First things first: Nuns to the front of the line. They built America’s hospitals and schools. It’s the least we can do to start this pro-life newsletter with gratitude to them on the heels of Labor Day. My friends at the Sisters of Life have a new website for their Visitation missions — the front lines, where they meet abortion-minded women with love, welcoming them into their convents to be loved back into life.
Check out viscenter.org and share it with young people in your life. And all people in your life. The Sisters are not about politics. They can be a bridge in divided times. “There is no Sister of Life without joy,” their founder, Cardinal John O’Connor, said. Democrat or Republican, MAGA or Heaven-Help-Us, we could all use joy. We could even be united by it. And then maybe get to work on replenishing and renewing and rebuilding. Lives. Families. Civilization.
Again, the website is here.
Supernatural Parenting Goals
Antonia Salzano will be at the Vatican on Sunday morning participating in the canonization Mass for her son, Carlo Acutis. That’s right, the Italian computer programmer will officially be a saint in the Catholic Church. If you’re not a Millennial Catholic, you might not have the sticker on your water bottle and all, but the new statue of him with a laptop and the Eucharist, near where he is buried in Assisi, is a reminder that virtue is possible even when surrounded by screens. And canonization suggests virtue of the heroic kind. Something to aspire to. Which is probably a good way to get a child on the right path. For more on Carlo, see here.
A Prescription to Kill and Harm
A mothers-and-sons Zoom call I was just on mercifully interrupted a Senate Finance Committee hearing with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Yes, multitasking. Is there anything more appropriate for writing about life and motherhood?) Senate hearings can simply be the worst. Oh, the grandstanding. Oh, the refusal to even listen to the person you’re supposed to be hearing from. Kennedy was asked about the Department of Health and Human Services’ looking into the safety of the abortion pill cocktail. Not much news, other than a Kennedy’s reporting that the Biden administration wasn’t straight with the safety facts and that investigations are ongoing. Meanwhile, it’s getting close to impossible to keep up with all the news stories, reports, and arrests involving harm done to women as a result of these increasingly unsupervised abortions. Melanie Israel from Heritage has been keeping a list. (Melanie’s chief biographical fact in my book, by the way, will always be that, on the day of oral argument for Dobbs in 2021, she was my photographer.)
Here are just two incidents from Texas this year:
In 2025, Justin Anthony Banta was taken into custody to be charged with capital murder and tampering with evidence. Upon learning she was pregnant, Banta’s girlfriend wanted to keep her child but Banta suggested an abortion. Her child had a strong heartbeat and appeared healthy on an ultrasound when she was about six weeks pregnant in October 2024. Banta allegedly ordered abortion pills online and crushed the pills into her coffee later that day without her knowledge. Several days later she went to an emergency room after experiencing heavy bleeding, discovering that her unborn child was dead. The county sheriff’s office also alleges that Banta remotely reset his phone, which had been seized as evidence, “deleting crucial evidence related to the case.”
In early 2025, Christopher Cooprider’s girlfriend became pregnant with a baby girl. According to a wrongful death complaint, Cooprider consistently pressured her to have an abortion, but his girlfriend refused. Ignoring her repeated objections, Cooprider obtained pills from AidAccess — a website operated by a Dutch doctor, Rebecca Gomperts, who illegally ships pills into the United States from international sources. Text messages in the complaint show him becoming increasingly hostile, and his girlfriend eventually told him to stop texting and harassing her. Eventually Cooprider invited his girlfriend over for a “trust building night.” His girlfriend was about eight weeks pregnant. He laced her hot chocolate with the abortion pills he purchased from AidAccess. According to the complaint, she started cramping and hemorrhaging withing 30 minutes. She scrambled to arrange childcare so Cooprider could take her to the emergency room, but instead he abandoned her and stopped responding to calls and texts. When his girlfriend finally made her way to the ER, it was too late for her baby.
There is much more here.
These are basically instances of back-alley abortions of the kind that abortion advocates have long warned about. Except these are considered freedom and empowerment and health care for women. Lies.
Melanie has also written, in a report earlier this year, on the dangers of chemical abortion.
I Knew I Liked Amy Coney Barrett
This doesn’t always make me popular, but I’m against the death penalty. I nod to Saint Augustine and just war theory and accept that abortion and capital punishment are different things. But they both involve human life.
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is opposed to it, too. In her new book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and the Constitution, according to an excerpt in the Free Press, Amy Coney Barrett writes about her moral objections. But she recalls the case of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and how she joined the Court’s holding that Tsarnaev’s death sentence was valid after the court of appeals had vacated it:
That was not the only course open to me. Given my view of capital punishment, I could have looked for way to slant the law in favor of defendants facing the death penalty. There were, after all, plausible arguments going Tsarnaev’s way — the court of appeals agreed with him, as did three of my colleagues in dissent. Had I voted in favor of Tsarnaev, no one would have known that I did it because I objected to the death penalty rather than because I concluded that Tsarnaev had the better of the argument.
But that would have been a dereliction of duty. The people who adopted the Constitution didn’t share my view of the death penalty, and neither do all my fellow citizens today. Quite the contrary: 27 states authorize capital punishment, as does the federal government.
Barrett says that were she to “distort the law to make it difficult for them to impose the death penalty,” she would be interfering with the voters’ “right to self-government,” but “my office doesn’t entitle me to align the legal system with my moral or policy views.” Moreover, “Swearing to apply the law faithfully means deciding each case based on my best judgment about what the law is, not what it should be.” Barrett admits that she found having to cast the vote “distasteful.” But she believes she did the right thing.
She also, as you might expect, writes about the end of Roe v. Wade, which she voted for. But she didn’t do it as activism. She did it because it was bad law. (It was also bad history and science and morality; it positioned us as a radical outlier in the world.)
And while the media are already dismissing her for pointing out that even liberal lioness Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought the Court had gone too far with Roe, this is true. That was probably one of the reasons Antonin Scalia was such good friends with Ginsburg — she didn’t say things just because the left wanted her to.
Speaking of Ginsburg, if we lived in a sane, civil country, ACB would be celebrated, just as RBG is on the left. After decades of “women can’t have it all” nonsense, she is a real-life inspiration. You can get a degree, you can get married, you can love and excel at home and in the U.S. judiciary. You can keep your values. And you can be radically hospitable. No one is perfect, but Barrett and her family are an example of good people trying to do the right things — some of the best of America. Knowing a little of her story, I can’t help but think of all the women and families whose names we don’t know, whom the Barretts encourage with their grace and resilience.
Shelve the Champagne. Abortion and Planned Parenthood Are Still a Public Menace
I have a little nit to pick with some of my pro-life friends. Just the other day, someone sent me photos of two abortion escorts outside Planned Parenthood in Manhattan. There has been celebrating and thanksgiving about the closing of that particular clinic. So, what’s going on? Well, it’s not gone yet. This was not news to me — you can check their website, make a phone call. Chemical abortion and gender-transition help are still available. Whenever I’m in Lower Manhattan, I still swing by to pray outside — for an end to abortion and in reparation for so much death and destruction. I always pray for miracles of healing for women who have been there over all its years of operation.
As you likely know, there’s an expanding list of Planned Parenthoods closing around the country. Is it because someday the courts might let Congress stop funding them? Is it because abortion pills at CVS and Walgreens and all make abortion clinics a little bit of a relic? A combination of these things. And with the rise and popularity of chemical abortions, Planned Parenthood isn’t making the kind of money it once did on surgical abortions.
Regardless: I caution you. This is not a matter for champagne. Innocents are still being killed. Mothers are still being harmed.
Around National Review
- Michael J. New: “D.C. Late-Term Abortion Facility Halts Performing Abortions“
- “Law and Order and Justice Handmaid“
- “It’s Not MAHA to Follow the Science on Abortion Pills, It’s Simply Honest“
Pulitzer Prize–Winning Defense of Life
Time will be running out soon to join me as I chat with the Pulitzer Prize winner Peggy Noonan about using our God-given talents for good. The New York GIVEN gathering will take place on Saturday, September 27. Details here.
I’m using this event as a best-of-pro-life-Peggy review. In an earlier edition of this newsletter, I cited Peggy on John Paul the Great and on women. Here she is, around the time of the pending Dobbs decision, in a column for the Wall Street Journal, “The End of Roe v. Wade Will be Good for America.”
I am pro-life for the most essential reason: That’s a baby in there, a human child. We as a society cannot accept that we have decided that we can extinguish the lives of our young. We can’t bear the weight of this fact, which is why we keep fighting. Another reason, and maybe this veers on mysticism, is that I believe that the fact of abortion — that it exists throughout the country, that we endlessly talk about it, that children grow up hearing it — has released a kind of poison into the air that we’ve breathed in for 50 years, and it has damaged everything. Including, of course, our politics.
Until Next Time
Please holler anytime with feedback — klopez@nationalreview.com. Send me your pro-life news. Send me your upcoming events. Tell me inspiring stories. Assign me under-the-radar stories. All of it. And: If you did not receive this in your inbox, sign up here to never miss a Lifeline, National Review’s weekly pro-life newsletter.