THE SUPREME COURT HAS OVERTURNED ROE. BUT THE PRO-LIFE FIGHT IS JUST BEGINNING.
from: LiveAction News

(24 June) The Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood on Friday, undoing the decades old court rulings that forced states to legalize abortion up to at least 24 weeks of pregnancy. There is confusion about what this means. While overturning Roe is monumental, it isn’t the end of the pro-life fight. It is just the beginning.

"Roe was egregiously wrong from the start," wrote Justice Alito in the majority opinion. "We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives."

No right to abortion in the Constitution

In overturning Roe in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case, the Court confirmed that there is no right to an abortion in the U.S. Constitution. Alito wrote, "The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely." He continued, "The Court finds that the right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition."

This is important because abortion advocates have been claiming for decades that there is a right to abortion in the Constitution and that abortion was allowed and accepted prior to laws enacted in the 1800s to outlaw it. This, according to the Court, is untrue. However, while the Court states that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, it also said, "[T]he authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives."

The problem here is that no person, no state, and no country have the authority to "regulate abortion." Abortion is a deliberate act of homicide visited upon an innocent human being, and is therefore an injustice; it is the homicide of a human being. And in issuing this decision to defer abortion-related law decisions to state legislators, the Court has failed to uphold the right to life protected by the 14th Amendment.

Rather than point this out, the Court has told the states they can either disallow abortion altogether, or allow abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. This idea didn't work too well when the North was anti-slavery and the South was pro-slavery, and it may not work out well today. If human beings have an inherent right to life, should states be deciding which innocent people are allowed to live and which may be killed? [read more...]

COMMENTARY: The remaining issues are: 1) Various states passing laws banning or allowing some or all abortions; 2) Deciding whether the 14th Amendment upholds the right to life of all persons, born and unborn; and 3) Overcoming the sharp divide between pro-life and pro-abortion politicians and ordinary people. Pray for calm, that the abortion decision does not lead to open fighting or civil war!

HOLLYWOOD ACTRESS EXPLAINS WHY SHE CHOSE SURROGACY: ‘I WAS TERRIFIED [OF GETTING PREGNANT]’
from: BioEdge.org

(27 June) Hollywood starlet Jamie Chung, 39, surprised her fans last year when she and her husband announced the birth of twins. It subsequently emerged that their children arrived with the help of a surrogate mother. She explained her reasons in a candid interview with Today Parents: "I was terrified of becoming pregnant. I was terrified of putting my life on hold for two-plus years. In my industry, it feels like you’re easily forgotten if you don’t work within the next month of your last job. Things are so quickly paced in what we do."

"People probably think, 'Oh, she’s so vain. She didn't want to get pregnant,' and it’s much more complicated than that. For me, personally, and I will leave it at this, it's like, I worked my ass off my entire life to get where I am. I don’t wan' to lose opportunities. I don't want to be resentful." Chung’s break-through was MTV's "The Real World: San Diego." She has since starred in a number of movies and TV series, including "Lovecraft Country" and "Dexter: New Blood." Washington Post journalist Alyssa Rosenberg tried to write a column about Chung’s decision – but discovered that she had very mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, she praised her honesty and was delighted to hear "a woman bluntly rage against the limits of biology and the costs it imposes on half the population." On the other hand, she mused, using another woman's body sounds a lot like exploitation. "One doesn't have to be that unsympathetic to feel a twinge of moral unease about surrogacy." [read more...]

COMMENTARY: I can understand how this actress feels, but is pursuing one's career as a movie star really more important than motherhood? Here's a piece of satire – but very true – about this sort of issue: "'I Accomplished Nothing Today!' Says Mom Who Spent All Day Nurturing Infinitely Precious Human Souls."

KAZAKHSTAN: RELIGIOUS FREEDOM SURVEY, JUNE 2022
from: Forum 18 News Service

(23 June) Freedom of religion and belief, with the interlinked freedoms of expression, association, and assembly, and other fundamental freedoms such as the right to free elections remains seriously restricted in Kazakhstan. Forum 18's survey analysis of freedom of religion and belief documents among other issues:

- Religion Law changes to widen state religious censorship and to make holding religious meetings away from state-registered places of worship more difficult came into force on 9 January 2022, as nationwide protests against the regime and its policies broke out;

- an interlocking web of laws, including the Religion Law and the Criminal and Administrative Codes making the exercise of freedom of religion and belief illegal without state permission;

- all religious communities being required to have to state permission to exist in the form of state registration. State permission is also required for the places people meet for worship, as well as for activities such as sharing beliefs with others;

- the use of unclear allegations of "extremism" to jail people exercising their freedom of religion and belief and other fundamental freedoms;

- prisoners of conscience being jailed for exercising freedom of religion and belief, these prisoners being tortured with the use of techniques such as being banned from praying, physical violence, denials of medical care, refusals to allow them to visit dying close relatives or attend their funerals (such as the funeral of a prisoner's wife or father), and solitary confinement;

- banning former prisoners of conscience from a wide and often unspecified "social activity," which can include activities including visiting a place of worship, driving a car, going to a restaurant, or being involved in any group or association;

- adding those convicted for exercising freedom of religion or belief to the Financial Monitoring Agency List of individuals "connected with the financing of terrorism or extremism." Any bank accounts an individual may have are blocked, their families often finding out about the blocking of accounts only when they go to the bank. Individuals remain on the Financial Monitoring Agency List for six or eight years after their sentence has expired as they are deemed still to have a criminal record;

- a strict state censorship regime, imposing censorship of all religious literature (including in electronic form) and objects, strict restrictions on where such texts and objects may be sold or distributed, who may sell or distribute them, and court-ordered destruction - including book burning – of confiscated texts. This includes the use of state "expert analyses" to convict, fine, and jail people in unfair trials;

- state surveillance of all religious communities, one official claiming of surveillance including video recording of a Baptist Church and its congregation: "This isn't spying, this is monitoring, nothing more." [read more...]

COMMENTARY: This is just a brief quotation, only about 1/10th of Forum 18's June 2022 report on religious freedom (or the lack thereof) in Kazakhstan. Reading the whole thing will turn your stomach. It is difficult for most Westerners to comprehend the vast reach of religious oppression in post-Soviet countries. The atheistic spirit of communism still exists there, even if the term is no longer being used.

WHEELCHAIR USERS WANT NEW ROAD MONEY SPENT ON SAFETY
from: Disability Scoop

(28 June) On a Sunday afternoon in May 2021, Patsy Ellison left her Knoxville, Tenn., apartment in her motorized wheelchair and started to cross a nearby street, as she often did. She never made it.

Even though there was a stop sign, a Dodge Ram pickup truck turning into the intersection struck and killed Ellison, who was 62. The driver told police he didn’t see her in the roadway.

"We were just devastated. She was such a good person. It's still hard," her great-niece Destiny Dozard said in an interview with Stateline. "I have a 5-year-old, and he talks about it every day. He's still traumatized."

Dozard said her great-aunt, who used the wheelchair because of knee problems that made it hard for her to walk more than a few steps, had a beloved dog named Spartacus and was well known in the neighborhood, where she regularly visited a convenience store to buy Hot Cheetos and Slim Jims.

"She's someone we could go to when we couldn't go to anyone else to talk to," Dozard recalled. "She helped her neighbors if they didn't have any food and gave them money. She was a sweetheart. It's crazy that something like this happened to her."

The streets can be dangerous for people in wheelchairs. Some are forced to roll along the street because the sidewalk is broken, uneven or nonexistent. Some have to cross busy roads with multiple lanes. Motorists, particularly those in SUVs and large pickup trucks, may not see them because they sit low.

Disability rights and highway safety advocates say some of the funding from the new $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure law, which includes $11 billion for transportation safety programs, should be spent on curb ramps, more accessible sidewalks and roads engineered to slow down traffic and provide safe crossings for people with disabilities. The law includes the "Safe Streets and Roads for All" initiative, which will provide $5 billion in grants to local governments over five years to support projects and strategies to reduce crashes and fatalities. [read more...]

COMMENTARY: Far too often, the safety needs of wheelchair users is overlooked in planning for streets and highways. People tend to ignore others who are not out and about very much due to limited mobility. And yet, over one-fourth of people are disabled and over half of those have mobility limitations: that's about twenty-five million Americans who we would rather not think about and care for.

THE ECUMENICAL PATRIARCH MET WITH THE LOCAL UKRAINIAN ORTHODOX FAITHFUL IN PANORMOS
from: Religious Information Service of Ukraine

(29 June) The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, on Sunday, June 26, 2022, paid a pastoral visit to the Diocese of the historic Marmara Sea port of Panormos, Crete, where he met with the local Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking Orthodox faithful.

The Ecumenical Patriarch presided over the Divine Liturgy, which was held in a specially modified area of a local hotel, and following a relevant permit issued by local authorities. In his speech, the Ecumenical Patriarch expressed his joy and emotion for the opportunity to meet "face to face" with the children of the Mother Church who live in Panormos.

"We have come, with our honorable entourage, to join our prayers to God and our Savior Jesus Christ, to give us all health, strength, prosperity, and every blessing. We are with you to pray together and beg the benevolent Lord to end the unjust war in Ukraine, which is spreading pain and death. So that the God of love and peace may illuminate those responsible, so that peace, reconciliation, and justice may return to this long-suffering country.

Wherever we are, far from our homeland, if we keep this cultural legacy untouched within us, then we have a homeland, we have an identity, we have an eternal destination." [read more...]

COMMENTARY: Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is the spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodox Churches. He is not like the Pope who has full authority over these Churches, rather, he is more like a council chairman in which all council members (bishops) have an equal voice. This position has a rich history of many centuries, but now the Russian Orthodox Patriarch is causing a schism in Orthodoxy, calling for other bishops to ignore or even thwart the decisions of Patriarch Bartholomew and his council members.

HOW PEOPLE WHO ARE DISABLED CAN FIX US
from: Disabled World

(12 June) Right now, I feel like our world is in turmoil. The internet is full of hateful language and memes. Mass shootings are on the rise. The wealthy continue to live lavish lives while the middle-class struggle, and the poor barely hang on. The compassion for each other [that] grew during the pandemic seems to have disappeared. Scholars, politicians, scientists, and others try to identify why this is happening and that we need to "fix" it. Maybe we need to "fix" us.

There are valuable lessons people who are disabled can teach us about how to live together peacefully. A person who is blind cannot see the color of your skin or your appearance. They judge you by your character.

For a deaf person to hear what you are saying, they need to focus on your face and not on their surroundings. In contrast, they can close their eyes to block out hateful speech. People who are intellectually disabled live lives of compassion, acceptance, and simplicity.

People who are severely physically disabled rely on direct support personnel to assist them in completing daily activities. They can teach us respect and cooperation for our essential workers. People who have a learning disability can teach us different and creative ways to complete tasks.

People who are diagnosed with autism are honest and non-judgemental. People who are medically fragile treat daily as a gift.

These are simple lessons that aren't found in books, studies, or political agendas. Through their loss of physical, sensory, or intellectual ability, they are characteristics of people who have found a way to see the beauty, love, and compassion in our world. Maybe we should look to them as our role models. Maybe they can "fix" us!!! [read more...]

COMMENTARY: There's much wisdom in this article! It reminds us of the Beatitudes – "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God."

Click the picture to read the whole article: scroll down about 1/3 of the way to "WHO HAS ABORTIONS?" This shows you that unmarried women account for 86% of all abortions. Further down, you see that unmarried women "living with a partner" account for 25% of abortions. This means that 61% of all abortions (86% minus 25%) are due to casual sex – "hooking up" and having "one-night flings."

Pro-abortion people will almost always bring up the "whattabout" argument: "What about cases of rape, incest, or when the mother's death is likely?" The article "Just the FAQS" in USA Today – hardly a conservative source – states: "Just 1% of women obtain an abortion because they became pregnant through rape, and less than 0.5% do so because of incest, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Yet the battle over exceptions for both has garnered outsized attention in the national abortion debate." The Guttmacher Institute is a pro-abortion research group, so again these figures are not from a conservative viewpoint.

A third article, "Abortion and Maternal Mortality," explains that the mortality rate of mothers is only 27 per 100,000 live births, or less than 0.003% which is a statistically insignificant number. So using the under 1.5% of pregnancies, the cases of rape, incest, or the life of the mother as a "whattabout" argument to justify all abortions is like justifying all speeding by pointing to an instance of a husband exceeding the speed limit to get his pregnant wife who's in labor to the hospital. The exceptions do not make the rule. We simply don't write wide-ranging laws just because of rare exceptions. We should not invent a blanket "right to abortion for any reason" due to these rarities. And adding the crime of murdering a live human being to the crimes of rape or incest does not lessen the evil of those two latter crimes.

Is the right to life found anywhere in the U.S. Constitution? The 14th Amendment to the Constitution says a state cannot "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." So the general rule is that all persons possess the right to life and equal protection. If states pass laws allowing abortion in the cases of rape or incest, the laws must follow "due process" – the rape or incest must be proven by law to have taken place.

The 14th Amendment uses the word "person" – is an unborn baby a "person"? My high school biology teacher who believed in evolution showed us illustrations of the supposed evolutionary ladder of monkeys and apes becoming humans and of a little tadpole as it passed through stages of development to become a frog. He made the analogy that a fetus is just like a tadpole, not a real human being. A few years later, we learned that he was convicted of having sex with one of his students. It is obvious from the first paragraph above that the vast majority of pro-abortion people adopt that position to rationalize having sex outside of marriage: what you really believe determines how you behave and vice-versa.

When Roe v. Wade was decided, one of the Justices wrote that the science was inconclusive as to when human life begins. But long before that case, people such as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that human life begins at conception. And a fourth article, "The science is conclusive: That fetus is a baby," quots several scientific and academic and legal sources that state, for example: "In McGraw-Hill's textbook, Patten's Foundations of Embryology, 6th ed., ... biology professor Bruce M. Carlson of the University of Michigan, writes, 'The time of fertilization represents the starting point in the life history, or ontogeny, of the individual.'" An unborn baby is a human person, not a tadpole or a frog or a dog or a monkey.

Thus, Justice Samuel Alito was correct in writing the Court's decision: Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided from the outset. It was contrary to known science and had no basis in the U.S. Constitution. Now it is up to the states to pass laws that follow the Constitution. Pro-abortion women have gone to extremes over this decision: one of the most egregious examples is "Pro-abortion women threaten sex strike over Roe v. Wade reversal" telling that they will abstain from sex outside of marriage because of the Court's decision. At last, we have agreement between the Pro-abortion and Pro-life folks on abstinence!

In the proper context of marriage, a man's and a woman's sexual desires coincide: a man desires to have intercourse, and a woman desires to have a baby. This creates normal, healthy families. But the "hookup culture" after the 1973 Roe decision has deceived women to believe they have the same desires as men. The article "Supreme Court Decision May Force Young Women to Confront Sexual Reality" explains – "The hookup culture only benefited men. And men have benefited from abortion becoming a form of birth control. Abortion on demand meant that men impregnating women to whom they were not married came with no consequences. Abortion meant that men didn’t have to marry the woman they impregnated. Abortion meant that men didn’t have to raise the child they conceived. And abortion meant that men didn’t have to pay child support."

86% of all abortions result from having sex outside of marriage, a lack of abstinence. As for the remaining 16% of abortions, married couples' excuses of "not ready yet" or the financial cost of "unexpectedly expecting," there are more married couples seeking to adopt than there are babies in the U.S. available for adoption and there are well over 3,000 pregnancy care centers and pregnancy resource centers in the U.S. – see Here's Where to Go If You Need Help With Your Unexpected Pregnancy. The pro-abortion people argue – "What is the use of a new baby? It wakes us up at night with its crying, it makes stinky diapers, it's always outgrowing its clothes, it's very inconvenient and expensive... and it gets in the way of our having uninhibited sex!" But that "useless" baby might be the next Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Michael Jordan, or Ben Carson... if he or she (not "it") lives.

The pro-abortion folks are supreme hypocrites:
if they'd just practice on themselves
what they preach for others,
it would put an end to this foolish debate.

(Get this as a separate article on our ARC-News blog at blogspot.com.)