* “No, Abortion Is Never Medically Necessary” (Ashley Bateman, Federalist)
From the article — Doctors facing mounting legal and professional pressure to perform abortions post-Dobbs reassert that there are no necessary abortions in medicine. The term “emergency abortion” is a scare tactic…Public ignorance and confusion over a “necessary” abortion continues to permeate political language and Biden’s rule is yet another coercive attempt to install national abortion “must-haves.”
An anonymous Food and Drug Administration committee determines “arbitrary safety standards” and what defines “emergency use” and “necessity,” said John Seeds, former department chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Virginia Commonwealth University, and can then utilize those standards to hide and mislead the public on the point of abortion…
The two primary situations when a pregnancy must be induced before viability to save the life of the mother, first-trimester hemorrhaging and ectopic pregnancy, have clear treatments that do not require an abortion, Bruchalski said. “In [catastrophic uterine bleeding] you’re targeting the placenta and its removal because that is the cause of bleeding, the preborn child is not your target,” Bruchalski said.
In the case of an ectopic pregnancy, an OB-GYN removes the diseased segment of the fallopian tube containing the embryo. “This is intellectually and scientifically not a direct abortion,” Bruchalski said. “The definition and the intent of an elective abortion is to terminate the life of the fetus. The intention and truth matter not only to the profession and the doctor but to the patient.”
In the vast majority of cases of ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages, the preborn child has already died due to the disease, Bruchalski said. In either situation, targeting the child is never the intent and is therefore not an abortion, but abortion practitioners deceive physicians and patients by saying ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages, and elective abortions are all the same.
* “Nebraska Supreme Court upholds pro-life ‘Let Them Grow Act'” (NRL News via Nebraska Right to Life)
From the article — The plaintiff challenging LB574 was Planned Parenthood, represented by ACLU of Nebraska. In a 6-1 ruling, the court rejected Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit that charged that the law passed in the 2023 Legislative session violated Nebraska’s single-subject rule which states no bill shall contain more than one subject, with the subject clearly expressed in the title. LB574 was signed into law by Governor Jim Pillen on May 22, 2023. “After our review of the facts of this case and our historical legal precedent wherein we have rarely found violations … we find no merit to Planned Parenthood’s argument that LB 574 contains more than one subject,” the court ruled.
In a statement, Gov. Pillen said he was “grateful for the court’s thorough and well-reasoned opinion upholding these important protections for life and children in Nebraska.” “We are grateful for the Nebraska Supreme Court’s decision upholding important protections benefiting Nebraska families,” said Sandy Danek, executive director with Nebraska Right to Life.
Nebraska law, prior to the passage of LB574, allowed for abortion up to 20 weeks with passage of its Pain Capable Unborn Children Protection Act—the first law of its kind—passing in 2010.
* “Drag Queens Carry the Olympic Torch in France” (Sarah Holliday, Washington Stand) (See also “Mitt Romney Praises Olympics Opening Ceremony: ‘Imaginative, Inventive'” by Elizabeth Weibel over at Breitbart)
From the two articles: Holliday — Although many are disappointed by the pick of torchbearers, it seems gender politics were already a part of the 2024 Olympics long before the three drag queens got ahold of the Olympic flame. Back in January, infamous trans-identifying swimmer Lia Thomas “secretly” sued World Aquatics and their policy that blocked trans-identifying men from women’s swimming events. And in June, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruled to dismiss the challenge presented by Thomas. It was “definitely a step in the right direction,” said Mary Szoch, Family Research Council’s director of the Center for Human Dignity.
And it’s that decision, as well as the 2024 Olympics overall, that “should reinvigorate the fight to protect Title IX” — at least, that’s the message Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines are proclaiming. In a joint article published on The Daily Wire, the women wrote, “The war against women is no longer hypothetical, and while Lia Thomas may have lost the battle this time, the Left’s persistence knows no bounds.” Ultimately, “Allowing males to compete against females will be the new norm for Americans competing at every level — including at the 2028 Olympics — if something isn’t done.”
And so, in order to prevent apathy on the issue, they urged readers to “keep up the fight — whether it’s in Washington, in the media, or in the sports arena.” As they emphasized, “Future generations of girls depend on us to preserve the equality that generations before us fought so hard to achieve.”
Weibel — Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) praised the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Paris, France, as being “imaginative, inventive and memorable.” The opening ceremony featured an opening dance number that showed women being “flung around on poles,” while another dance number showed three dancers, two men and a woman, who had been dancing through the streets, going up the stairs of a building as they began kissing. The dancers then went into a room and began to kiss some more.
* “Elon Musk is a ‘cultural Christian’. How does that work?” (Michael Cook, Mercator)
From the article — Musk did not want to be tied down. Ultimately, he subscribes to “the religion of curiosity”, he told Peterson. Despite the vagueness of his theological views, it does seem that admitting that you are a “cultural Christian” is socially acceptable again, after a couple of decades of noisy agitation from the “New Atheists”.
Even the Grand Panjandrum of Atheism, British biologist Richard Dawkins, recently described himself as a “cultural Christian”. After he had spent decades denouncing Christianity, this was a baffling development. Dawkins explained to a bemused interviewer: “I’m not a believer, but there is a distinction between being a believing Christian and a cultural Christian. I love hymns and Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, and I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.”
Musk and Dawkins are not the only public figures who come out as cultural Christians. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born defender of free speech, announced that she was a Christian not long ago. Jordan Peterson himself admires Christianity. Tom Holland, the best-selling historian, says that his outlook is Christian but that he is not a churchgoer. This would have been incomprehensible to the builders of England’s glorious cathedrals. In the Middle Ages, there were mediocre Christians, hypocritical Christians, saintly Christians, and Christians double-dyed in wickedness. But the notion of a Christian husk without a Christian core was unknown.
* “Kamala Harris’s Michael Dukakis moment” (James Piereson, The New Criterion)
From the article — mericans over the age of fifty may remember the 1988 presidential election campaign, when Governor Michael Dukakis surged to a seventeen-point lead over Vice President George H. W. Bush following the Democratic National Convention in mid-July. That was a successful convention for Democrats. They were united and eager to take back the White House after suffering for eight years under the Reagan–Bush administration. Dukakis selected Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas as his running mate, mimicking JFK’s Massachusetts–Texas alliance from the 1960 campaign. Dukakis delivered an effective speech at the convention that emphasized competence over ideology, thereby suggesting—wrongly—that Bush was in the thrall of right-wing ideology.
That was a high point for Dukakis. His lead began to melt away as soon as Bush portrayed him as an out-of-touch liberal, a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and a soft-on-crime governor who planned to raise taxes and had no foreign-policy experience. By early August, his advantage over Bush had dropped to seven points, according to a Gallup poll. By mid-September, Bush had surged into the lead by seven points (from 49% to 42%), and he proceeded to win the election by eight points. Bush carried forty states and won 426 electoral votes, compared to just 111 electoral votes for Dukakis. No national candidate has won by a larger electoral margin since.
Kamala Harris is now enjoying this kind of moment as she racks up endorsements in anticipation of the Democratic National Convention in August. Democrats and media allies are busy portraying her as a fresh face (she is not) and a youthful candidate (also doubtful) who will electrify the nation, galvanize women and minority voters, and trounce Donald Trump in the fall campaign. Some polls show her running more or less even with Trump, though, in truth, Biden was not doing all that badly in the same polls when he decided to drop out. Harris’s honeymoon will continue until and through the Democratic convention, at which time delegates will put on a show of unity and strength, thereby covering up the large cracks in their coalition that Trump will soon exploit. She and her running mate may come out of the convention even with, or perhaps even slightly ahead of, the Trump-Vance ticket.
The honeymoon will not last very long. Trump will succeed in painting Harris as an out-of-touch San Francisco leftist, much as Bush portrayed Dukakis as a Massachusetts liberal. Trump will find plenty of running room with that campaign, as there is hardly a left-wing cause that she has not embraced.