Category: Life Issues & Bioethics

New US UN Ambassador Nominee Stands by Pro-Life Position at Confirmation Hearing
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New US UN Ambassador Nominee Stands by Pro-Life Position at Confirmation Hearing

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President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for United States UN Ambassador, Nikki Haley, repeatedly asserted her pro-life views during her Wednesday confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  The South Carolina Governor promised to be a force for reform of the UN system if approved for the position. “I am strongly pro-life,” Haley said in response […]

Archbishop Carlson Defends Life
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Archbishop Carlson Defends Life

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You may have heard of sanctuary cities and thought the term only applied to a city that protects illegal immigrants. But if you thought that was the case, you would be wrong—at least when it comes to St. Louis, Missouri. According to a recent St. Louis public radio report: “Two St. Louis aldermen, in partnership […]

Bioethics 2016: Winners and Losers
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Bioethics 2016: Winners and Losers

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Each year at this time we look back over the past twelve months with an eye toward identifying those whose lives and work actively promoted and affirmed a truly human future, and those who did not. Winners: Stephanie Packer is more than a winner; she really is a hero. Sitting down with her while making […]

The Castro Regime: Repression of the Rights to Life and Liberty
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The Castro Regime: Repression of the Rights to Life and Liberty

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Freedom is never free. The passing of Fidel Castro is a keen reminder that many liberties so often taken for granted in the West, even as they are rapidly diminishing in the face of radical secularism, are still not a given for many. For over 55 years, the Castro regime perpetrated numerous human rights abuses. […]

The Beauty of Sacramental Love
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The Beauty of Sacramental Love

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While preparing for the celebration of the birth of Christ this year, we must also think about the wonderful blessings that Joseph and Mary experienced when God chose them to be the parents of His Son. Mary, who was conceived without original sin, and Joseph, who was vowed to Mary’s virginity and to his role […]

Pro-Family Leaders Launch Declaration on Marriage in Cape Town
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Pro-Family Leaders Launch Declaration on Marriage in Cape Town

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Pro-family leaders from around the world recently gathered in Cape Town, South Africa, to roll out and sign a declaration that aims to protect the family and traditional marriage. In its five short paragraphs, the Cape Town Declaration recognizes the family as the “first and primordial community” and “the bedrock of civil society.” It reaffirms […]

LIFE -- It's Wonderful!
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LIFE — It’s Wonderful!

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In the classic Christmas film “It’s a wonderful life” George Bailey is an honest man living in small town whose life seems so desperate that he contemplates suicide. George’s guardian angel intercedes as he prepares to jump from a bridge showing him how dark the world would have been if he had never lived. The […]

French Court Rules: Children with Down Syndrome Not Allowed to Smile on TV
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French Court Rules: Children with Down Syndrome Not Allowed to Smile on TV

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On November 10, the Conseil d’Etat ruled it “inappropriate” to show happy children with Down syndrome on TV, as that sight could “trouble” women who chose not to give birth to their disabled children. With this pronouncement, the French judges upheld a previous decision by the CSA (“Conseil Supérieur de l’audiovisuel” – equivalent of the […]

We Can’t Contracept Our Way to Maternal and Child Health
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We Can’t Contracept Our Way to Maternal and Child Health

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For too long the answer to making childbirth less dangerous has been to urge women to avoid it.  The family planning establishment, backed by powerful Western governments, has saturated the global market for contraception, yet more than 300,000 women still die every year in childbirth. It is time to release the stranglehold that family planning […]

Light of the Son in a New Dark Age
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Light of the Son in a New Dark Age

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How could it have happened in Canada? At the beginning of the 20th Century, we were a Christian nation, but within 100 years we were a secular nation. We now are even seeing social policy that is anti-Christian by design or in its application. Nowhere is this more evident than in how the most vulnerable […]

Euthanasia Movement Sells Assisted Suicide to the Depressed
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Euthanasia Movement Sells Assisted Suicide to the Depressed

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With all the fluff and noise about the elections, two reports came to my attention recently that may have missed your roving review of the news. We have learned that in the Netherlands the government will kill you at your request, even if what you’re suffering from is alcoholism or depression. One report reveals that […]

Abortion Advocates Seek to Sway Trump to Keep Foreign Abortion Funds
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Abortion Advocates Seek to Sway Trump to Keep Foreign Abortion Funds

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The biggest names in international abortion advocacy are looking for ways to convince the incoming Trump administration not cut their funding by reinstating the 1984 Mexico City Policy. The policy requires that grantees of US foreign aid for family planning do not perform or actively promote abortions. It was rescinded under Democratic administrations and reinstated […]

Unborn Sanctuary Cities and Prenatal Immigrants
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Unborn Sanctuary Cities and Prenatal Immigrants

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There is much debate since the presidential election about the status of sanctuary cities across our country. “Sanctuary city” is a name given to a city in the United States that follows certain procedures that shelter illegal immigrants. A sanctuary can be defined as “a place of refuge and protection,” and sanctuary cities claim to […]

Controversial Sterilization Device Should be Taken Off the Market
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Controversial Sterilization Device Should be Taken Off the Market

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced that it has approved a boxed warning for Bayer’s controversial Essure® sterilization device. A boxed warning is the strongest warning the FDA can require for drugs and devices and is intended to alert the user to potentially serious, even deadly, side effects that can result from […]

The Contraception Crisis that Isn’t
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The Contraception Crisis that Isn’t

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The world’s most powerful family planning groups announced a “contraceptive crisis,” calling for more funding and “sounding the alarm over the unmet contraceptive needs of hundreds of millions of people.” A look at their latest report, however, shows the opposite: a glut of contraception in a world where unsatisfied demand has sharply fallen. The group, […]

Old, Lonely, and Poor
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Old, Lonely, and Poor

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When China’s Communist Party under Deng Xiaoping first introduced the one-child policy in 1979, party insiders had been convinced that China’s population growth was impeding its economic development. Decades under Chairman Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution had wrecked the nation’s economy and left policymakers in the Communist Party searching for new solutions. Some of the reforms […]

We Must Be Nice
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We Must Be Nice

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The new superintendent of my local independent school district unilaterally decreed a few months ago that any student with the chromosomes and the privy parts of one sex, but who “self-identifies” as one of the opposite sex, must now be given access to the bathrooms of the other sex or to single user bathrooms. Also, […]

Human Life -- <em>The Issue</em>!
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Human Life — The Issue!

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As a very long election season comes to a close, there is a fury of endless media messages attempting to focus voters on issues. There are countless issues to sort through that are facing our nation as we head to cast our ballots on Election Day, and it often becomes difficult to prioritize what matters […]

US Presidential Election
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“You Be You”

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I sit here listening to one of my favorite reflective CD’s (Carl Herrgesell’s Reflections in the Key of Peace), playing in the background as I attempt to put little letters together and form words on a blank page. We are days away from a national election that has stirred in me an unprecedented level of both […]

Americans Don’t Want to be Taxed to Pay for Abortions
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Americans Don’t Want to be Taxed to Pay for Abortions

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Perhaps you have heard the saying abortion advocates often like to repeat: ‘if you don’t like abortion, then don’t get one.’ Well, we not only don’t like abortions, we don’t like being forced to pay for them or to do anything else that would facilitate the termination of the life of an unborn child. Yet […]

Christians in a Culture of Death
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Christians in a Culture of Death

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I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of multiple sclerosis (MS) in 1984. In the early 1990s a Canadian woman with ALS tried to introduce to Canada a thin edge of a deadly wedge of physician assisted suicide. Sue Rodriguez was an active campaigner from her wheelchair. “Whose body is this anyway?!” she said. I […]

Cruel and Unusual Punishment for Baby
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Cruel and Unusual Punishment for Baby

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In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Meredith Isaksen wrote about her later-term abortion—the death of her second child—as if it were an act of mercy for her, her family, and the preborn child who died during the abortion. Her sense of her son’s death as an act of compassion toward him and […]

How Faithful Catholics May Use the Law at the End of Life
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How Faithful Catholics May Use the Law at the End of Life

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The last time I checked, the mortality rate in this country was still 100%. To die usually involves unavoidable suffering. I don’t think these things will be changing any time soon. This is not a cause for anxiety or dread. Christ our Savior has made death and suffering into pathways to eternal life. “Precious in […]

Global Abortion Advocates Dispense with Mask of “Post-Abortion” Care
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Global Abortion Advocates Dispense with Mask of “Post-Abortion” Care

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A leading consortium of reproductive health advocates announced its intention to drop “post-abortion care” from its title and to begin campaigning for “comprehensive abortion care” instead. At an event in Washington announcing the shift, one advocate said that sustaining post-abortion care was never the goal.  “Post-abortion care” was meant to be an “entry point.” She […]