The next few days will include celebrations and wakes. Some pro-life groups are having D.C. events to mark the end of Roe v. Wade four years ago on June 24. Abortion advocates think of the day differently.
And, truth be told, pro-life Americans have mixed feelings on the matter.
There is no doubt, from a historical perspective, that Roe v. Wade needed to end. I have a blow-up of National Review’s “End Roe” cover that Ramesh Ponnuru and I both hoisted as we walked around the March for Life four years ago, praying that it would be our last January March with Roe as the Supreme Court–imposed abortion law of the land — abortion was legal in all three trimesters of pregnancy, even though that wasn’t always widely known. As that issue of the magazine pointed out, Roe was bad law, science, history, morality, health — you name it.
Of course, now that it’s over, there is a bit of a mess. But it’s one where there is a fighting chance to make good law — even as there are seemingly endless lies and miscommunications and outright deadly propaganda infecting the decisions even of doctors. If a doctor is refusing to treat the sepsis or cancer of a pregnant woman, it’s not because of a pro-life law. It’s likely because of media and even legal confusion.
Meanwhile, beyond law and policy, women need the pro-life movement — and all the time. Abortion advocates have a bit of an advantage: They just need to get to a woman in her most desperate moments. We need to walk with her early and often and for life, quite literally. You may be well aware of the fact that I love to talk about the Sisters of Life, whose work is to serve God and His Creation: human lives. The sisters not only walk with women but invite them into a convent to live with them. (And pray with the sisters if you want; there is no coercion on any front with the Sisters of Life.)
One of the solutions to the question of What Now? comes from the mission and priorities of Her Plan (Her Pregnancy and Life Assistance Network). Her Plan does two main things: helps helpers help women, and helps raise up more helpers.
In recent months, I’ve been to pro-life clinics in Nashville where Her Plan is intensifying its work on the front lines. Her Plan has made it possible for a full-time, trained, and continuously formed caseworker to be dedicated to the specific needs of each client who finds her way to them.
Have a listen to my conversation with executive director Autumn Christensen about what Her Plan is all about, here. God does not leave us alone in life, and the pro-life movement had better never consider leaving women alone.
Adopting Life-Giving Love
“Whoever saves a single soul, Scripture accounts it as if he had saved an entire world. And whoever destroys a single soul, Scripture accounts it as if he had destroyed an entire world,” says Francis Maier, quoting the Talmud this week as he gives thanks to a scared young woman and her ne’er-do-well ex-boyfriend. Francis hopes that they’ve both done well, because they did good: She chose adoption and gave Francis and his wife their second son.
He writes:
In the hospital waiting room, that autumn night, a nurse finally came along to fetch my wife and me. And in that moment, the roads that had briefly brought us together with Jack — the baby’s natural father — parted ways. He grabbed my hand and thanked us, but stayed behind. We went ahead to meet the newborn. When we came back later, he was gone. We never saw him again.
As for the baby: Well, as the days flowed on into the first months of his life, and we held and played with him night after night, our unexpected gift from God, he seemed (at least to me) to have his mother’s eyes, the eyes of the mother who would raise and love him — my wife’s eyes.
All of the above happened nearly half a century ago. Our son is a grown man now. He has a good job, a gifted, beautiful wife, a ferociously talented son of his own, and a daughter, Veronica, who owns his heart.
And about Veronica, his granddaughter — a life that birth mom made possible by not going through with an abortion, as friends encouraged her to — he writes:
“Vero” is wheelchair bound. She was born severely disabled. She can’t speak. She can’t feed or clean herself. Yet beneath those burdens is a being with a distinct personality, a young woman with a forever purpose in the mind of God, conscious of the world, with her own likes and dislikes, joys and frustrations. Now 21, her smile can light up the room. Her displeasure can be equally vivid. But she knows that she’s loved, and watching the everyday devotion — the unapplauded heroism — of her parents is a master class in what it means to be human for anyone who enters the family’s orbit.
I encourage you to read the whole column. I also encourage you to read regularly, if you don’t already, The Catholic Thing website. It’s not fancy. I can’t imagine that its editor, Robert Royal, has much of a budget for it. But it’s been around, and it’s reliable. I’m fond of Francis’s column, as well as the Sunday Gospel reflections by Father Paul Scalia every few weeks, and so much more. He’s even published yours truly now and again over the decades. You don’t have to be Catholic — just have an interest in faith and reason and truth and love.
You sure get love from Francis and Suann Maier — I was blessed to see them for a moment last week at the Becket Fund dinner at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Becket brings together some of the most wonderful people. My table included Clare Lai, for instance, the daughter of Jimmy Lai, imprisoned in Hong Kong for insisting on freedom. I could not help but dream that night — in a hotel room that by some divine or Kimpton gift had a wonderful window view of Independence Hall — about Jimmy Lai being the Becket Canterbury Medal honoree next year, accepting in person.
Ireland’s Abortion Vote
So Ireland has seen better days. I was reminded this week of how I was once at a lunch with the late Kate the Great O’Beirne. We were with a prospective presidential hopeful at the time who was going on about how wonderful Ireland is because it had just adopted a flat tax. “Too bad it’s post-Christian,” said Kate, daughter of a New York pub owner, deflating the ode to the Emerald Isle.
She would have been heartbroken to learn that this week the parliament there voted to remove a three-day waiting period for abortions.
Irish politicians have voted in favour of removing the three-day mandatory wait for an abortion in the Republic of Ireland.
The vote in the Dáil (Irish parliament) on the Sinn Féin bill was carried by 86 votes to 70.
Currently there is a three-day waiting period between GP consultations and a termination up to 12 weeks.
The bill is now expected to go before the health committee for further scrutiny.
The Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) and Tánaiste (Irish deputy prime minister) voted in favour of the bill.
This was a sensible calling-out of Sinn Fein by independent member (Teachta Dála) Carol Nolan. Among other things, she points to the waiting period giving woman “time and space,” often when facing coercion. She called it “the last remaining safeguard” for women — and their babies — when it comes to abortion. She focused on the “moral incoherence” of Sinn Fein’s talking about the future of Ireland when they are so eager to eliminate the children who would be the future Irish people.
While we’re over in Ireland, this short video caught my eye: an abortion advocate insisting that Saint Brigid was . . . an abortionist (yeah, no). It’s all bizarre and jarring, especially that she considers abortion a “miracle.” A “miracle” is, by secular definition, something unusual or extraordinary. Abortion — especially in this day of abortion pills through the mail — is essentially ubiquitous. The sooner we acknowledge this in the West, the sooner we have a chance to make the culture more hospitable to life. As long as we largely ignore what’s happening behind closed doors — and without medical oversight — the more we are killing our future. Both here and across the pond.
Gratitude Coalition
If you know someone who chose adoption, just do something kind. Surprise her with flowers. You don’t even have to tell her why. It could have been decades ago. Maybe you walked with her. Maybe she confided in you.
Same with a dude. Maybe the birth mother and father were fully involved in the decision. Maybe he stepped up to the plate to encourage life. For a man, what’s the equivalent of getting a woman flowers? Baseball tickets, depending on where you live? When I asked on social media, a hardcover book and a gift certificate for a lawn-mowing break were also decent suggestions.
Am I greedy to not mind the occasional surprise flowers and a hardcover book?
Back to the point: Mother’s Day, Father’s Day. Any day is a good day to remember the sacrifices that people have made to make sure life has a chance. Foster parents are often not only underappreciated but treated terribly, as Naomi Schaefer Riley has kept her eye on. When you are an adoptive parent — especially from foster care — you are probably dealing with known and also unknown traumas. I saw one of these precious dears just last week, my godson Noah, a miracle whom many readers are familiar with. There are the realities of birth mothers whose children wind up in foster care — we are grateful to them because they didn’t kill their kids, even though some of them have put their kids through hell.
We need to be sensitive too, that there are so many walking wounded who have had abortions. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can hurt. Every day can — and probably does, in subtle and dramatic ways. There’s not much we can say and do other than love one another and be aware of these things when we talk about neuralgic issues. If you’re a longtime reader, you know this drill. I’m always available to talk civil-communications principles, speaking about intimate issues with love. I’m no expert in it, but I certainly pray to practice it. Because these aren’t mere political issues and headlines. They are the stuff of real lives — more common than we admit, and becoming more hidden every day.
BraveLove is a good place to start if you want to support birth mothers and don’t have ready — or at least obvious — access to one.
Around National Review
Michael New:
• New Gallup Poll Shows Stability in Public Attitudes Toward Abortion
• New #WeCount Data Show Slight Abortion Increase in 2025
• Ed Whelan: “This Day in Liberal Judicial Activism” remembered Bill Clinton’s nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to SCOTUS on June 14.
• Wesley J. Smith: The Health-Care Lexicon Is De-Professionalizing the Practice of Medicine
• Abigail Anthony: ‘Demonic Chapter’: How ‘Cultural Sensitivity’ Led to the Systematic Abuse of Thousands of British Girls
Me:
• Refunding Planned Parenthood in America?
Other Things
Over in England, the much-debated assisted-suicide bill has returned. It had passed the House of Commons last summer but failed in the House of Lords.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito dissented when the Court decided not to take up a college free-speech case involving a flier by a Students for Life chapter — they were censored for having Defunding Planned Parenthood placards on them. Alito hopes that a similar case will be taken up in the future.
Oregon Representative Suzanne Bonamici is among over 80 House Democrats upset that the new Moms.gov website directs pregnant women to pro-life pregnancy centers, so they can be the mothers they already are.
Agence France-Presse writes, “34 fetuses found in Polish doctor’s garden”:
A Polish doctor has been taken into custody after 34 human fetuses were found buried in the garden of her former home, the authorities said on Monday.
Magdalena H. — a 57-year-old medical pathologist with no previous criminal record — is suspected of using the fetuses to perform experiments and now faces up to 12 years in prison.
Live Action: NICUs are celebrating soccer fever with adorable outfits for their premature patients.
Upcoming
• Heartbeat International is in court this coming week in California. The government there is suing the organization for providing women with the choice/option of reversing a chemical abortion with progesterone — just about the most natural treatment for a woman there is in nature. If you pray, pray that more women (a) never have to get to the point of abortion-pill reversal and (b) know it’s an option if they do take the first pill in the chemical-abortion cocktail. It’s somewhat miraculous when a girl or woman even knows that you can reverse the process once it has started. And California is not the first state and won’t be the last to try to keep them from finding out — you know, actually closing off access to choice.
• The Human Coalition is hosting a sandwich lunch reception in Washington, D.C., marking the fourth anniversary of the Supreme Court Dobbs decision. Speakers will include a mother and her daughter who were helped by Human Coalition, which serves more than 500,000 abortion-seeking mothers a year, according to the invitation. It’s June 24 at 12:30 p.m. at the Conservative Partnership Center, 300 Independence Avenue in D.C. RSVP by June 22 here.
• Ed Whelan from the Ethics and Public Policy Center — and longtime National Review Online contributor — is looking for judicial-confirmation testimonies. He explains here.
Last Things
Have a listen to my Father’s Day interview with Mary Eberstadt about a great American man, her stepfather, Roy. He served in the Battle of Okinawa, and I think hearing about him will give you a lot of hope. Watch/listen on YouTube here.
Next week marks four years since the Supreme Court Dobbs decision that ended Roe v. Wade. It is, as they say, one of those I’ll-always-remember-where-I-was moments. I had the opportunity to tell a room of 200 or so women — most of them under 30 and offline for a forum put on by the GIVEN Institute — about the news. I remember encouraging everyone not to take a pop-champagne-corks approach to the historic milestone, but to instead pray that we rise to the occasion. Those are both things we still need to be working on, big time.
I’ll have more about Her Plan and other things in the coming days on National Review’s website. Meanwhile: Let me know if you’re doing anything to mark the occasion. And what more you’re aiming to do. Make America’s 250th count on this front. We need to end abortion in America with a revolution of love.
Which, as it happens, is what Mary Eberstadt’s story of her stepfather is about.
Holler on these or any other things anytime — Klopez@nationalreview.com.
And thank you, as always, for reading. More to come.