Freeze on Central American aid could cause spike in immigration, Congress told

Washington D.C., May 23, 2019 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey recently signed the Human Life Protection Act into law. The legislation would make performing or attempting to perform an abortion a felony in the state.

The bill permits exceptions if the life of the mother is at risk, but controversially makes no exception for victims of rape or incest.

In an interview to air May 23 on EWTN Pro-Life Weekly, attorney and pro-life speaker Rebecca Kiessling said that she applauds Alabama for refusing to make such exceptions because they dehumanize people like her.

Kiessling is the founder and president of Save the 1, a pro-life advocacy group dedicated to supporting the rights of unborn children conceived in rape or incest, or with disabilities. She told Pro-Life Weekly host Catherine Hadro that she was conceived when her biological mother was abducted at knifepoint and raped, and that she owes her birth to abortion having been illegal at the time.

Adopted at birth, Kiessling met her biological mother for the first time when she was 19 years old. While her birth mother “was happy to meet me,” Kiessling said her mother told her that she would have had an abortion if the procedure had been legal at the time.

“She said, ‘it should have been my right,’” Kiessling said.

But, Kiessling said, her mother has since undergone a change of heart, and the pair are now both “thankful that we were protected by Michigan law at the time.”

Asked about the Alabama law and its lack of a rape exception, Kiessling said state Rep. Terri Collins, who introduced the bill, was defending the lives of people like her.

“He really went to bat for us,” Kiessling said, while noting that the rhetoric around the debate had been distressing for her and others like her.

“It really hurts when our people group are under attack,” Kiessling said, adding that Save the 1 has eight hundred members who were either conceived in rape or became mothers after rape.

Shortly after Gov. Ivey approved the bill, President Donald Trump opined on Twitter that although he considers himself “strongly Pro-Life,” he believes in “three exceptions – Rape, Incest and protecting the Life of the mother.” Trump did not name Alabama, although the tweet was widely interpreted as commentary on the bill.

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>As most people know, and for those who would like to know, I am strongly Pro-Life, with the three exceptions – Rape, Incest and protecting the Life of the mother – the same position taken by Ronald Reagan. We have come very far in the last two years with 105 wonderful new…..</p>&mdash; Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href=”https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1129954110747422720?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>May 19, 2019</a></blockquote>

<script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>

Asked about the president’s tweet, Kiessling called Trump “the most pro-life president we’ve had by far,” but that this only made his comments about rape exceptions “hurt so much more.”

“You want somebody like that to be willing to defend you,” Kiessling said.

Asked how pro-life advocates can discuss such a sensitive topic, Kiessling said that it is important to “appreciate people’s concern for rape victims who become pregnant,” without dismissing the humanity of the unborn children involved.

Kiessling said pro-life advocates should “appeal to the sense of justice, that we do not punish innocent people for someone else’s crime.”

“People respect that answer,” she said. “And I did not deserve the death penalty for the crime of my biological father.”

Kiessling said Save the 1 has “made a lot of progress” in working to terminate the parental rights of rapists.

“I tell people, look if you really care about rape victims who become pregnant, please, protect them from the rapist and the abortion,” she said. “The baby is not the scary enemy.”

Kiessling’s full interview will air Thursday at 10:00 PM Eastern.

Kate Scanlon is a producer for EWTN Pro-Life Weekly

[…]

This photo taken on Jan. 15, 2024, shows a Chinese flag fluttering below a cross on a Christian church in Pingtan, in China’s southeast Fujian province. / Credit: GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images

CNA Staff, Mar 26, 2024 / 12:45 pm (CNA).

Government restrictions on religion reached their highest levels ever in a key global survey this month, one that has been monitoring those trends for nearly two decades.

Pew Research said this month that its religious restriction and hostilities survey showed that in 2021, government restrictions on religion reached “a new peak globally,” registering “the highest global median score” in the nearly 20 years that they have been analyzing the global data. 

Overall China, Russia, Afghanistan, Iran, and Algeria topped the report’s list of countries with “very high” government restrictions. Nigeria and India were the worst-ranked countries for social hostilities. 

Pew in its report noted several changes to both lists. Between 2020 and 2021, Pakistan and Turkmenistan moved from the list of countries with “high” government restrictions to those with “very high” restrictions. The Eastern African country of Eritrea and the Southeast Asian country of Brunei both moved from the “very high” category to “high.”

Roughly equal numbers of countries between 2020 and 2021 had increases and decreases in their government restriction scores, Pew said, while 55 countries had no changes at all. 

No countries moved up into the “very high” category of social hostilities, meanwhile, though several — including Iraq and Libya — moved from “very high” to “high.”

The survey showed religious groups facing government harassment in 183 countries, which Pew said was the highest on record; the governments of just over 160 countries, meanwhile — a near-record number — interfered with religious worship.

“Harassment” in Pew’s survey includes the “use of physical force targeting religious groups” and “derogatory comments by government officials” as well as “laws and policies that single out groups or make religious practice more difficult.”

“Interference” in religious worship, meanwhile, was defined as “laws, policies, and actions that disrupt religious activities, the withholding of permits for such activities, or denying access to places of worship” as well as rules that interfere with burial rights and other components of religious belief. 

The total number of countries with “high” or “very high” levels of government restrictions declined slightly from the prior year, though the “median index score for all countries” still rose overall. 

Just over one-fifth of countries had high levels of “social hostilities” involving “violence and harassment by private individuals, organizations, or groups,” a decline from its peak of about one-third of countries in 2012. 

Among the cited restrictions and hostilities in the report are Nicaragua’s persecution of the Catholic Church in that country and the kidnapping of multiple Catholic clergy in Haiti.

The survey also cited incidents such as what the U.S. State Department called a campaign for the “de-Islamization of the Netherlands,” led by politician Geert Wilders, as well as reports of antisemitism in Finland coupled with an insufficient police response to those incidents. 

Christians were targeted in 160 of the surveyed countries, while Muslims were harassed and restricted in just over 140 and Jews in 91.

The survey argued that the frequency of harassment “should not be interpreted” to indicate that those groups are the “most persecuted” in the world. Jews, for instance, were the third-most harassed religious group in the survey, though they make up just 0.2% of the world’s population. 

Globally, across regions, countries in Eastern Europe and Asia posted the highest rates of government restrictions on religion, while countries in Western Europe and much of Africa reported high to moderate levels of those restrictions. Restrictions in the United States were listed as “moderate.” 

Overall, the survey’s global government restriction index was the highest on record, reaching 3.0 on a 10-point scale and up from 1.8 in 2007.

The 10-point social hostilities index, meanwhile, stood at 1.6, up from 1.0 in 2007. 

[…]

CNA Staff, Jul 15, 2020 / 04:00 am (CNA).- Citing the need to protect the unborn, the Tennessee governor has signed strong heartbeat-based abortion restrictions into law. However, a federal judge quickly placed a temporary injunction on the law.

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