“When you have an abortion, the take-home packet gives you explicit instructions on what to do if you bleed through two pads per hour,” Sofia Franklyn writes in her new book Daddy Issues. “But nowhere does it include guidance on the emotional clusterf*** that’s to come.”
Franklyn was the founding co-host of the raunchy Call Her Daddy podcast, explicitly heralding women’s sexual power in the least feminine of ways. The podcast was in the news for other things in recent days, but Vanity Fair features an excerpt from Franklyn’s book on the abortion she had in 2023, three years after leaving the podcast. She’s now the host of her own show, Sofia with an F.
“I can usually reconcile the dark corners of my past, but my feelings around my abortion are, in many ways, still pending, and, frankly, it still feels very wrong to share publicly,” she writes. “But I hope putting myself out there will free me from the self-imposed exile and shame.”
She tells an increasingly familiar story in a post-Roe time of widespread abortion-pill access, writing:
I took the pills at home, and weeks later I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror, physically or mentally, and I couldn’t figure out why. I felt crazy. I later learned that there is a physiological, hormonal, neurological chain reaction that occurs. No one prepares you for that part. At the time, all I had were Reddit threads and an off-handed comment my friend made to check my hormones months after. Getting some answers, no matter how disparate, made it less scary.
Daddy Issues is fundamentally a story about being a girl in the world, and I wrote this chapter because I want women to feel less insane. Less alone. I want women to know that other women are having abortions. They are just not talking about it. We aren’t supposed to.
Ramaswamy’s Ad Matters Beyond One Family, Beyond One Election
Look, putting aside whom Ohio voters should elect, Vivek Ramaswamy’s controversial campaign ad using Amy Acton’s mother inadvertently points to an all-too-familiar story: sexual abuse within a family. Especially where a non-relative man living in the home sexually abuses a child.
Darcy Olsen is the founder of The Center for the Rights of Abused Children. She has an op-ed in the Washington Examiner pointing to the bigger-picture significance of the Ohio ad that features the Democratic candidate’s estranged mother calling her a liar. In “Ramaswamy’s ugly Ohio ad points to a crisis in plain sight,” Darcy Olsen writes:
Family members commit about 30% of child sexual abuse, and strangers about 5%. The danger usually isn’t a stranger in a van. It’s someone at the dinner table.
Who walks by your home matters far less than who lives in it. In one landmark study, girls raised with stepfathers were about eight times more likely to be sexually abused than girls raised by their biological fathers: 17% versus 2%. Children living with a parent’s unmarried partner face roughly 20 times the rate of those living with married biological parents.
In the spirit of God writing straight with crooked lines, the upside of the shameful Ramaswamy ad is that some of us are talking about what children suffer and how to keep them safe. If there is anything adults are good for, it ought to be this.
The Jewish Side on Ending Life
I love the publication Mosaic from Tikvah. It brings me back to a gift of a conversation I had with its editor in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Old City Jerusalem the last time I was there, among other things. But that’s for another time.
Devorah Goldman has a piece this week, “Canadian Doctors Are Choosing Death. We Should Choose Life.” In it, she does something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now: give some added attention to the British actress/comedian Liz Carr, who has become one of the most important voices across the pond warning against the dangers of assisted suicide. Carr has a powerful BBC documentary on the topic, among other things.
A few years ago, I actually bought a copy of a necklace she wears: “Better Off Dead.” It’s a conversation starter. (Mine actually broke in international transit, but there was something poetic about the broken arrival, echoing the brokenness of humanity, whether our disabilities be obvious or less so. The value remains regardless of what we’re facing.)
I recommend the entire article, which is a different treatment of what just went down with the defeat of assisted suicide — for now — in England.
The AI Is Pregnant
K-Pop is Korean pop music.
BABYQUEEN is an AI-generated Chinese girl band inspired by K-Pop.
I’m sorry to be so rudimentary here, but this news story is a bit of a mortality check for me. I needed to get some basic information to understand — even though I first learned about it from that great bastion of clickbait “journalism,” the Daily Mail.
So, one of BABYQUEEN’s singers, Mity, has recently announced she is taking maternity leave. In a social media post, Mity reports, with a pink-pajamaed selfie: “I’m pregnant. After much consideration and thorough discussions with the company and my bandmates, I have decided to temporarily leave the group to focus on rest and recovery.”
Apparently, the day before, the group had more generally announced:
“To prioritize her health during pregnancy and prepare for childbirth, she will temporarily suspend all group and individual variety show appearances and stage performances after thorough discussions with the team.” It also urged followers not to “over-speculate about her private life.”
Apparently, this has all gone viral in some Chinese circles, with outrage that women’s reproductive health would be used for entertainment purposes in this AI fantasy creation. The original posts have been deleted, and I’m unclear where this leaves Mity and BABYQUEEN. But at least it’s safe to say they won’t create an abortion storyline if people are already upset about things getting out of hand with a pregnancy?
A Tale of Two Tweets
Josh Shapiro, who will win his second term as Pennsylvania governor on Tuesday, got grief in recent days for a post on X involving his ninth-grade girlfriend.
Yes, ninth-grade girlfriend.
You can see how that was irresistible for people to jump on, suggesting he was involved in something dark. But is that really where our minds are? Looking for evil where it is not, ignoring or exploiting it where it is?
In truth, the post was a sweet photo of him and his wife — they were clearly high-school sweethearts. He wrote: “Who knew kicking off a bus tour would make for a nice date with my ninth-grade girlfriend.” Could it have been worded differently? I guess. It’s social media, though — it is by definition out of context. And there are plenty of grounds to take issue with Shapiro. That he’s been with his wife for decades is a beautiful thing.
I’m much more concerned about a post from a few days before that; he writes:
Abortion is health care.
And those health care decisions should be made by a woman and her doctor — not by the federal government, and certainly not by Donald Trump.
So long as I’m Governor, abortion will remain safe, legal, and accessible here in Pennsylvania. And I will always protect a woman’s fundamental freedom to make her own decisions about her body.
A few things about it: Abortion is the opposite of health care.
Donald Trump doesn’t even pretend to care about abortion anymore. This administration has refused to even address safety concerns about chemical abortion and the fact that what was purported to be a Covid change to allow for pills through the mail for a time has not been revisited six years later. And so we are living in an increasingly Wild West situation where anyone at any time can get themselves abortion pills without a doctor, without proof of pregnancy, without being a woman. So his old talking points meant to scare voters are actually a lie at this point. If you want expansive abortion in America, Trump is not your enemy. The Republican Party doesn’t have ending abortion in America in its platform anymore. Roe v. Wade is over, but it’s easier to get an abortion than ever. Including if you live in states like Texas and Louisiana, where the unborn and their mothers are protected from abortion more than in California or New York (where the governors are all too enthusiastic about exporting abortion).
Around NRO
David Alton, from the monthly print magazine: Why Assisted Suicide Failed in Britain
While traditional conservatives opposed the bill in large numbers from the start, growing numbers of parliamentarians from the left increasingly saw the need to defend the rights of those who face societal disadvantage, whether people with disabilities, the elderly, victims of domestic abuse, or ethnic minorities. After all, a desire to protect vulnerable people from an early death is not confined to any one political camp.
A U.K. government impact assessment warned that structural disadvantages could pressure such people into an assisted death, and that there was a risk that, if the bill passed, a higher proportion of people from ethnic-minority backgrounds in particular would seek an assisted suicide compared with their peers. For some, there was a fear that a likelihood of living in poverty or having inadequate access to care would make an early death desirable.
The plethora of voices willing to join the opposition to the bill was as diverse as it was broad. It included Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, and Sikh leaders. It included Ann Furedi, formerly the chief executive of Britain’s largest abortion provider, who recognized the dangers posed by allowing a sick, vulnerable adult to opt for a premature death under implicit pressure that she was a burden on her family or the health-care system. And it included actress Liz Carr, Baroness Jane Campbell, and Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, a former Paralympic athlete; each of these women used her platform as a disability-rights champion to challenge the assumption that people coping with life-shortening conditions would be “better off dead.” More than 350 disability organizations opposed the bill.
Read the whole piece here.
Wesley J. Smith: Would You Attend an Assisted Suicide?
Michael New: New Polls Offer Hope to Pro-Lifers in Missouri and Idaho
Brooke Stanton: The Earlobe and the Unborn Child
Me:
The Chicago Archbishop’s Cynical Move
Anti-Catholicism Lives with El-Sayed in Michigan
Other Things
There is a beautiful conversation on The Doctor’s Art podcast featuring my friend Dr. Keri Oxley Brenner, a psychiatrist and palliative-care physician at Stanford.
How’s that for demanding, needed work?
In “Healing Those Who Can’t Be Cured,” Keri describes how her time with the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa’s nuns, in Calcutta helped inspire her medical vocation.
The conversation enters the holy ground of accompanying people through suffering: how to be present when you cannot fix what hurts; how prayer can sustain that presence; and how doctors can care for their own emotional wounds and those of their colleagues. Keri also reflects on her own health challenges and the insight they have given her into the uncertainty patients and their families face. It’s a rich, accessible conversation about healing, peace, and the care we owe one another, whatever our background or beliefs.
Patrick Brown in the National Catholic Register: 4 States Could Paint an Unfortunate Picture for the US Pro-Life Movement
Hannah Rowan in the New Atlantis: Should Your Kids Be Born in a Pod?
And Hannah in the Wall Street Journal (She’s one of our friend John J. Miller’s finest, from the journalism program at Hillsdale — a few years out now; her husband, Nic, is, too): Nebraska Won’t Let You Call the Midwife
Marie Cohen & Naomi Schaefer Riley: When children are being neglected, tribal sovereignty has limits.
Why would the federal government take over the child welfare agency on an Indian reservation? After six weeks without an answer from the FBI and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), we have learned the shocking and ugly truth. The tribal agency was knowingly leaving young children in dangerous homes and they were dying as a result.
Elizabeth Black in World: Canadian bill would expand euthanasia to “advance request” cases
Catholic News Herald (North Carolina): Room at the Inn celebrates a culture of life, names new complex
This one from the Arlington Catholic Herald includes a family dear to me and their youngest, Maggie: Two mothers reflect on a challenging prenatal diagnosis
The Catholic Weekly (Australia): Meet the women behind Birdflip’s pro-life campaign
Upcoming & Notable
There’s an ongoing virtual series on prenatal diagnoses sponsored by the McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame. The first happened and can be watched here. The next one happens this coming Tuesday, November 3. Register here to watch live. The panelists coming up are Frank and Catherine Milner, a couple who fought doctors who offered abortion for their son, Philip, when he was diagnosed with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome in utero. Robin Pierucci, M.D., a neonatologist and pediatrician. And Judy Townsend who works with Be Not Afraid (BNA), which has been a support for the Milners. She and her husband also know about life with a prenatal diagnosis of HLHS — including eight surgeries on their son over three years, three of them open-heart surgeries
November 8 is Mother Cabrini Sunday. Click on the link for a toolkit and other details. It’s a Catholic initiative from Springs of Love to promote foster-care and adoption services, inspired by the Christian Alliance for Orphans‘ Pure Religion Sunday, on the same day, for the same purpose.
November 9–13. Pregnancy Help Appreciation Week
November 21. National Adoption Day
December 4-6. Entering Canaan Advent Retreat. “Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room.” Doylestown, Pa. Contact information here. There’s also a sibling retreat in March; details at the same link.
December 3, 2–3 p.m. Eastern. “Where Faith and Disability Meet,” from the National Catholic Partnership on Disability. Virtual. Register here.
January 8–10, 2027. Project Rachel Post Abortion Healing Retreat. Raleigh, N.C. Details here.
Alrighty. There’s so much life to live. Encourage someone on today in some way. Thank you for encouraging us here at National Review by reading and supporting us by subscribing and in the other ways that you can and do. We would be nothing without readers! Thank you for your ongoing insights and communications, including about upcoming events and the exceptional ministries you run and encounter. The news seems extraordinarily bleak most days, but I’ve got a view often of people at their best when confronting the darkness — accompanying others, often strangers, with such great love. Keep in touch and let’s pray for one another! klopez@nationalreview.com.