California bill would remove reporting exemption for priests in confessional

Denver Newsroom, Nov 4, 2020 / 05:11 pm (CNA).- Planned Parenthood on Tuesday dropped a lawsuit challenging several abortion restrictions in Arizona, including a 24-hour waiting period for women seeking abortions, laws that bar non-physicians from carrying out abortions, and state laws against telemedicine abortions.

In a notice dated Nov. 3, Planned Parenthood Arizona voluntarily and without explanation dismissed its lawsuit against Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich, which it had first filed in 2019.

PPAZ says the pro-life laws it was fighting have reduced the number of abortions it has performed in the state by 40% since 2011.

Cathi Herrod, president of the Center for Arizona Policy, told CNA that Planned Parenthood tried to argue that the combination of Arizona’s various pro-life laws created an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to choose abortion.

The Center for Arizona Policy has been advocating for various pro-life measure in Arizona for several years, working with the Arizona Catholic Conference and the Bioethics Defense Fund to craft policy, Herrod said.

“It’s a great day for Arizona women and for preborn children. Planned Parenthood challenged laws that basically provided for women’s health and safety,” Herrod told CNA in an interview.

In the lawsuit, Planned Parenthood had challenged several laws in Arizona pertaining to abortion including provisions that “effectively prohibit anyone other than a licensed physician from providing abortions and related services,” as well as a ban on the use of telemedicine to prescribe abortion pills.

“The laws that were challenged by Planned Parenthood were all common-sense regulations that would apply to most any other medical procedure, so it’s very good news that they dropped this lawsuit,” Herrod continued. 

Denise Harle, Senior Counsel for the Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, also welcomed the dismissal as a boon for the women of Arizona.

ADF, along with a Phoenix-area pro-life pregnancy center, had in March intervened in the lawsuit to defend the 24-hour waiting period provision in Arizona law.

“Abortion is a life-altering decision, and no woman should be rushed or pressured into it. That’s why we are pleased that Planned Parenthood has notified the court that it wants to drop its flawed challenge to Arizona’s common-sense protections for women, which are similar to those the U.S. Supreme Court has already upheld,” Harle said in a Nov. 4 statement.

“As many medical experts agree, significant, non-emergency medical procedures should not be performed without in-person consultation, or on a drop-in basis—let alone be performed by someone who is not a licensed physician,” Harle noted.

Planned Parenthood Arizona claimed in its lawsuit that the pro-life laws at issue have led to the organization performing 40% fewer abortions in the state since 2011, and have also led to the closure of four abortion clinics located in Yuma, Goodyear, Prescott Valley, and Chandler.

Arizona first imposed its 24-hour abortion waiting period in 2009. Courts blocked parts of the bill that brought about the waiting period, including provisions for mandatory counseling, until 2011, when they were allowed to go into effect.

At least 26 states mandate waiting periods for women seeking abortions, most of them 24 hours. Five states— Utah, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and South Dakota— have a 72-hour waiting period in place.

The Supreme Court held in 1992 that 24-hour waiting periods did not did not impose an undue burden on the right to abortion. Federal courts had not struck down a state’s waiting period until this year, when in October a federal judge ruled unconstitutional a mandatory 48-hour waiting period for women seeking abortion in Tennessee, which had been in effect since 2015.

Arizona has passed several pro-life measures since 2009, including a provision that minors must have notarized consent from one parent to obtain an abortion. The state also in 2011 passed a ban on abortions based on the race or sex of the unborn child or based on the race of a parent.

In 2015, the Arizona legislature passed a law barring abortion coverage from all health plans offered through the state’s health insurance exchange.

During April 2018, Governor Doug Ducey signed into law a bill which requires doctors to ask women seeking abortions for a specific reason why they want to end their pregnancy, such as rape or sex trafficking. The questions are intended to helo women who are being coerced into abortion; women can refuse to answer. 

Other states, such as Virginia, have in recent years moved to liberalize abortion access by allowing nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants to carry out the procedure.

During August 2019, an Arizona court awarded a former Planned Parenthood clinic director $3 million in damages in a wrongful termination case. The former employee, Mayra Rodriguez, claims that she witnessed physician malpractice, illegal conduct of a doctor, falsification of affidavits and patient records, and failure to report a minor who had an adult partner.

[…]

Washington D.C., Jun 10, 2018 / 05:00 am (CNA).- A Thomistic philosopher, an evolutionary biologist, and a Harvard astronomy professor walk into a bar. Well, not a bar.

But they did walk into a Washington, D.C. symposium this week, at which graduate students, professors, religious sisters, and other curious Catholics discussed highly technical scientific questions over bourbon and pecan pie, late into the night.

The three-day conference, co-sponsored by the Thomistic Institute and the Society of Catholic Scientists, brought together nearly 70 professors and graduate students from Princeton, Harvard, Yale, MIT, the University of Chicago, and other universities across the country to examine the intersection of faith and science.

“The typical contemporary view assumes that there is going to be some deep tension between faith and science. From our perspective that’s an illusion. There is not really a conflict there, but it does require you to work carefully through some of these issues,” said Fr. Dominic Legge, OP, the Thomistic Institute’s director.

The idea behind the conference was to bring high-level scientists together with some very good philosophers and theologians to talk through questions about integrating specialized scientific research with a broadly grounded philosophical perspective, Legge told CNA.

Scholars presented lectures on neuroscience, physics, cosmology, biology, and philosophy. The Thomistic Institute plans to post lectures from the symposium on iTunes.

Dr. Karin Öberg teaches astrophysics at Harvard University, where she researches the interstellar medium and star formation. Öberg seeks to discover “how chemistry and physics interact during star and planet formation to shape the bulk and organic compositions of nascent planets.” She is also one of the founders of the Society of Catholic Scientists.

At the Thomistic symposium, Öberg lectured about exoplanets and the possibility of extraterrestrials.

“The big scientific development that has happened in the past 10-20 years is that we have found out that planets are very common around other stars. Basically, every star that you see in the sky is its own solar system, so that’s a change in the cosmology that we live in. This obviously for most people begs the question, ‘Are they also living systems like our earth?’”

Öberg told CNA that it would be “super cool” to discover even non-rational life because “it would teach us something about how you go from inanimate to animate matter, which is currently very poorly understood.”

“But I think from a spiritual point of view what people are excited about is the possibility of other intelligent beings that could potentially inhabit some of these worlds,” Öberg continued.

“That’s where you get into some of the most controversial and exciting meeting points of the scientific pursuit of what may or may not exist, intelligent extraterrestrial life, and what we can deduce from Scripture or Church teachings on the likelihood of their existence. What kind of aliens would be compatible with the interpretation of Scripture?”

Neurology professor Dr. Stephen Meredith from the University of Chicago; Dr. William Carroll, a research fellow at Oxford; and Dr. Daniel de Haan, a divinity professor at Cambridge, also presented lectures.

Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, OP, presented on evolutionary theory.

“My question is how do you explain the appearance of novel traits in the biological realm from a biological perspective that appeals to four causes, one of which is efficient?” said Austriaco, who received his Ph.D., in biology from MIT.

“To invoke a first cause would make no sense to many of my colleagues at MIT who are doing science, but the attempt there is to try within a particular conceptual framework to make intelligible sense of what is actually happening,” he continued in a discussion among all of the lecturers.

On the theory of evolution, Legge explained that God’s creative activity is not in competition with explanations for the origins of being that are framed with the created universe.

“Creation means not just a first moment in time, but a relation of radical ontological dependence on God as creator. And, at the same time he endows creatures with the power to cause, and that means that creatures really can cause things to change in the world,” said Legge.

“We can investigate what’s happening with creaturely causes, including a theory of evolution about how you have the diversification of species over time and the emergence of more complex forms of life. That doesn’t threaten in any way the fact that God creates the world or that God has a providential plan,” he continued.

Dr. Jonathan Lunine, vice-president of the Society of Catholic Scientists and a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, elaborated on that point.

“Science provides us with a way of understanding the natural universe, the processes that occur, how that universe has evolved through time, but it doesn’t give us the metaphysical question of why are we here and what is behind it all,” he told CNA.
 
Unlike most scientific conferences, this symposium included an option for daily Mass and a holy hour, giving it a distinctly Dominican flavor.

Catholic speaker Matt Fradd, who has a graduate degree in philosophy, told CNA that the meeting “has been like drinking water from a fire hydrant with people who are about 17,000 times smarter than me giving talks on neuroscience and evolutionary theory, so it has been great.”

Legge told CNA that the symposium aimed to help participants grow in love for God through scientific understanding.

“To learn to love the Lord with your mind means to devote everything, all of the resources of your mind, to understanding what God has created and, ultimately, trying to understand as much as it is possible for us — God himself,” Legge told CNA.

“I think that is an important thing for every Catholic who is engaged in the life of the mind,” he said.

[…]

Washington D.C., Mar 20, 2020 / 12:00 pm (CNA).- Efforts to combat the spread of coronavirus should not be used to override ethical restrictions on the use of aborted fetal tissue in medical research, Catholic bioethicists warned on Thursday. The … […]