If someone were to judge only by the outrageous coverage and commentary in our pro-choice media, he or she could be pardoned for supposing mifepristone is some kind of wonder drug—a cure for cancer perhaps, or a tonic that reverses the aging process. As it is, though, mifepristone is an abortion pill.
It works by breaking down the lining of the uterus, thereby terminating pregnancy. The Food and Drug Administration has approved it for use up to the 10th week. By then, the infant in the womb has a beating heart, an active brain generating brain waves, arms and legs, and tiny fingers and toes. Of course she or he is very small. All of us were at that age.
Mifepristone is reportedly used in more than half of all U.S. abortions. And, as all the world knows by now, it also is central to a legal battle that touched down briefly in the Supreme Court last month before the court sent it back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for argument and a decision on the substance.
There is little doubt that the case will sooner or later return to the Supreme Court, perhaps as early as the term that begins next October.
As suggested above, much of the coverage of the fight over mifepristone up to now has been a disgrace—sufficient cause to make the responsible writers and editors blush if they are given to blushing. I am not talking about minor news outlets or ideologically tilted opinion journals and web sites. I mean some of the biggest, most powerful and—they would have us understand—most professional media in the land.
Yet from the way they told the story you would hardly know that a district court judge in Texas was making a serious case in finding that the FDA cut corners so as, first, to approve mifepristone and twice more subsequently to relax restrictions on it. Instead, the pro-choice media simply slimed the judge and hushed up his critique.
Expressing “tremendous disappointment” at the Supreme Court’s failure to act forcefully in the case, Bishop Michael F. Burbidge of Arlington, Va., chairman of the U.S. bishops’ prolife committee, called it “wrong to allow the FDA’s greatly diminished health and safety standards to remain in place.” Here’s hoping the court does better when the case returns in the fall.
Meanwhile, it’s important to realize that the recent hubbub over mifepristone is only a hint of what’s yet to come. When the Supreme Court, in its Dobbs ruling last year, finally reversed the atrocious 1973 Roe v. Wade decision decreeing a newly invented constitutional right to abortion into existence, some may have thought the battle had been won.
But it wasn’t. The struggle to protect unborn human life must continue—in legislatures, courts, and the court of public opinion.
As it does, we do well to reflect on the ultimate source of the pro-choice movement’s fanatical energy. Here I turn to the late Lawrence Lader, an early pro-choice zealot, who in 1966 published a highly influential book called Abortion (it was cited eight times in the majority opinion in Roe). Like others in the movement, Lader saw legalized abortion as the key to the final freedom—not just freedom to have an abortion but, above all, freedom for sex without consequences.
To the extent this corrupting principle has become part of many people’s version of the American dream, the nation is in deep trouble for sure.
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Great and needed article!! I walk and pray on the sidewalk 10 hours a week in front of an abortion house. They, at about the time the Dobbs decision came out, hired more “Esorts” to shut us down on the sidewalks.
The abortion movement is extremely well funded, as in many ways so are our churches, yet we can barely even get the issue mentioned in all of our Christian churches. It should be an every day every week movement to change the culture to pro life. Yes “the nation is in deep trouble for sure”, and we can continue to hide our heads in the sand and ignore it, or we can wake up and demand action.
We read: “…much of the coverage of the fight over mifepristone up to now has been a disgrace—sufficient cause to make the responsible writers and editors blush if they are given to blushing.”
“Blushing!” Of the trendy “writers and editors,” those luminaries for buxom, teleprompter talking heads and for many of their generation, Anthony Esolen exposes their generalities:
“These are the people who should be first in our minds, these boys and girls. The world we’ve given them is worse than squalid. It is mad. The boy knows nothing about soldiering, but a lot about sodomy—more than his grandfather knew even after his turn of duty in the world war. The girl knows nothing about ovens or looms or pianos or poetry, but plenty about diaphragms, spermacides, and condoms. The boy and girl yawn at old-fashioned fornication, laugh at the Bible, and blush [!] to admit that they blush over anything” (Anthony Esolen, “Suffer the Children,” Touchstone (Chicago: Fellowship of St. James, March/April 2015), 3-4).
Will such media moguls succeed in sliming the Supreme Court, or not?
We can be assured of hundreds of corporate boardroom amicus briefs, as they submitted in 2015 in favor of oxymoronic gay marriage…for a very microscopic economic blip predicted for the GNP…Look for a repeat performance—imaginatively photocopied!—from AT&T, Verizon, Dow Chemical, Bank of America, General Electric, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, and even the San Francisco Giants, and nearly four hundred others.
Good article. But, as I know that I have mentioned before, we should stop using the term Pro-choice, and start using Pro-abortion. That is what they are – they want abortions. If you allow your opponent to decide what terms to use, you are halfway to losing the argument.
An even more accurate term would be “pro-murdering unborn babies.”
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/254218/pope-francis-praises-nfp-method-as-valuable-tool-for-married-couples – surprised that more attention has not been given to the words of the Holy Father on the good of NFP . HHS – if it has been blinded by the enemy to the blessings of having the real Presence of Jesus in a hospital ,
and honored by a lighted candle – may refuse to also see the connection between the attitudes that promote the death culture and many other social evils of our times .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5jYLR2x9jI – the well accepted Surrender Novena –
hope same be a good help in all areas that need the power of the trusting love for The Lord and its Peace, for The Spirit to operate – as the antidote for the rebellions and its fruits in our times .
I am mostly with Crusader. The best term is pro-unborn-child-murder. Second best would be pro-abortion. One of the worst is pro-choice.
This is why publication must be understood as a privilege and not a right. Something very similar to the procedure and methodology behind “The Index of Forbidden Books” ought to be applied to all publications.
As such, it would be best to allow only Dominicans (Order of Preachers) to publicize. If there is a third order of Dominicans, they and regular Dominicans would be the only ones with a license to submit articles to be published. Perhaps other people (e.g. those who are currently writing articles) could make demands on them for articles to be written, but they would be responsible for writing, and they would be held accountable.
Pro feticide vs anti feticide.
Lesser known facts.. there’s items other than mifepristone that can induce abortion.
Take unripened papaya for instance.. women in India have used it for ages.
If people don’t find one way, they tend to seek another.