The Irish Lesson

If the purpose of abortion bans is to actually reduce the rate at which women terminate pregnancies, the Irish experience shows how utterly ineffectual they are.

Fintan O’Toole
August 18, 2022 issue, NY Books (posted July 27)

In 1973, soon after the US Supreme Court established a right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, Charles E. Rice concluded that “the essential remedy to the abortion problem is a constitutional amendment.” Rice is an important figure in the intellectual history of the antiabortion movement that is now, with the recent overturning of Roe, enjoying its moment of triumph. He was a cofounder of the Conservative Party of New York State, formed by those who considered the Republican Party too liberal; one of his scholarly tracts is an attack on the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As a professor of constitutional law, he established Notre Dame University in Indiana as a redoubt of the conservative Catholic legal thinking whose influence most fully blossomed when Donald Trump appointed Rice’s colleague and associate Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

Continued: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/08/18/the-irish-lesson-fintan-otoole/


A question of faith: Biden, Catholicism and the presidency

Some bishops think America's second Catholic president should be denied the Eucharist. Are Biden's faith and job title an unworkable mix?

By Tara McKelvey, BBC White House reporter
July 13, 2021

On the matter of faith, President Joe Biden is not shy.

Each weekend that he is in town, he goes to
Mass in Washington. A motorcade takes him on Saturday evenings or Sunday
mornings to Holy Trinity, the church where President Kennedy, the only other
Catholic US president, used to attend services. He makes the sign of the cross
at public events, and his Catholicism is woven into his speeches and policies.

Continued: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57825309


US Catholics funded Malawi opponents of legal abortion in cases of rape

After condemning abortion reform as an imposition of “foreign cultures”, a religious group in Malawi took thousands of dollars in foreign cash

Josephine Chinele
30 March 2021

A Catholic group in Malawi used money from the US to support its campaign against a bill to allow legal abortion in cases of rape – after condemning proposed reforms as an imposition of “foreign cultures”.

The Episcopal Conference of Malawi (ECM), a local assembly of Catholic bishops, received a $30,000 grant from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) in 2019 for “pastoral animation and advocacy of members of parliament and the laity in political leadership”.

Continued: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/us-catholics-funded-malawi-opponents-legal-abortion-cases-rape/


Trump Just Stacked A Fetal Cell Research Panel With Abortion Opponents

Seen as the “gold standard” in many areas of medical research, fetal cells are widely used in coronavirus vaccine research.

Dan Vergano, BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on July 31, 2020

On Friday, a Trump administration panel erected to judge the ethics of federally funded research relying on human fetal cells met more than a year after it was first announced. Just hours before the meeting, the panel was revealed to be stacked with abortion opponents hostile to such research.

Human fetal cells are widely used in medical research to develop vaccines — notably in at least a half dozen current candidate coronavirus vaccines — as well for studying diseases including AIDS. The National Institutes of Health Human Fetal Tissue Research Ethics Advisory Board was initially announced in June of last year, putting a hold on grant applications for medical research involving human fetal cells. It followed the Trump administration’s moves to cancel related federal research contracts and audit human fetal cell research.

Continued: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/trump-fetal-cell-ethics-panel-abortion


How Trump’s abortion gag rule policy impacts the global AIDS crisis

How Trump's abortion gag rule policy impacts the global AIDS crisis

By Rory Smith, CNN
Tue July 31, 2018

(CNN)New findings presented last week at the 22nd International AIDS Conference reveal how President Donald Trump's expansion of the so-called global gag rule -- which restricts US health assistance funding to non-US NGOs that offer abortion services -- is likely to have widescale negative effects on the fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Four hundred seventy non-US NGOs working in the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS across the world might be subject to the expanded global gag rule, according to new data presented at the conference. These organizations received $900 million from fiscal year 2013 to fiscal year 2015.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/31/health/trumps-gag-rule-effects-hiv-aids-intl/index.html