PEACE & LIFE CONNECTIONS

News on Defunding Violence The defunding of Medicaid dollars for Planned Parenthood was legislatively set to last one year, and so expired at midnight on July 4. Congress can still extend that defunding, but needs to be encouraged to do so. Legislators inclined to have such defunding need to have it stressed to them how important this is. See also our blog post on Planned Parenthood’s Financial Fraud. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) has an amendment to H.R. 8595, the State Departme

Republican Governor Calls For Death Penalty Abolition In a press conference on June 16, 2026, Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio declared that "The moral justification I had for voting for the death penalty simply no longer exists.” He went into great detail (in the first 20 minutes) to make the case: it doesn’t deter; the victims’ families suffer with the unavoidable delays; it traumatizes the execution team members, etc. Some find this surprising from a former prosecutor who in 1

June 12, 2022: The End of the Roe Era Now that four years have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, where do we stand? Our headline at the time was “Major Obstacle Removed.” We knew we had plenty of work ahead. The only problem solved was the reign of the Roe v. Wade decision; the reverberations of Roe continue even if it’s no longer in force. We still need all hands on deck. It was always going to be true that some states would pass abortion bans and others

A Fantastic Article in Commonweal In a May 22 article in Commonweal, a Catholic journal, Timothy Kirchoff mentions the consistent life ethic several times, and opines from the perspective of Democratic Party electoral politics: Reviving the Pro-Life Democrat While a couple of prominent people have suggested Democrats would have a better winning strategy if they weren’t so dead set against pro-life Democrats running in districts where that’s more likely to win, Kirchoff points