USCCB: Equality Act would ‘punish’ religious groups opposed to gender ideology

Washington D.C., Jun 5, 2018 / 05:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- On Monday the Supreme Court vacated an appellate court’s decision from October which permitted an undocumented minor held in federal custody to an obtain an abortion.

This move by the court means there will no longer be a precedent should a similar case arise.

The June 4 order in Azar v. Garza was unanimous, though the initial case had been rendered moot as the minor had already had an abortion. The Supreme Court took up the case in January.

The minor in question, identified only as “Jane Doe,” obtained an abortion Oct. 25, 2017, after an appeals court ruled that the government had to provide her with one. Doe was from Central America, and was arrested after illegally crossing the U.S. border. She learned she was pregnant after she was in custody. Doe is now 18 years old and is no longer in federal custody. She was represented in court by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Trump administration argued that it was not the role of the government to assist with an undocumented minor’s abortion. In an appeal filed last year, Solicitor General Noel Francisco wrote that the government is “not obligated to facilitate abortion,” and that “the government acts permissibly when it does not place an undue burden in a women’s path.”

While the ruling did not go as far as some pro-life activists would have preferred, they were still pleased with the decision.

Charlotte Lozier Institute President Chuck Donovan told CNA that although the court did not determine whether the federal government must assist undocumented minors with abortions, he felt it was a setback for those in favor of abortion rights.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling in this case doesn’t answer the fundamental question – does the federal government have an obligation to help an undocumented teen abort her unborn child – but it does deny the ACLU a major victory in their drive to promote abortion on demand,” he said.

“Solicitor General Noel Francisco and the Trump Administration deserve the greatest thanks for waging this fight and helping our nation honor the right to life of every human being, born and unborn, who reaches our shores,” Donovan stated.

Kerri Kupec, Justice Department spokeswoman, welcomed the court’s decision. “The Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear that the federal government is not required to facilitate abortions for minors and may choose policies favoring life over abortion. We look forward to continuing to press the government’s interest in the sanctity of life.”

The Supreme Court’s decision detailed the timeline of the case.

The appellate court ruled Oct. 24, 2017 that the government make Doe available to obtain the counseling required by Texas law and to obtain an abortion. Texas requires pre-abortion counseling with the same doctor who will perform the abortion to take place at least 24 hours in advance of the procedure.

Doe’s representatives scheduled an appointment for her, and arranged for her to be transported to the clinic Oct. 25 at 7:30 a.m.

The government planned to ask the Supreme Court for emergency review of the appellate court’s ruling, and said it would file a stay application early in the morning of Oct. 25, believing an abortion would not take place until Oct. 26.

“The details are disputed, but sometime over the course of the night both the time and nature of the appointment were changed,” wrote the Supreme Court.

A doctor who had performed counseling for Doe earlier was available to perform an abortion, and her 7:30 a.m. appointment was moved forward to 4:15 a.m.

The government was informed at 10 a.m. Oct. 25 that Doe had procured an abortion that morning.

The Supreme Court declined to discipline Doe’s lawyers, whom the Trump administration alleged had committed misconduct, making “what appear to be material misrepresentations and omissions … designed to thwart this Court’s review.”

“Not all communication breakdowns constitute misconduct,” the court wrote.

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St. Paul, Minn., Mar 6, 2019 / 06:00 am (CNA).- At a time when, to many Catholics, politics in America seem at odds with faith and morals, Catholics in Minnesota gathered last month to demonstrate their active role in the legislative process.

On Feb. 19, over 1,000 Catholics, hailing from every one of Minnesota’s 90 state senate districts, gathered in Saint Paul for a day-long event called “Catholics at the Capitol.” The event was organized by the Minnesota Catholic Conference (MCC), the public policy arm of the Catholic Church in Minnesota.
 
MCC Executive Director Jason Adkins described the day as “a fantastic experience of helping people overcome their misperceptions about politics, their fear of the process.”

Adkins expressed confidence that the day helped participants find “their voice as faithful citizens.”

Following the midterm elections of 2018, Minnesota is the only U.S. state with a divided state legislature: a Democratic majority controls the state House of Representatives, while a Republican majority holds sway in the state Senate. With a newly-elected Democratic governor, advocacy by the MCC has focused on the art of the possible.
 
While meeting with state legislators during the afternoon, Catholics at the Capitol participants were encouraged to voice support for two specific measures, using talking points and handouts provided by the MCC.

Adkins explained that these two initiatives — the regulation of surrogacy in the state to prevent commercial exploitation of women, and a package of bills aimed at providing support to mothers and their children from pregnancy to two years of age — were deliberately selected for the day, because they were thought to be non-controversial in the legislature.

“The main priority of the day was education. We certainly wanted to assist the legislative advocacy around those two issues, but we wanted to pick issues that we thought had a strong consensus behind them.” he said, so that participants could have a positive experience of interacting with their elected representatives.

“We also have recognized that the pro-life political cause has kind of reached a stalemate. If your state is not controlled totally by Republicans, then it’s hard to get any pro-life legislation passed.”

By focusing their efforts this legislative session on proposals like the “First 1000 Days” collection of bills in support of mothers and young children, Adkins said the MCC “wanted to try to break that Gordian knot and propose something that we think may not combat the supply of legal abortions, but it can try to fight the demand.”

CNA asked Adkins if the wave of scandals related to clerical sexual abuse (and reports of episcopal failures regarding the handling of such cases) have had an impact on the Minnesota bishops’ ability to speak effectively on social issues. He said they haven’t noticed any change in the responsiveness or receptiveness of legislators so far.

“But where it has an impact,” he continued, “and it’s undoubted that it does: it has an impact on the bishops’ ability to be effective teachers to their own flock. So that’s the real challenge that we’ve encountered.”

The bishops of Minnesota have not appeared shy about continuing to lead their people in public. During the event, they distributed “Minnesota: Our Common Home”, an “educational resource” published with the approval of the Catholic bishops of the state.

As the title indicates, the text is a localized digest of Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical “On Care for our Common Home,” Laudato Si’.

The local text is significantly more compact than the original, with a word count under 13,000 compared to the encyclical’s more than 40,000 words.

The Minnesota document is presented in three parts: A Crisis of Nature, Ecological Conversion, and Integral Ecology.

The third part builds upon a phrase borrowed from Pope Francis — “integral ecology” — to call for a “consistent ethic of life” — a concept that, despite the controversy it has often engendered among American Catholics, is a core concept within the MCC’s efforts.

“Our belief is that ‘integral ecology’ is a very powerful way of repackaging the natural law: the idea that we have a created nature, and we live among things with a nature, that we must respect their possibilities and limitations, and living in accordance with the way God has ordered them, whether that’s our bodies or the creation we see all around us in the earth,” Adkins told CNA.

Emphasis on ‘integral ecology’ provides a new framework for public advocacy in the state.

“Minnesota: Our Common Home” calls not only for stewardship of natural resources, but also for “an ecological view of the human person.”

The document also underscores “the underlying false belief that we can be God” at the root of social ills such as artificial contraception, the disconnection of gender from biology, and the growing prevalence of assisted suicide and euthanasia.
 
“The bishops don’t take positions on public policy because they want to play politics” Adkins said. “They do it to help identify for Catholics how our Catholic social teaching translates into concrete public policy that [citizens] can choose to take up and support in the public square.”

[…]

Nebraska Capitol. / Credit: Steven Frame/Shutterstock

CNA Staff, Nov 1, 2024 / 14:55 pm (CNA).

Nebraska’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has released an advisory clarifying that the state’s preborn protection law does not prohibit miscarriage care or lifesaving care amid a pro-abortion advertisement campaign that told the public otherwise.

“The Department of Health and Human Services has received several inquiries, from physicians and health care providers, expressing concern regarding recent radio and television ads that included incorrect and misleading information regarding the Preborn Child Protection Act,” the Oct. 28 advisory reads.

The health advisory came amid an advertising campaign by advocates of Nebraska’s Right to Abortion Initiative 439, which advocates for a right to abortion up to fetal viability in the state constitution. The campaign featured multiple ads that stated that women couldn’t receive miscarriage care and necessary health care because of Nebraska’s current law.

“Any time misleading information causes confusion among health care professionals, it could cause harm to the health and well-being of their patients,” stated the advisory by Dr. Timothy Tesmer, the chief medical officer of the DHHS in Nebraska.

In the health advisory, Tesmer didn’t name which ads the department was responding to, but he clarified that the current law, which protects unborn children after 12 weeks’ gestational age from abortion, provides exceptions for medical emergencies and for cases of rape or incest.

But an advertisement campaign by pro-abortion group Protect Our Rights: Nebraska for 439 told the public otherwise. In one advertisement, advocates said that in Nebraska, there is “an abortion ban that threatens women’s lives” and that “doctors can’t help them even if the pregnancy won’t survive. It puts their lives in danger.” Other advertisements by the same group state that doctors “can’t properly care for patients” and claim that women get sent home “because of the confusing abortion ban” when they have miscarriages.

Allie Berry, the campaign manager for Protect Our Rights, told NBC News that she believed the advisory referred to her group’s ads but said the advisory was designed to “confuse voters.”

The advisory noted that a medical emergency is legally defined as either a threat to the pregnant woman’s life or a “serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.”

“The act does not require a medical emergency to be immediate,” Tesmer noted in the advisory. “Physicians understand that it is difficult to predict with certainty whether a situation will cause a patient to become seriously ill or die, but physicians do know what situations could lead to serious outcomes.”

Nebraska also has a competing pro-life amendment, Initiative 434, which would prohibit abortions after the first trimester, with exceptions for medical emergencies and cases of rape or incest. Another advertisement by Protect Our Rights claimed that Initiative 434 would make Nebraska’s current law permanent and “opens the door” to banning miscarriage care and IVF. 

The health advisory clarified that a variety of medical treatments are not prohibited by the Preborn Child Protection Act, including the removal of a child’s remains after pregnancy loss and the termination of a preborn child produced by in vitro fertilization (IVF) but not implanted in the mother’s womb. The advisory noted that any act intended to save the child’s life, as well as treatment for ectopic pregnancies, is not prohibited under the current law. 

“Physicians should exercise their best clinical judgment, and the law allows intervention consistent with prevailing standards of care,” the advisory continued. “The law is deferential to a physician’s judgment in these circumstances.”

Political context

With two contradicting abortion-related measures on the 2024 ballot, Nebraskans will decide Nov. 5 on protection for unborn children in the nation’s only competing abortion ballots. 

Marion Miner, the associate director of Pro-life and Family Policy for the Nebraska Catholic Conference, told CNA that “these lies … are abortion activists’ attempt to terrify voters into approving a radical pro-abortion constitutional amendment they would never otherwise support.”

“Abortion activists are putting women’s lives at risk in a gambit to advance a pro-abortion political agenda,” Miner added. “There are real potential human costs, including lost lives.”

She noted that “misinformation by abortion activists …is putting women’s lives at risk.”

“These lies have become so rampant in the weeks leading up to this election that public health officials felt the need to correct the record to prevent this misinformation from provoking a public health crisis,” Miner said.

Kelsey Pritchard, director of state public affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, pointed out that this pro-abortion rhetoric is not isolated to Nebraska.

“This falsity that has been parroted by [Vice President] Kamala Harris and unchecked by most of the media leads women to delay seeking care and gives doctors pause when they need to act immediately,” Pritchard said in a statement shared with CNA.

“Every state with a pro-life law, including Nebraska, protects women who experience a miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, or any other medical emergency in pregnancy,” Pritchard emphasized. “This care continues to be available under ‘life of the mother’ exceptions, which allow physicians to rely upon their reasonable medical judgment.”

Recently, Harris amplified claims by several news outlets that two women died as the result of Georgia’s pro-life laws. But doctors say one woman, Amber Thurman, died because of the abortion pill and medical malpractice, while the other woman, Candi Miller, died of side effects from the abortion pill after she didn’t seek medical help.

“Women who need medical care should not be made to believe, because of ads they have seen on TV or in political mailers, that they have no option but to stay home instead of seeking treatment,” Miner said.

[…]