She hasn’t finished school.
A young woman has dreams.
And as biology would have it — the agony of “pregnant people” aside — she’s left with the consequences of a night of passion. He has no intention of sticking around to be a father.
She’s already in debt, too. Her friends, her family — just about every signal points to the same thing: End the problem.
We’ve heard euphemisms for so long about choice and women’s reproductive freedom and basic women’s health care that the idea that she would be eliminating a human life — her own child — really is not something she’s expected to think about.
The fact of the matter is that women do raise children and fulfill dreams. In fact, somewhere along the way, being a mother may have been one of them. While “having it all” is a bit unrealistic, giving birth does not necessarily mean she’ll never get her high school diploma or finish her college degree or get the job she’s been working toward since prep school.
She just needs people to encourage, guide, and support her.
We are not meant to be alone.
And pregnant women with dreams, as simple as finishing high school or more elaborate or creative, are not alone.
Her Plan is the best new example of this.
This week marks four years since the Supreme Court decision in the Mississippi Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that finally threw out Roe v. Wade after half a century.
So what’s happening now?
The answer from Her Plan is to give already successful pro-life pregnancy centers additional resources — and extensive training and ongoing oversight — to dedicate time to the mother. She may have chosen to raise her child. She may have more than one child, without a father in the picture. She may have chosen adoption. The work of Her Plan doesn’t stop once that decision has been made, and the baby is outside of the womb and home.
I chose a generic example of a high school diploma because that was one of the first Her Plan success stories in Nashville, where they’ve been running a pilot program. Give a center the financial ability to hire a full-time caseworker to help women with their plans for life, and you may just see amazing grace at work. They already have — and the pilot has been running for a bit less than a year.
There’s also a piece of Her Plan that helps anyone discern what more of a role they might have in the pro-life movement post-Dobbs. Take a look at the website, take the quiz, download the app. Hear what Her Plan’s executive director, Autumn Christensen, has to say, here. This is the pro-life movement after Dobbs. This is where the pro-life movement needs to be.
Your Life Matters — However It Came to Be
I find it interesting to see how algorithms work. At some point yesterday, I noticed Brooke Shields talking with Mika Brzezinski about reproduction — IVF and a supposedly pro-life-imposed culture of fear after Dobbs, specifically, but not exclusively. After the actress talked with pride about her daughter’s reproductive activism, they discussed generalized threats against women’s health care. Women aren’t getting the care they need, they said, bringing up examples that we continue to her about: miscarriage care being withheld and other instances of, frankly, medical malpractice — not the result of pro-life laws.
How can this be?
That’s an important question. And it’s not getting an honest hearing at the moment.
It turns out the interview is from 2024 — I have no idea if I watched it at the time, but it’s still the mood people are in. I assume it popped up on Facebook because I’ve been reading and writing about some recent medical scenarios that should not have been complicated for doctors to deal with. But there is a culture of fear around certain reproductive experiences — and the most brutal of them. The attacks on Republican Congresswoman Kat Cammack this week are a prominent example. But she is far from alone. A Texas woman filed a complaint this week, having gone to multiple Texas hospitals and being told they couldn’t help her for fear of mysterious post-Roe repercussions.
As Dr. Ingrid Skop has said early and often: Pro-life laws aren’t keeping any woman in America from getting medical treatment. It’s the hospital administration that is buying into propaganda. Don’t make the scare tactics a self-fulfilling abortion-industry prophecy. It’s actually in the hands of the doctors. And we should support doctors giving women the actual health care they need.
Dr. Skop talked with me about such things recently, here.
Attacking a Republican Woman for Getting Health Care and Living to Talk About It
As I mentioned earlier, Florida Representative Kat Cammack is getting hell — not for the first time — for talking about her brutal 2024 ectopic pregnancy. According to some on the left, she should be recanting her pro-life position because she wanted doctors to stop her bleeding and care for her. Abortion supporters want to insist she got an abortion. Her baby was already not going to survive. Making sure she doesn’t die, too, is not the same as SHOUT YOUR ABORTION. In no small part because SHE DIDN’T HAVE ONE.
I wrote about it a bit here. She posted this heartbreaking (and maddening) read later in the week. To make this woman defend herself for getting health care and for fighting for the lives of the unborn and their mothers is truly unconscionable.
And yet, I’ll say this, because I think it’s important. If you watch the interview Cammack did with Tara Palmeri that stirred up controversy this week, it’s clear to me that Palmeri is honestly surprised by Cammack’s humanity. The congresswoman had a MAGA hat on one of the shelves behind her, and yet she still seems like a decent person. The reason she was doing the interview in the first place was to talk about bipartisan efforts to end the creepy culture — sexual harassment-wise — on Capitol Hill. She wants the place to be safe for young interns and everyone else.
Yes, even people who vote Republican — even people who have found themselves supporting Donald Trump for one reason or another — live and love and hurt and have something to offer the world. This seems obvious. But it really, in the day of people breaking up friendships over politics, is a revelation to many.
Watching Morning Mika over the years, I’ve often thought: Get a few good people who see one another as fellow creations of God, but disagree on some fundamentals, and you might have some constructive conversations. I don’t always agree with her, but I’ve heard a heart open to truth.
Life After Abortion
I sure did a double-take when I saw the headline on a piece that Theresa Bonopartis just had published on the Live Action website: “I had an abortion and I am a murderer. Does that make you feel better?”
Theresa’s life work is being a mother and grandmother, and the work of post-abortion healing. For the mothers. The fathers. The siblings. She knows all too well how painful abortion is.
Her reflection is a response to some of what’s being said louder and more frequently on the World Wide Web that Al Gore created. The abortion abolitionist movement is, of course, getting New York Times coverage. As the state of California brings pregnancy centers to court for having a simple hormonal protocol that helps women undo the damage of the first pill in the typical chemical abortion, the New York Times highlights fissures in the anti-abortion movement.
I’ve known Theresa for decades now, and I’ve stood beside her outside abortion clinics praying. She has a courageous sign admitting she had an abortion, hoping a woman might come over to talk and perhaps ask for or accept help to reconsider the abortion she’s come to the clinic for. These interactions are harder to have as the old-school abortion clinics become more of a relic of the Roe years, with our local pharmacy — and mailboxes — replacing them.
I firmly believe that I am going to have to answer for what I did not do to help end abortion in America. That’s not so much because of a savior complex, but simply because I know. K-Lo isn’t personally going to end abortion in America, but whatever she can do to sow love and, yes, tell the truth in love . . . she sure had better.
On Wednesday, the Dobbs anniversary, I was visiting with the superior general of the Parish Visitors of Mary Immaculate. Her religious community recently made international news because the founder of the community, Mother Mary Teresa Tallon, was just declared “venerable” by the Vatican — her cause for canonization is getting serious, in other words. Brooklyn-born Mother Maria Catherine Iannotti was talking with me about their charism, which is to be an arm of a local parish, to help the pastor invite people — door to door — to know their Savior, who loves them. Each and every one. As individuals. “It’s not rocket science,” she tells me. It’s also probably not as appreciated as it could be, how foreign that seems to be to far too many people.
We reminisced a bit about the Parish Visitors’ role in helping form the Sisters of Life 35 years ago. The late Cardinal John O’Connor asked them to help this new order of women he got an inspiration for while at the Dachau concentration camp. If you are pregnant and in need, the Catholic Church will help you, he said to all women. Cardinal Dolan repeated it in recent years, and I’m sure his successor, Archbishop Ronald Hicks, will do the same if he hasn’t already. The Sisters of Life are dedicated to the love of God, obviously, and being the solution. As Mother Maria Catherine told me, the Tallon mission is one for all the church — I shared that that’s exactly what the Sisters of Life are, too. If you don’t know you are loved, you’re not going to be able to show you are Christian by your love. If you don’t know you were loved into existence, how are you going to be able to welcome new life into the world?
Celebrate birthdays. Look at people with a gaze of love. Please, God, may someone look at you with such a gaze — because whether you see it or not, God is.
I think of Pope Benedict here:
Look at the face of the other. . . . Discover that he has a soul, a history and a life, that he is a person and that God loves this person.
The Sisters of Life may find themselves asked to talk about assisted suicide in New York, as Sister Anne Marie does, as head of the Respect Life Office in the Archdiocese of New York. Increasingly, Parish Visitors are going to be asked, like I was doing, about their “Mother Foundress,” as they refer to her. But in the end, it’s about letting you know you are loved by the Creator of the universe.
Much more on Mother Tallon — a likely saint from New York! — to come. But for now, take a look at Theresa’s website, Entering Canaan. If you are new to the post-abortion-healing world, please do not be afraid. Theresa used the m-word in reference to herself only in the prayer that people will lead more with love, as she was feeling the overwhelming onslaught of anger online. And remember some of the merciful words of John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae:
I would now like to say a special word to women who have had an abortion. The Church is aware of the many factors which may have influenced your decision, and she does not doubt that in many cases it was a painful and even shattering decision. The wound in your heart may not yet have healed. Certainly what happened was and remains terribly wrong. But do not give in to discouragement and do not lose hope. Try rather to understand what happened and face it honestly. If you have not already done so, give yourselves over with humility and trust to repentance. . . . Through your commitment to life, whether by accepting the birth of other children or by welcoming and caring for those most in need of someone to be close to them, you will become promoters of a new way of looking at human life.
Around National Review
• Michael New: Dobbs at Four, wherein Michael mentions his new Charlotte Lozier Institute report on the state of state laws since the end of Roe.
• Abigail Anthony: Commemorating the Dobbs Anniversary
• Wesley J. Smith: Twelve-Year-Old Euthanized in the Netherlands: Not a First
Me:
• Pregnant Women in the Spotlight
• Grim Report: Euthanasia of a Child in the Netherlands
• Dr. Biden and Summer Reading
• Post-Dobbs Medical Malpractice in Texas
• Representative Kat Cammack and Her Baby: (Social) Media Cruelty Toward a Mourning Mother
• Are We Going to Refund Planned Parenthood?
Other Things
Chuck Donovan: Unmaking MAID for Mental Disorders in Canada
SCOOP: Members of Congress Told Abortion Pill Safety Review Possible by September
This is the most pathetic wait from what we’re told to believe is a pro-life administration.
Take a pledge to sacrifice for the next 40 days for the end of abortion in America?
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