they are pregnancy centers were actually a wonderful opportunity to highlight the good work that the First Choice clinics do in the Garden State — along with the lifesaving work that pregnancy centers do throughout the country. They are the backbone of the pro-life movement. They give us credibility.
You know what else gives us credibility? Every professed pro-life man and woman making sure the people in their lives know we will walk with them if they find themselves with an unplanned or challenging pregnancy.
There was a pro-life webcast Monday night in advance of the oral arguments during which a young mother of twins named Aisha Taylor talked about the fear she felt when she was starting out as an entrepreneur and found out she was pregnant. The father psychologically tortured her about what an agony single motherhood is, offering to pay for the abortion, because “it’s not like we are playing for keeps,” he told her.
When during an OB-GYN appointment she was told about a local pregnancy center that had free counseling, among other things, she felt a new sense of freedom, realizing she was not alone.
You can hear from her 54 minutes in here.
She also wrote a little of her testimony here.
This is an interview I did with Aimee Huber, who runs First Choice (and with Erin Hawley, from Alliance Defending Freedom, who argued the case before the Court on Tuesday).
There was also a court win on the abortion-pill-reversal front this week. Which reminds me of another recent win, from Becket, in Colorado, and this interview I did with Dede Chism, one of the nurse founders (with her nurse daughter) of the Bella Health and Wellness network there. The war against abortion-pill reversal is actually insane. It involves taking progesterone! It’s about as natural to pregnancy as you can get. If a pregnant woman who has just taken mifepristone actually knows this exists, let her have a second chance, if it’s possible, to have her baby. It’s cruel and vindictive to go after advertising and doing this simple therapy.
By the way, as you may have heard, Clarence Thomas casually outed New Jersey for the hostile campaign it is on. And some of the liberal justices’ questions seemed to make clear the writing was on the wall before the arguments ended. There are links below in “Around NRO.”
Around NRO
• Rick Santorum: Supreme Court Must Stop the Left’s Assault on Pro-Life Pregnancy Centers
• Audrey Fahlberg: Exclusive: White House Asks Pro-Life Groups to Keep Quiet in Obamacare Subsidy Fight
• Wesley J. Smith: Finally, a Suicide Prevention Organization Opposes Assisted Suicide
• Kamden Mulder: With Planned Parenthoods Closing, Pregnancy Centers Are Ready to Fill the Gap
• Michael J. New: New Study Shows Texas Heartbeat Act Reduced the Incidence of Abortion
Me:
• Swiss Suicide-Clinic Founder Kills Himself; U-M Medical School Celebrates Kevorkian
• Former Labour PM Gordon Brown: Put the Brakes on Assisted Suicide in the U.K.
• New York Moves Closer to Assisted Suicide?
• May the Supreme Court Help New Jersey Pregnancy Centers Be Free to Do Their Lifesaving Work
• Court Rules That It’s Okay to Tell Women About Abortion-Pill Reversal
Other Things
• A grand jury in Ohio has mercifully indicted that University of Toledo Medical Center doctor who allegedly forced abortion pills into his pregnant girlfriend’s mouth (he was a surgical resident at the time). He used his estranged wife’s information to obtain the abortion pills, crushed them, and tried to force his girlfriend to take them. She got out of his grip, called 911, and he took the phone and hung up. She eventually got herself to an ER. (As far as I can tell from public reports, no baby was born.)
• Amanda Achtman interviews a Canadian woman named Lovanie about the pain of her grandmother’s assisted suicide.
She says her grandmother was one of the strongest people she’s known. And yet, at the end, she gave up because she was “afraid of seeming weak, even though we were all ganging up to help her.” Even in a big family, with kids and grandkids wanting to help, she felt like a burden. Lovanie says she suffers with mental illness and wonders in the wake of her grandmother’s suicide: “Why should I keep swimming? Why should I just keep climbing? It’s no use if the strongest person in my life chose to give up.” She also says: “I don’t want members of my family to see it as a power move that they can pull whenever times get difficult.” The danger of assisted suicide, of course, she says, is there’s no regretting a “bad mistake” and moving on. It’s over. There is no going back. Assisted suicide “ends everything” and “robs us of hope and strength. Death does not have to be sudden or chemically induced.”
“The dignity would have been for her to stay with her family . . . and realize how much we loved her and cared for her willingly, not as a burden,” she reflects. She says her grandmother’s death was inconsistent with the way she lived her life.
• A helpful new tool for educating and saving lives is this new Baby Oliver animated video from Live Action about fetal development. It’s a companion to the group’s previous Baby Olivia.
• A favorite photo from the pope’s visit to Lebanon this week.
Upcoming/Notices
• You may have seen me plug the GIVEN Institute before. It puts on programs for young Catholic women. I most recently had a fun conversation with Peggy Noonan at a New York City event we were invited to. The GIVEN Institute’s next Leadership Forum is June 24–28, 2026, at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. The application deadline is December 31. GIVEN also is looking for Catholic women to serve as mentors (something I’ve done a time or three and enjoyed). Information here.
• The smart, clever Will Rahn is interviewing Cardinal Dolan in a pub in Manhattan on December 17 for the Free Press. As I link, there still seem to be a few tickets left.
• The Sisters of Life and the Knights of Columbus will have a Life Fest event the morning of the March for Life at National Harbor (January 23). Details here. Information about the march itself here. (Yes, we still do it in the dead of winter! It’s important we do!)
• But, why march for life (still)? Sister Mary Grace explains. (Hint: Every life is sacred. Every life is good. Every life has value.)
• Alliance Defending Freedom has a brief winter journalism academy February 15–17 in Leesburg, Va. “Applicants should be young professionals or college students in the United States pursuing careers in media and communications. Applicants compete for a limited number of seats.” Also: “Alliance Defending Freedom will gladly cover the cost of airfare, lodging, and most meals for accepted program attendees.”
Deadline is January 7. Details here.
• There’s a job opening for an associate dean at Franciscan College in Indiana. As my friend Charlie Camosy puts it: “This is an amazing job for the right person. But it has to be the right person. Could you please share it in your circles, especially if they might have a good associate dean for a new and faithful medical school coming soon to a suburb of Chicago?”
Okay, I’ve gone on too long. Could keep going. There’s always next week! Make sure you’ve signed people up for this newsletter so I’m not talking to myself (and so that The Suits, as Jonah used to refer to the financial side of NR, know you value this kind of content). Sign-up is here.
Email me anytime with ideas, news, speaking requests, or anything else, at klopez@nationalreview.com. Thanks, as always, for your time! We don’t have a lot of it.