#607 - Peace & Life: Babies Flash Peace Sign / Black Maternal Health Week - April 15, 2022
Peace! Says the Baby
A sonogram of a baby in the womb flashing the peace sign with her or his hand is an idea right up our alley. We’d love to show you pictures, but they’re copyrighted, so we’ll link to this baby girl and this baby boy.
Black Maternal Health Week: April 11-17
Racism has lethal and injurious consequences on Black maternal health, and this week was established
to educate on the problem and solutions.
Marking the Tragedy of War Everywhere
During the first 48 hours of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, counting airstrikes alone, this graphic shows additional victims:
We grieve for the astonishing hard-heartedness in all these locations.
Making Laws
Updates on Peace & Life Referendums:
In Oklahoma, the Senate has passed two different proposed state constitutional amendments for the November ballot: a No Right to Abortion amendment and an Establish Rights of Unborn Persons amendment. Since these were passed by the same vote with a bunch of other anti-abortion bills on the same day, they are presumably not competing proposals but instead trying different approaches in the hopes that one works. The House still needs to vote.
In Michigan, signatures are being gathered to put the minimum wage on the ballot. We add this to the already existing page and offer pro-life commentary on why it would be good if it passed. Unfortunately, the other proposed referendum gathering signatures for Michigan is to make abortion a “right.”
We had mentioned that the attempt in Maryland to put a right-to-abortion amendment on the ballot never passed the Senate, and as Ballotpedia reports it won’t be on the ballot, the page has been removed. But Maryland did pass a law to allow abortions to be done by specified non-physicians. The idea is that by adding more people who could do abortions, there would be more people doing them. But they haven’t taken into account that abortion doctors who have to tolerate the stigma that goes with doing abortions at least still have the prestige of being physicians. Once it’s communicated that their practice can be done by non-physicians, they lose some of that prestige. While the law may have the intended effect, it’s also quite possible that it might discourage some physicians from abortion practice.
Our Latest Blog Post
Sonja Morin recounts her personal experiences in Walk On: Responding To Recent Situations in the Pro-Life Movement. This includes observations about the bodies of 115 babies, 5 of which were late-term and showed medical signs of possible partial-birth or post-birth violence.
Quotation of the Week
Charles Camosy
Angelus, Feb 24, 2022
In his “Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade” (Oxford University Press, $35.95), historian Daniel K. Williams tells of a pro-life movement that was deeply connected to activists protesting against the war in Vietnam. For reasons that should be obvious, these activists publicly burned their draft cards — but they also discarded their birth certificates at pro-life rallies.
Much like a draft card, a birth certificate was seen as an oppressive government document serving anti-life oppression by arbitrarily declaring that human life mattered at one point in its development, but not another.
This beautiful consistent ethic of life has been the beating heart of the U.S. pro-life movement from its beginnings. And now, with war apparently beginning in Ukraine, it is time once again for pro-lifers to fiercely resist coming attacks on human life.