Pelosi says ban on federal abortion funding will be dropped next year (What is it with Democrats and the Destruction of The UN-Born I just do not understand. Have the Democrats become a Death Cult and what is there real End game)
CNA Staff, Aug 31, 2020 / 11:00 am (CNA).- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has signaled that a prohibition on federal funding for abortion will be excluded from spending bills next year if Democrats retain a majority in the House of Representatives, setting the stage for the end of a 44-year-old bipartisan agreement on abortion funding.
The Los Angeles Times reported on Friday that Speaker Pelosi (D-Calif.) recently told some House Democrats that funding bills next year would not include the Hyde Amendment.
The Hyde Amendment, a policy barring taxpayer funding of elective abortions, has been law since 1976. It is named former congressman Henry Hyde, a 16-term Republican congressman from Illinois who introduced the amendment.
The policy, passed with bipartisan support as an attachment to spending bills, bars Medicaid reimbursements for elective abortion services, but it contains exceptions for abortions in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is at stake.
According to a study published by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute and recently updated, the policy is estimated to result in around 60,000 fewer abortions each year, or around one in nine pregnancies of women with Medicaid benefits. The institute claims that the policy has thus saved more than 2.4 million lives since it was instituted in 1976.
However, the 2016 Democratic Party platform called for the repeal of Hyde, and all of the party’s presidential candidates in 2020 supported the repeal of the policy.
Nominee Joe Biden reversed his support for the Hyde Amendment last year, after he faced criticism from abortion supporters—including his future vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris—for supporting the policy.
President Trump has supported the Hyde Amendment, but a bill to codify it–the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act–failed to receive the necessary 60 votes in the Senate, in 2019.
Some House Democrats including Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), have tried to repeal the policy in 2019 and again in 2020, either through introducing legislation to do so or by attempting to remove the amendment from a spending bill at the last minute.
The amendment was ultimately included in spending packages so they would receive the support of the Republican-led Senate and White House.
Now, however, Speaker Pelosi has reportedly promised to undo the policy.
The head of the U.S. bishops’ pro-life committee, Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, told CNA last year that “there historically was broad consensus” in support of the policy from members of both major political parties.
“So it’s very disappointing to see the extremism now that’s attacking what most Americans would consider a very important principle,” he said. “When you’re destroying a human life, this isn’t health care.”
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CNA Staff, Aug 31, 2020 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- The United States sent a strongly-worded letter to several UN committees in early August rejecting any implication that there is a right to abortion as “bizarre.”
The letter was sent on August 11, 2020, to several United Nations offices including: the Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls; the Special Rapporteur on the Right of Everyone to the Enjoyment of the Highest Attainable Standard of Physical and Mental Health; and the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Its Causes and Consequences. It was published online on Aug. 25.
The letter was issued by the United States Mission to the United Nations in Geneva. Andrew Bremberg is the U.S. Ambassador to the Office of the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva.
“We received your bizarre and inexplicable letter of May 22, 2020, regarding alleged undue ‘restrictions taken in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic impeding access to abortion services’ in the United States,” said Bremberg, referring to criticism the United States received after some states moved to restrict non-essential medical procedures to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
“As United Nations human rights mandate holders, you are undoubtedly aware that international human rights law does not recognize any ‘right to abortion,’” he wrote.
“The United States is disappointed by and categorically rejects this transparent attempt to take advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to assert the existence of such a right. This is a perversion of the human rights system and the founding principles of the United Nations,” said the ambassador.
The letter noted that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stated in a June 1 letter to the United States Agency for International Development that “the United Nations does not intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any State. Thus, health care is provided with full respect to national laws. It does not promote, much less impose, abortion on anyone, nor is it intended to do so.”
The United States is “particularly disappointed that you have chosen to waste the limited time and resources of your mandates on such spurious allegations, rather than focusing your energies on areas where your attention is most appropriate and warranted,” said Bremberg in the August letter.
The letter cited the “actual human rights abuses” occurring in the Chinese province of Xinjiang as something that would be more appropriate for the committee to concern themselves with compared to U.S. abortion policies.
The Chinese government is currently holding more than 1 million Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in concentration camps, with human rights groups consistently reporting instances of torture, anti-religious indoctrination, forced labor, forced abortions and sterilizations.
“Yet the United Nations system — including the Secretary-General, the Human Rights Council, and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights — has been notably quiet on this topic, even as they find ample opportunity to opine on matters of American domestic political concern,” he wrote.
According to the letter, the United States and other states “increasingly see the UN’s human rights system as utterly broken,” due to its status as “self-appointed guardians to label certain policy preferences as ‘rights.’”
“At the same time, we see violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms on a massive scale that generate little or no comment by these same guardians,” said Bremberg.
On Monday, during a virtual townhall with women’s civil society organizations, Guterres was asked about what can be done to ensure that “critical rights”–referring to reproductive health care–would be protected during the pandemic.
“It is clear that we are witnessing a very strong attack,” on the terms of the Beijing Declaration said Guterres, in apparent reference to objections from the U.S. and other countries. The Beijing Declaration and Platform to Action is a 1995 document that “flagged 12 key areas where urgent action was needed to ensure greater equality and opportunities for women and men, girls and boys,” including reproductive health.
Guterres said the UN was working to ensure “Governments do not take profit of the COVID-19 to undermine the rights of sexual and reproductive health,” and that such services will still be available.
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We should see vocation on the whole spectrum of love, understood as charity, as willing and doing whatever God tells us to do in the duty of the moment, however our lives are externally structured.
Mary Cuff’s recent Crisis article premising that the single life is not a vocation, has left many singles rather nonplussed. The following words are meant to offer some hope and consolation to those who, for reasons that may soon be adduced, do not end up in one of the three traditional ‘vocations’ – priesthood, the vowed religious life, and marriage.
I write these words having just attended the marriage of two alumni of the college at which I teach (a graced opportunity I have had many times over the years) but I also know of many others who have not found spouses, and don’t discern a call to the convent or seminary. There are untold numbers of such unsettled ‘singles’, many of whom are so, as the Catechism says, ‘often not of their own choosing’ (par 1658). What are we to say to them?
We might take a step back, and look at ‘vocation’ in a more etymological and personalist sense, as a ‘calling’ from God given to each soul, to follow the path that He wills for one’s life. None of us (save Our Lady) fulfills this perfectly but the Church has developed various paths one may choose, to ensure as well as we might that we are doing God’s will. The Apostles and disciples followed Christ Himself; then we have the orders of virgins and widows in the apostolic era, the beginnings of monasticism in the early desert Fathers, the coenobitic and the eremitic, flourishing in the rule of the Augustinians, Benedictines, Cluny and Citeaux, the Basilians and others in the East; then the itinerant Friars of the Middle Ages, minor et maior, the clerks regular, the Jesuits being foremost; then on into the early modern era, with societies of apostolic life, personal prelature (Opus Dei, the Anglican rite), and various consecrated lay apostolates.
Some have vows, some have promises, some are rather less externally structured: Saint Philip Neri, the founder of the Oratory, never wanted the men in his community to be bound by vows, even crossing them out from a draft of the rule, writing in with his own hand that his men would be bound solely in vinculo caritatis, by the bond of charity alone.
The thing is that the concept of ‘vocation’ is a developing varied one, that is best seen as a branched tree, with many paths of life leading to heaven (one may hope), each with its roots in Christ. After all, in a previous era, marriage would not have been included as a ‘vocation’, but would have been more of a natural default (for want of a more felicitous term!), what everyone did, if you didn’t have a vocation, a term reserved for a calling to a supernatural state transcending the natural desire for a spouse and children, written into our very nature. When students mention that they feel ‘called’ to marriage, I think – and have oft times said, half in jest – who doesn’t? A woman who left the novitiate, or a man who left the seminary, would be described as having ‘lost their vocation’, not as having ‘found their vocation’ to marriage.
But we will take the point as given, if vocation in a broader and more expansive sense implies being ‘set apart’ – consecrated, in some sense – for a particular purpose or mission, great or small. We are all in one real sense already consecrated – set apart for a mission by Christ – by Baptism, and by Confirmation, the latter making us ‘ambassadors for Christ, quasi ex officio’, as Saint Thomas put it.
The ultimate vocation of every human person is what the Church has called the ‘universal call to holiness’, that imitatio Christi, the way, the truth and the life. Yes, the promises of marriage and priesthood, and the vows of religious life, are a salutary means to this necessary end, and hence would be termed more ‘vocational’ paths, but the promises and vows are not the end themselves.
There are two problems with maintaining too rigid a notion of vocation. The first is that a certain number of people – we know not how many, in the tangled depths of the conscience – are simply not called to one of the traditional vocations, or ‘states of life’. We should not leave them to fall into discouragement, if not despair, as though they had been rejected or had themselves ignored a ‘call’. They may start to ‘feel’ one, even though one does not exist, and enter into a frustrating path, that is almost entirely not conducive to their holiness.
And what of marriage? It would seem that a relatively happy and flourishing singlehood is to be preferred to a tragic match. Striving to shoehorn one’s way into such a vocation for which one is ill-suited seems not to be recommended. After all, every vocation is a gift from God. Whatever one thinks of ‘online dating’, is there not a slight Pelagian tinge to filling out questionnaires, replete with characteristics of what one is looking for in a potential spouse, from height to eye color to liturgical sensibilities, and then being disappointed with the real person? And beware of desperation and marrying because one’s biological clock is ticking – seven and twenty and no prospects and all that – or because you think you have to be married, whether for natural or supernatural reasons. As Dr. James Dobson once quipped, don’t confuse your needs with someone’s (oft illusory) assets. To seek a spouse at all costs, come hell or high water, may well result in both hell and high water, should the marriage prove disastrous, and readers likely know all too well of many such tragedies. Serendipity and patience (not passivity) in one’s romantic endeavors seems to be preferable, corresponding to the oft-mysterious ways of God.
We may be glad to see the end – or nearly the end – of coercing men and women into seminaries, convents and orders, with the youngest son destined for Holy Orders, unless one younger came along. Mothers across the land would pray for at least one her boys to become a priest and would go into her old age with a tinge of sadness if they all found brides, even if she was blessed with grandchildren. As the saying goes, the seminaries in Ireland were filled with young men whose mothers had vocations.
For the young women, Hamlet’s cry echoes through the ages, ‘Get thee to a nunnery’, if they found themselves stymied or rejected in the pursuit of marriage and motherhood, ‘by chance or nature’s changing course’.
We might add that of those who do have vocations, how many are frustrated in their path by the sad state of dioceses, seminaries and orders across the Church? We have all heard of conservative and traditional candidates have been cast out, when found saying the rosary or being too ‘pro-life’, or preferring certain traditional liturgies.
And as far as marital prospects go, our own era may be likened as spiritually analogous to the years following the Great War: Just as millions of the most eligible bachelors were blown to smithereens on the battlefields of Europe, so too, millions of young men are now morally compromised (even to the point of being unmarriageable) by the sea of impurity – the plague of pornography – in which our world is immersed, and the moral degradation that ensues. To paraphrase the Catechism, the integrity of the gift in marriage is dependent on the integrality of the self who gives. Men dis-integrated by unchastity won’t make good husbands and fathers.
On the other hand, so many young women are themselves distracted by careerism and feminism, that they have to get themselves ‘established’ before even thinking of marriage, if they ever do. Who needs a prince, as the saying goes?
Which brings us back to the single lay state, with so many people single not of their own choosing, having to carve out a ‘vocation’ in the midst of what pursuits they do follow. One of the key elements to holiness – a sine qua non – is to dedicate our lives in some way to a purpose higher than ourselves – some apostolic work, whether humble or great – which in turn is offered to God in divine charity. This may be anything from caring for the sick, or aging parents, to education and forming of the young, or really any work that may be done ad maiorem Dei gloriam.
Yes, it is easier, one may suppose, to devolve into selfishness and instability in the single path, but this may happen in any vocation, vowed or unvowed. One need not look far for disastrous examples. Apostolican Actuositatem, the document on the laity from the Second Vatican Council, exhorts all of us in the lay state to adopt a ratio vitae – a ‘plan of life’ – an analogue, if you will, of the religious rule, so that we may use the hours, days, and weeks, to offer them to God, and so fulfill the end for which He created us, which, ultimately, is the purpose of any vocation.
Of course, we should still pray for and support the traditional vocations to the priesthood and religious life’, and we may add, if you like, ‘to holy marriages’, that many, especially those who are resisting, may respond to the call of God. Pope John Paul II’s 1985 Letter to Youth, Dilecti Amici, is an excellent meditation on this theme, which I give to all my students to read. But I would propose – and I use that term advisedly – that we see vocation on the whole spectrum of love, understood as charity, as willing and doing whatever God tells us to do in the duty of the moment, however our lives are externally structured, just as Our Lady exhorted the stewards at that wineless wedding, ‘do whatever He tells you’. For the Almighty can turn whatever we’re given, even if it be a jar of ordinary water, into an elixir leading to everlasting life.
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John Paul Meenan, M.Sc., M.A., teaches theology and science at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom in Ontario, Canada, with a particular interest in the relationship between faith and reason, and how the principles of our faith should impact and shape the human person and modern culture.
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