Month: April 2019

Denver, Colo., Apr 2, 2019 / 04:56 pm (CNA).- A death penalty repeal effort has failed in the Colorado legislature after failing to win enough votes in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

The Colorado Catholic Conference is “deeply disappointed&rd… […]

Washington D.C., Apr 2, 2019 / 03:00 pm (CNA).- House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) filed a discharge petition for the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act Tuesday. The petition needs 218 signatures to force a debate on the floor of the House of Representatives.

The bill would make it a crime for a doctor to refuse to provide age-appropriate medical care to an infant who survived an abortion procedure. It also would provide mothers with the opportunity to file a civil claim against their doctor.

Speaking at a press conference April 2, several members of Congress criticized Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for her refusal to give the bill a hearing. House Republicans have requested that the legislation be considered 25 times.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), chairwoman of the Republican Conference, said that for her colleagues to truly be for the people, “that has to start with being for the most vulnerable among us, for the babies.”

“If you don’t stand with the babies, and you won’t protect the babies, you are not for the people.”

Scalise echoed Cheney’s point.

“All of us here today have a message for Nancy Pelosi: if you won’t bring it up, we’ll bring it up,” he said. “And that’s what this discharge petition is about.”

“How can you be a leader in Congress and say that they think it’s okay to murder a baby once it is born outside the womb?” Scalise asked. “It’s happening, and we’re here to make it stop.”

Scalise said that the practice of denying medical care to infants who survive abortions is “not only wrong, it’s murder” and that this should not be legal. The Born-Alive Act would make laws “consistent all across the board” to ensure that babies are cared for.

The bill must garner the signatures of a simple majority of the House of Representatives. Scalise acknowledged that this will be an “uphill battle” in the Democrat-controlled House.

“But we don’t come here to do the easy things,” he said. “We come here because it’s hard.”

The bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO), said that her legislation was “a measure that has passed with bipartisan support in the past.”

Presently, 26 states have some sort of legal protection for babies who survive abortions. Wagner said that it was important that this be extended throughout the entire country.

“We need to make sure that we make this a criminal act,” said Wagner. “That we give mothers civil remedies, and that most of all, we give life-saving care to babies that are born alive.”

Wagner said she was grateful for the “brave” Democrats willing to sign the discharge petition. Right now, three Democrats have agreed to co-sponsor the bill.

“The Constitution provides for life, liberty, and equal protection under the law,” said Wagner. “Our founding fathers didn’t put an age limit on that.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) expressed shock that 25 requests for the bill to be considered had gone unanswered. He said that it should not come down to a discharge petition to protect the life of a newborn baby, and rejected the idea that this is a partisan issue.

“This isn’t about Republican or Democrat, it’s about life,” said McCarthy.

The members of Congress were joined at the press conference by three young women who were themselves survivors of attempted abortions.

Melissa Ohden was born at about 31 weeks of gestation, following her teenage mother’s attempted saline abortion. She described herself as “one of the children who deserve to be protected by the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.”

Ohden said that after her birth, she was “laid aside” at the hospital, until a nurse saved her life and provided her with care.

“My life never should have been left in the hands of the abortionist that day,” said Ohden. “My life never should have been to the luck of the draw of who was working that day at the hospital.”

As part of the Abortion Survivors Network, Ohden said she has been in contact with 281 other abortion survivors. She urged lawmakers to give her and her fellow survivors “the basic dignity we deserve. Give us healthcare. It is a right.”

“We fought for our lives in the womb. Do not make us fight for our lives once again when we’re born alive.”

[…]

Washington D.C., Apr 2, 2019 / 02:07 pm (CNA).- A new scientific study has found significant differences in the ways that the brains of male and female fetuses function prior to birth.

Researchers conducted MRI scans on human fetuses in the womb, studying the functional connectivity (FC), or the neurological connections between different areas of the brain, for both males and females. They found connections between parts of the female brains that were almost nonexistent in the male brains.

“The present study demonstrates for the first time that development of fetal brain FC varies with sex,” the researchers wrote, concluding that the fetal brain networks they observed likely lay the “building blocks” for brain development throughout rest of the baby’s life.

Dr. Leonard Sax, a family physician and author of the 2005 book “Why Gender Matters,” told CNA that the fact that there is a difference in brain function at all— at a stage of development when a baby has not yet been exposed to any societal influences— is significant in itself.

“I think the importance of this research is that it shows that the brain of a baby girl in her mother’s womb prior to birth is significantly different than the brain of a baby boy in the mother’s womb at the same stage prior to birth,” Sax told CNA.

“Exactly what those differences signify is controversial,” he noted.

Sax wrote a March 27 article for Psychology Today summarizing the study’s findings, in which he asked why the study had received relatively little media coverage. In some parts of the brain, the differences between males and females were “truly amazing,” he wrote.

“The human brain is gendered prior to birth. That may be politically incorrect, but it is an empirical reality,” Sax stated.

“Male and female are of God. The are hardwired, they are innate.”

He cautioned that it is not yet clear to neuroscientists what exactly the gender differences in brain function might mean, in terms of how activity in the brain relates to human emotion and experience.

“How does thinking happen? How does the brain mediate the process of thought or feeling? We don’t know the answers to those questions,” Sax said.

“In my article, I make no attempt to claim what that [brain function] difference signifies, because neuroscientists don’t know.”

He said while there are “plausible” interpretations that can be made based on the data, the researchers themselves “make no attempt to guess at the significance of their own findings.”

“The claim I’m making is girls and boys are different— that image strongly supports that claim,” he said.

Sax noted in his Psychology Today article that academics such as Judith Butler have pioneered popular theories that “male” and “female” are merely social constructs.

“The category of ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ are meaningful categories, they’re not a mere performance or a social construction as Judith Butler would have us believe. And they are clearly meaningful and real prior to birth,” he said.

Sax also pointed out that The New York Times published an op-ed April 1 in which Dr. Carol Hay, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, endorses Butler’s understanding of gender, calling gender “fundamentally a performance” based on and learned from social systems.

Sax posited that the author is unaware of “research showing that ‘male and female’ are present in the human brain prior to birth.”

“I wouldn’t say that she is lying, I would say that she is unaware of the relevant research,” he clarified.

CNA reached out to Hay for a reply. She told CNA in an interview that when it comes to gender, she tends “to be pretty critical of the science, because I think it’s often motivated by a particular political agenda, as all science is motivated by a particular political agenda.”

Despite this, Hay said that in her view, even if science can prove that there are innate biological differences in the male and female brains, “I’m not sure that would tell us anything about why boys and girls end up acting completely differently.”

“The question is whether those brain differences— if they do exist— the question is whether they then actually translate into the kind of gender differences that we’re used to associating with men and women and boys and girls,” she argued.

Sax, however, maintained that the data is meaningful, showing a concrete difference in brain function between males and females, even if it is not yet clear what that signifies.

“That claim that gender is meaningless, or gender as merely a ‘performance’ isn’t a true statement. It’s a false statement,” he said.

[…]

Chicago, Ill., Apr 2, 2019 / 11:48 am (CNA).- Alexa Hyman navigated her white Kia Optima, peering through sheets of rain as she made her way to a Southern California Rite Aid. She already the answer, but she had to see it in flashing black and white. S… […]

Bethesda, Md., Apr 2, 2019 / 08:58 am (CNA).- When Fr. Matthew Schneider was asked to move on after just one year of a three-year assignment as school chaplain and youth ministry leader, he was shocked.

“I wasn’t expecting it,” he sa… […]