On July 13, a Pro-life group at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Brooklyn held a monthly mass followed by a prayer vigil at an abortion clinic. They were met by a pro-abortion group that blocked their path and engaged in shoving and yelling of obscene epithets. This was not the first time the church group has been met with counter protesters, but they report that the anger is accelerating and they have expressed concern for increased violence and suppression of freedom of speech. Similar anti-abortion actions are held monthly on Manhattan and Staten Island, and in the Bronx.

On July 12, a House subcommittee advanced a draft of a federal spending bill which does not include the Hyde Amendment which has prohibited since 1976 the use of taxpayer money to fund abortions for women on such Federal programs as Medicaid. Pro-life members of Congress are opposing the bill and hope some day to make the Hyde Amendment a federal law rather than an add-on amendment to the budget. At the same time, pro-abortion members of Congress want to make the Supreme Court findings in Roe v. Wade federal law so that future court findings cannot modify the original court rulings in 1973.

On May 29, a Canadian Pro-life group released an animated video encouraging pregnant women to choose life for their baby with the theme “yes, you can do this.” The video has received hundreds of thousands of views and is in the process of also being released in languages other than English.

A panel of women on MSNBC recently discussed the upcoming case before the Supreme Court in which Mississippi asks the court to rule that their law prohibiting abortion after 15 weeks gestation is constitutional. The concern by pro-abortion groups is that the court may recognize the right of the states under the 10th Amendment to the constitution to decide all issues which are not specifically designated to the United States. Therefore, the issue is one of whether the individual states can decide the circumstances under which abortion is legal. The panelists agreed that such a ruling would allow the states to treat women “like incubators with mouthparts.” They also took the position that incumbent democrats should add many more pro-abortion justices to the Supreme Court right away to prevent such a ruling. They did not discuss making resources available to women in desperate circumstances so they could have a healthy baby without resorting to abortion. In contrast to those who believe abortion should be an unrestricted first choice, Pro-life groups believe in helping women so that abortion could be the last choice any woman had to make.

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileoni recently commented that “one cannot claim to be a devout Catholic and condone the killing of innocent human life.” While decrying the concept of “abortion as an issue of health and fairness to poor women,” he continued to comment, “What about the health of the baby being killed?” San Francisco is the hometown of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who supports abortion and elimination of the Hyde Amendment which has prohibited the use of federal money to pay for abortion since 1976. She has cited her Catholic faith as her reason for doing so. By calling herself a “devout Catholic” (along with President Biden and numerous other pro-abortion members of Congress), a very divisive controversy has been set in motion within the Catholic Church, which officially opposes abortion and supports respect for life and the dignity of the individual. The Archbishop reaffirmed that it is the “people of faith” who operate pregnancy resource centers to “provide poor women life-giving alternatives to having their babies killed in their wombs.”

Some of the above notices have been discussed to some extent in earlier posts, and more information is available on some topics under tabs on this site.