Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t even ten years old when Rich Lowry first dubbed me National Review’s “egg correspondent.” (A piece that had some staying power — “Eggheads”! — for quite a while was written for the print magazine in September 1998.)
I was the weirdo who kept bringing up reproductive-health-technology news at editorial meetings, going undercover at fertility clinics, and eventually obsessing about in vitro fertilization ads on commuter trains, among other things. During the push for human cloning, I was there. I was even invited on The Daily Show once to talk about it. (I declined the opportunity to have my taped interview — it wasn’t going to be a fair discussion; you may remember the scenarios — be pitted against the compelling testimony of Christopher Reeve or Michael J. Fox, was my assumption). K-Lo’s got some street cred on these matters, dating back a bit, for better or for worse.
August surprises have already included more information than anyone likely wanted to know about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s biological clock. Sunday morning, she was on This Week after starting an online tour of her life and her decision to freeze her eggs. We saw her Saturday with a needle on social media, promising more details from the green room at ABC — the situation basically scripted a question from host Jonathan Karl (which, naturally, he didn’t look delighted about). This may mostly be a political play by AOC, which may, in fact work.
Though, on the other hand, people of different political persuasions — particularly men — do seem to be united in believing this to be a case of TMI.
And as the week went on, women from political dramas real and fictional unexpectedly helped with the general understanding of how this is of political benefit for women, especially — and how we are a nation desperately in need of basic facts about fertility. Monica Lewinsky and actress Allison Janney (who played C. J. Cregg, the White House press secretary on The West Wing; The Diplomat) talked about many things on Lewinsky’s podcast this week: Scientology, addiction, and, I kid you not: the desire for a silent retreat (I have ideas, ladies — please, let’s talk). And, of course, fertility.
Lewinsky, who is 53, has long been marriage-minded, we learn — long before she met a certain president of the United States — Janney, 66, not so much. Janney, though, assumed it would be her story eventually, raised seeing that as the script. She said it wasn’t until it was already about too late that a fertility doctor — Janney was in her 40s — broke it to her that women typically are not getting pregnant into their 50s, which she had assumed.
This is a little pet peeve of mine, I confess: Not even in Catholic private-all-girl-school contexts in recent decades were girls typically prepared for the most obvious things. I’ve gone back to high-school “career days” where girls never ask about marriage and children — even to ask why some if not most of the panel has never had kids.
Bring back shop class and home economics, please!
And, speaking of pet peeves, not only do women not know about their own fertility — something I will safely generalize — the whole of women’s health care is one big scandal of not actually finding what’s wrong with women’s health, but masking unwanted symptoms, often with carcinogens that also can work to prevent pregnancy.
(I’m not even going to rant about abortion as “health care” here.)
Much will continue to be said about AOC, because last I checked, I hadn’t finished her latest egg file, but Caitlin Flanagan summed some things up quite nicely:
The harsh truth is that a 36-year-old who wants a baby should probably start trying to get pregnant now, not freeze her eggs. The terrible, irreducible fact of the matter is that by the time you need to thaw those eggs, it will probably be very hard to get pregnant naturally. When you put off childbearing, even with your eggs on ice, you are more likely to find motherhood is out of reach. This, too, is a decision. There are three things I know about having a baby. The first is that it’s the most important thing you can ever do; the second is that nothing will ever come close to giving you as much joy as a baby; and the third is that it’s a young woman’s game.
When Does Surrogacy End?
A New York Times headline yesterday read “A Fight Over Abortion and Surrogacy Ends With a Baby Born in Texas.”
Permit me a brief quasi-linguistic rant about this terrible, miserable story.
What exactly ended?
A pregnancy, yes. But the story is far from over. And it is completely uncertain what any of this means for the baby who was born on Thursday. His biological “parents” are a couple (man and woman) in California who ordered him and then requested he be a dead baby once they learned he would have hypoplastic left-heart syndrome. It is treatable, but the expected surgeries can go on for months and even years. McKenna West, the surrogate mother, told Live Action that she thought being a surrogate “would be a really awesome way to make extra income for my family, not have to take extra time away from my kids, and get to provide a family the amazing gift of having a child.” She was aware an abortion might be requested if any abnormalities were seen in ultrasounds but said she was assured that those situations are rare.
West says she went from Alaska to Dallas because there were specialists there with a successful track record, and she certainly couldn’t be made to get an abortion there (before national pro-life organizations got involved, she planned on staying with a friend rather than expect to be put up at a hotel).
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton intervened and requested that two hospitals care for the baby boy, outlining state law as it pertains to him so long as he remains in Texas. Alliance Defending Freedom is representing the surrogate, who calls the baby “Gabriel.” She has not had access to him since birth – a restraining order keeping her from representing herself in any way as his mother. As of Friday morning, his legal name is “Rumi” and he is in the custody of the customer-parents, who are present in a Texas hospital where he is being at least temporarily treated.
This is not the only surrogacy legal battle in the news recently — I wrote earlier this summer about a Canadian case involving two men suing because their surrogate mother didn’t have an abortion either; they are arguing that the child they are currently raising as their son should have been aborted.
What profiles in loving parenthood.
At the end of the day, though, all of these individual cases add to a bigger, possibly even more contentious issue: Surrogacy really needs to be banned. And that’s hard for people to say, because most of us know couples who have used surrogates. Hollywood has normalized it, for what it’s worth. Even churches that teach against surrogacy don’t talk about it all that often — priests know who is in the pews, and they probably are likely donors. Some conservative commentators don’t want to go there because there are amiable colleagues who have also used surrogates, quite publicly.
And yet, there is the likelihood that a strange-bedfellows kind of coalition will come together solidly against surrogacy.
“Surrogacy reduces women and children including girls to mere commodities, stripping them of their equality and dignity and encouraging their exploitation and abuse,” Reem Alsalem, special rapporteur on violence against women at the United Nations, said in a report last year.
Kathleen Sloan, a former member of the National Organization for Women’s board, was one of the first liberal feminists to speak out against it, telling me in 2013 that “surrogacy is a stark manifestation of the commodification of women and their bodies.”
Unsurprisingly, the Holy See has been vocal at the U.N., too, on surrogacy as a violation of human dignity.
Infanticide in America
The surrogacy case that wound up with a live child in Texas this week could have been a dead child in Washington State — Alaska doctors weren’t willing to do it at 22 weeks, when it was first requested; there was one scheduled for her in Seattle. News outlets with a preconceived bias toward the customers for the baby tend to do drive-bys assuming Ken Paxton got involved only because he wants to be elected to outgoing Senator John Cornyn’s seat in November. You don’t have to endorse Paxton as a candidate or a moral exemplar to recognize that he prevented an infanticide this week, just as Massachusetts was making it clear in law that a baby can be killed at any point in a pregnancy, for any reason. Defenders of the law will say that it is for rare cases of medical need. No, that was the law before the governor signed the new bill into law. The same baby who was delivered at about 37 weeks with a treatable condition on Wednesday could have been aborted on Tuesday. And he could have been aborted because they decided they really wanted a girl or wanted to guarantee a certain eye color or whatever. That’s the point. Whatever. The question is, are Americans at the point where they are saying exactly that: Whatev — moving on?
“Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said in a 1963 speech on race. (Princeton’s Robert P. George cited it this week in reference to the abortion extremism in Massachusetts — which Ramesh Ponnuru, his former student, notes is not actually new, but the “fig leaf” has been removed.)
And do we care about protecting innocent human life?
No, I don’t think we do, honestly. Not enough. We wouldn’t be dragging our feet at best, so many of us, if we did.
The good news is: Our time is not up. But it’s not infinite. And we don’t know the hour . . .
I share more thoughts about what to do here.
An Unwavering Voice for Voiceless Human Lives
Ann Widdecombe’s funeral Mass was this week. You may recall she was the former British member of Parliament — pro-life, Catholic convert — whose head was bashed in 21 times at her home on July 8. Coinciding with the requiem Mass, Bishop Fintan Monahan of Killaloe in Ireland, wrote of her:
Among the causes closest to her heart was the defence of unborn life. Ann Widdecombe became one of Britain’s best-known pro-life advocates, consistently opposing abortion and speaking passionately for those who, in her words, had no voice of their own. She also opposed assisted suicide, believing that every life, regardless of age, illness or disability, possessed an inherent dignity that should never be measured by utility or convenience.
These were not always easy positions to hold in modern politics, and they frequently attracted criticism. Yet she never wavered. For her, these issues were matters of conscience rather than party politics, rooted in a belief that the protection of life was one of society’s highest responsibilities. . . .
In today’s world, where compromise is often mistaken for conviction and popularity can eclipse principle, her example stands as a reminder that integrity still matters. Whether one agreed with her or not, Ann Widdecombe remained true to herself, true to her faith and true to her conscience.
May she rest in the peace of Christ whom she served so faithfully, and may her example continue to encourage all who believe that public life is at its best when guided by courage, conviction and an unwavering respect for the dignity of every human life.
Around National Review
Ramesh Ponnuru: On Late-Term Abortion, Massachusetts Removes the Fig Leaf
I know I linked to this above, but he repeats a few important things we all need to bear in mind:
There are far more unborn children killed late in pregnancy than there are, say, kids killed by gun homicide.
The evidence we have, some of it collected by researchers who favor legal abortion, indicates that most abortions after the 20th week are elective, not based on risks to the mother’s physical health or on severe abnormalities.
It is hard even to imagine circumstances in which killing a child in the late stages of pregnancy, rather than delivering the child early, would be needed to save a mother from death or physical harm.
The defenders oppose any effort to limit abortions even late in pregnancy to the circumstances they invoke to defend them — as the new Massachusetts law illustrates.
Wesley J. Smith:
Commercial Surrogacy Turns Women into Machines, Babies into Products
We Should Try to Prevent All Suicides
Michael New: The Pro-Life Movement’s Blue State Problem
Me:
Brad Pitt and Matters of Life and Death
Massachusetts Makes Way for More Death
Nun Sense: Sometimes a Life of the Fullest Freedom Is Mistaken for Sexism
Hawthorne Sisters Fight for Freedom — and Life
Fashionable Antisemitism at the Met Museum
AOC and Her Eggs: A Cynical — and Winning — Play?
Mary Eberstadt’s Upcoming Novel, The Washington Zoo
Other Things
EWTN News: Springfield Bishop Thomas Paprocki joins doctors, nursing home in suit against Illinois suicide law.
Emma Waters: AOC’s Illogical Case for Egg Freezing.
Christopher Kaczor: Alasdair MacIntyre on Abortion.
Brian Caulfield: Brain Death at the DMV.
And Then There Were None is Abby Johnson’s ministry to men and women who work in the abortion industry. This is their “Quitter” of the month, a “Clinic Closer,” Sarah Eubanks.
John Fechtel: Is Your Embryo Harvard Material? (“Embryo screening startups like Herasight pressure parents to help kids compete from the very first moments of life.”)
Only One in Five U.S. Young Adults With Advanced Cancer Receive Palliative Care as Part of Treatment, Study Shows. (“American Cancer Society researchers suggest integrating palliative care earlier and more consistently into routine oncology care is needed.”)
Sarah C. Williams: “Perfectly Human” — a mother writes about her daughter, Cerian:
We named our third daughter Cerian, Welsh for “loved one.” Cerian’s life ended in the hour before she was born. At that moment the presence of God came powerfully into the hospital room. It was unlike anything I have ever experienced, before or since. Weighty, intimate, holy, the room was full of God. Everything inside me stilled; I hardly dared breathe. His presence was urgent and immediate and I knew with certainty that God had come in his love to take a tiny deformed baby home to be with him. There would be no painful bone crushing for Cerian, only the peaceful wonder of God’s enfolding presence.
Upcoming
Applications just opened for the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute’s (CCAI) Foster Youth Internship (FYI) Program. The deadline is November 1.
September 21 is the Pennsylvania March for Life in Harrisburg.
October 2 is Ohio’s, in Columbus
October 8 is the New Jersey one, in Trenton
October 9 is the North Dakota march in Bismarck.
(The information for the official marches in the states is here.)
October is Respect Life Month, an annual tradition in the U.S. as designated by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. There is a resource page. This year’s theme is “Mary, Mother of God.”
There is a preparatory webinar for anyone interested on August 27 at 8 p.m. RSVP here.
Respect Life Sunday is October 4
Thank you for reading — please do come again. And send me your news and events and what you’re doing for life and how I might be able to help you.
God bless — please help — us!