Flowers are left on names on the National 9/11 Memorial in N.Y., September 11, 2018. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters)

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2. Russell Moore: When People Cheer Abortion

3. Do Women Regret Giving Birth When the Baby is Doomed to Die?

4. This image came close to illustrating some of my feelings this week — and I know I’m not alone:

It was accompanied by this note from Damian J. Geminder from Feminists for Life of America:

It was just over a year ago that I first visited the 9/11 Memorial, located on the site of the original World Trade Center. Despite living in New York my entire life, including attending graduate school in Manhattan, I had never gotten around to visiting the memorial until then. The memorial’s distinguishing feature is two acre-large footprints in place of where the Twin Towers once stood, composed of giant waterfalls into reflecting pools. Surrounding the pools are the names of all of those who died in the September 11, 2001, attacks, as well as the victims of the first World Trade Center bombing. That’s when I saw it.

Every unborn child known lost on those horrible days is memorialized, despite not being included in the official death tolls. Although there is no equality under the law for the unborn, at the very least, it was right to call attention to their lives and what their deaths meant to the families who loved them. Tuesday night, the memorial proved a monstrous farce. The New York state Legislature passed one of the most sweeping abortion expansions in the country to mark theRoe and Doe U.S. Supreme Court decisions, which struck down abortion restrictions nationwide. To “celebrate” his signing the so-called Reproductive Health Act into law, Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered multiple landmarks be set alight in pink, including One World Trade Center, presumably to honor (post-natal) women.

New York has long rejected the humanity of the unborn. Our abortion laws were loosened three years before Roe. But this law, which effectively expands abortion-on-demand from 24 weeks to birth, thanks to the new, ambiguous “health” exception for late-term abortions; allows non-doctors — including nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and midwives — to perform abortions; moves all abortion — including forced miscarriages — from the penal law to the public health law; declares abortion a “fundamental right,” imperiling conscience protections; and repeals protections for children born alive during botched abortions, sets the bar for disrespecting human life lower than ever before. The Suffrage Trail of our feminist foremothers, who without known exception opposed abortion, runs through the Empire State: from Seneca Falls, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott spearheaded the Declaration of Sentiments at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848; to Rochester, where Susan B. Anthony worked tirelessly until her final days to gain equal suffrage for women, including being arrested for illegally voting in the election of 1872; to my own hometown of Amityville, where Naomi Williams Griffiths knocked on thousands of doors to convince local men to vote to give New York women the vote in 1917, eventually retiring to the very house in which I was raised, and where I still live today.

More than 30 million baby girls have died in our country since 1973, and millions more women have been forever changed, including those who died as a result of legal-but-lethal abortion. To turn a memorial dedicated to thousands of born and unborn victims of terrorist violence into a pink monument to the killing of little girls — and boys — is the sickest of ironies. New York women and children deserve better.

5.

Powerful! A New York book store took a stand & closed in protest of a new state law guaranteeing unrestricted abortion. "CLOSED TODAY: Today is a day of mourning…We will not collect sales tax today for a tyrannical government that murders babies… End Abortion Now." pic.twitter.com/SwGxC1UyBk — Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) January 23, 2019

Buy a book from these folks!




More here.

6. Cheryl Calire and the Mother Teresa Home in Buffalo are part of the solution.

7. Kathleen Parker:

As it turns out, a picture isn’t always worth a thousand words; sometimes it’s worth just one: Wait.

8. Ramesh:

Don’t a lot of our political debates these days, especially on Facebook and Twitter, fall into this pattern? Instead of reacting to what other people are saying, we react to what we think people like them believe. You can find this behavior on all parts of the political spectrum, and sometimes on both sides of an exchange. It’s a cognitive flaw and a civic failure.

9. John Podhoretz:

I love Twitter. But I also loved cigarettes. And the second-hand smoke social media produce is making our public life diseased. It also does damage to its users; it makes most of us meaner and uglier and more hostile, and is therefore clearly a bad thing spiritually. I have no idea how Americans will find the restraint we need to limit the social media damage other than a revolution in manners that will encompass the whole society and not just the computer-networked part. But we have to. We have to.

10. Today’s the feast of the patron saint of writers. That couldn’t have come a day too soon. There’s this in his Introduction to the Devout Life:

Love is the great healer of all ills, and of this above the rest. Everything looks yellow to a man that has the jaundice; and it is said that the only cure is through the soles of the feet. Most assuredly the sin of rash judgments is a spiritual jaundice, which makes everything look amiss to those who have it; and he who would be cured of this malady must not be content with applying remedies to his eyes or his intellect, he must attack it through the affections, which are as the soul’s feet. If your affections are warm and tender, your judgment will not be harsh; if they are loving, your judgment will be the same.

11.

The test of a preacher is that his congregation goes away saying, not ‘What a lovely sermon!’ but ‘Now I will do something.’

– Saint Francis de Sales pic.twitter.com/a32eUaal5g — Msgr. Ronny Jenkins (@jenkinsronny) January 24, 2019

12. The pope typically has a communications message on DeSales’ feast day. From today’s:

The Net is an opportunity to promote encounter with others, but it can also increase our self-isolation, like a web that can entrap us.

“We are members one of another” (Eph 4,25).

PLUS:

In the face of abortion, why does Fr. Fidelis, a Franciscan priest, get himself arrested?