From the editor’s desk:
Before looking at the weird news stories and commentary that come across my desk in any given month, a note or two about the current paper. I was preparing a story about how those who oppose abortion can reach beyond the pro-life bubble as a cover story for this edition of the paper. It has been something I’ve been giving thought to since before the last paper went to press because of a conversation I had with Alex Schadenberg, a member of our editorial board. I reached out to pro-lifers from numerous organizations to get feedback on how the movement can do a better job reaching beyond our usual avenues, mostly this newspaper, LifeSiteNews, and the newsletters of pro-life organizations. Unfortunately, that story is put on hold because of the election. We were finishing the paper when the election was called and it did not make sense to relegate a national election to second fiddle behind a feature article that is not time-sensitive. I hope to use the extra time that current events have provided me to improve the story. Having been delayed for the election, there is a good chance the article will be delayed again, depending on what we might have to say about the election campaign. For now, I’m taking a wait-and-see approach. The next paper may be a couple days later than usual as we take a few extra days to evaluate what happened in the election results.
To keep posted on election-related stories, check out our website, theinterim.com. And for information about local candidates, sign up at Campaign Life Coalition’s voteprolife.ca. Unfortunately, because of Elections Canada regulations, you will have to pay a nominal fee to sign up for CLC’s thorough take, but it is worth it to be properly informed about the parties, leaders, and local candidates. The mainstream media will generally ignore moral issues or misreport on them. So, for the truth about the federal election, check out our and Campaign Life Coalition’s websites. We plan on reporting on the analysis CLC provides, so you will get some of it at TheInterim.com.
This edition has a lot of news stories, but part of that is because we published a joint July-August paper. You will notice that we have stories about New Brunswick, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. We are working extra hard to ensure there is coverage of life and family news from across the country.
In this issue, as in the last, there are stories by some of the summer students hired by Campaign Life Coalition. I want to thank Johnny, Maeve, Joanna, and Sarah for the work they did for The Interim. Our paper is better for the fresh perspectives they brought to our pages.
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Way back on July 2, Vox ran a story by Sigal Samuel about what we owe future human beings. It could have been called “how to be a good ancestor.” The article relied heavily on Roman Krznaric’s new book The Good Ancestor that examines the moral responsibility the current generation of policymakers has to future generations. Samuel notes that this notion of responsibility to the future is hardly new, that Peter Singer and others have favoured “the idea that future lives matter, and that we should care about improving them just like we care about improving those of people alive today.” I’m not antagonistic to the idea, although there are certain limits to it; we just don’t know what the future holds. Of course, we need to place our trust, first and foremost, in God, not government planners. But neither are we indifferent to those who will come after us. Governments, and the publics they answer to, should avoid the hubris in believing they can totally shape future outcomes. Timespans of just a few decades often seem like folly for most politicians, let alone what might be helpful to those who will be born a century from now. I am not thrilled that the people who most seem to think we have any moral responsibility to the people of the future are environmentalists, although the health of the physical planet is obviously one way in which we can think about what we owe future generations. One of my favourite economists, Tyler Cowen, in Stubborn Attachments, his book about moral imperative of economic growth, says that current policymakers should be as concerned about the lives of future populations as much as they are about current ones, and if they were, governments today would promote pro-growth policies that lead to innovations that reduce future suffering.
In his book, Krznaric notes that in some jurisdictions, “legal struggles for the rights of future people” are sprouting up around the world, including in the United States and Canada. In 2019, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that the government had to cut greenhouse gas emissions due to its duty of care for current and future generations. But these legal strategies are focused solely on forcing governments to take action on anthropomorphic climate change — which some might argue is another form of hubris.
For environmentalists, who generally favour draconian anti-population growth measures, there is an obvious blind spot. Our moral responsibility to future generations, however, presumes the presence of future generations. To be a good ancestor, we must have progeny. Instead, we have steeply falling fertility rates as families generally have fewer children than they say is their ideal; this is the result of the high costs of raising a family (including social costs), pushing women into the workforce, having children later in life, and other social maladies. Of course, the greatest threat to future generations are the preborn children who are prevented from being born, growing up, and having families of their own. Abortion is the greatest threat to future generations. If we want to be good ancestors, first we must be good families and good parents.
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In June, a biological man in California who identified as a woman insisted he had the right to enter the female section of a spa where he would expose his naked self, including his penis, to women. The staff faced complaints from women, including one who asked for a refund. The Los Angeles Times commented about the brouhaha in an editorial, “Transgender spa customers have the same rights as everyone else.” The editorial says that it is a relief that transgender-identifying individuals are “gaining acceptance in many corners” but that sometimes their rights clash with the rights of others. The Times editorial suggests that the way to deal with this is to always err on the side of transgender rights. The editorial goes on to state: “There is no doubt that Wi Spa did the right thing in defending the right of a transgender customer to be nude in the women’s area, even though the sight of male-appearing genitalia discomfited at least one female customer, who complained at the front desk. As a public-serving business, Wi Spa had to follow California law forbidding discrimination against transgender people. What’s extraordinary isn’t that the spa’s employees followed the law but that this led to violence outside as opponents and supporters of the law clashed over the weekend.” Did you read that carefully? “Male-appearing genitalia” is the term the paper uses instead of the biologically correct “penis.” It is not “male-appearing genitalia,” but actually “male genitalia.” The transgenderism ideology depends on barbarism and butchery — sometimes in form of physical mutilation, but always to the language and common-sense.
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The editorial from the Los Angeles Times mentioned in the previous item reminds me a bit of when Healthline, a San Francisco-based health information website for people who identify as LGBTQ+, called the vagina a “fronthole.” As I noted above, linguistic butchery.
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The July-August edition of Christianity Today has a fascinating article, “As Denominations Decline, Faith Looks Different in Nashville,” which examines how the capital of Tennessee has moved beyond being a hub for two of the largest denominations in the United States, the Southern Baptists Convention and the United Methodist Church, and that smaller and non-denominational churches are growing in both size and stature. The story is interesting throughout, but two tidbits especially caught my attention. Mike Glenn, pastor at Brentwood Baptist Church, said being a denominational leader “no longer carries any cachet,” explaining, “If you had in one room the executive of a denomination and in the next room you had a YouTube influencer, everyone would go to the YouTube influencer.” That is more than a sad little reflection of our times. On a more positive note, the same article reports that what is labelled “Contemporary Christian Music” outsells country music in Nashville.
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In July, the Czech government agreed to make restitution to thousands of women (mostly those in the Roma minority) who were subjected to communist-era forced or coerced sterilization in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic when it was under the thumb of the Union of Soviet Socialists Republics. Czechoslovakian doctors routinely bribed women to accept sterilization, lied about it being medically necessary, or carried out such procedures during other medical interventions such as caesarian sections. National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson writes about the “scars of socialism.” “The socialist strongmen of the 20th century differed in important ways from their progressive admirers in the United States and the rest of the free world, but they had some fundamental things in common: ‘Central planning’ was never an idea that was limited to economic life, and the planned in ‘Planned Parenthood’ is very much the planned from ‘planned economy,’ meaning that the ‘planning’ involved was to be at the social scale rather than merely at the family scale. Eugenics and population control were obsessions of central planners from Moscow to Washington to Beijing, and, to some extent, they still are.” It is foolish to believe that the state will limit itself to planning the details of the economy; it often leads to planning the minutiae of daily life — and the not-so-minutiae like how many children a family might have. Often such “planning” was backed by coercive sterilization and abortion, or at least strongly nudged sterilization and abortion. It is telling that Williamson’s column was the only one I saw in a North American publication.
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Years ago, Auberon Waugh, the author of the satirical Peter Simple column in the Daily Telegraph (and son of the novelist-journalist Evelyn Waugh), wrote a parody in which a disused Anglican church was being renovated to do abortions in the basement while the main floor was to become a mosque. Alas, events in England over the past 20 years have made such parody redundant, with some churches becoming “reproductive health clinics” or mosques although I have not seen any reports of a church becoming both like in Waugh’s column. Seldom does the ratchet seem to move in the moral direction, but the Associated Press reported in July that an Anchorage, Alaska strip joint that went by the name of Fantasies, was to become the Open Door Baptist Church, “turning the show floor into a sanctuary and trading the dancer’s pole with a pulpit.” Pastor Kenny Menendez told the AP, “I would say God is pleased to have a change, a transformation in the building, a place that really ultimately points more people towards him instead of away.” Amen to that.
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Auberon Waugh was perhaps the best 20th century’s best parody writer. Along with the novelist Peter De Vries, he was my favourite. Kevin D. Williamson in his aforementioned column, wrote, “Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was a great enthusiast for sterilization, and, to this day, the organization markets sterilization to women on the grounds that it — and this is a direct quotation — ‘can even make your sex life better’.” He links to the Planned Parenthood website’s page “What are the benefits of sterilization” and it sounds like parody: Sterilization can make your sex life better. Sterilization is birth control that you don’t have to use during sex, so it won’t interfere with the action. You can get caught up in the heat of the moment without worrying about pregnancy, and you and your partner can focus on each other instead of birth control.” Unfortunately, it is not parody to say that Planned Parenthood finds sterilization sexy.
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On August 12, the New York Times ran a story under the headline: “The C.D.C. endorses COVID vaccinations for pregnant people,” yet the caption under the photo referred to a “pregnant woman” in the picture. In politically correct publications, “pregnant people” is now the standard because of the insistence that transgender men who identify as women can become pregnant, as can transgender women who identify as men if they haven’t mutilated their reproductive organs. I thought someone might get into trouble at the Times with the cutline identifier “pregnant woman.” After all, the cutline writer probably does not know how the woman self-identifies. As Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center observed on Twitter, “How cisnormative to presume that she IDs as a woman.” The New York Times website did make a change, but it was to the headline, to the less offensive “The C.D.C. endorses COVID vaccinations during pregnancy.” That, at least, is accurate. The first two references in the article still referred to “pregnant people” but when it reported on the clinical trials, it used the formulation “pregnant women.” Journalists and editors are getting themselves tied into linguistic pretzels to avoid offending an infinitesimally small group of people who are biologically ignorant. We at The Interim will always refer to pregnant women, not pregnant people.
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The Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine issued a statement on its position and guidelines for “Infant Feeding and Lactation-Related Language and Gender” to “dissociate breastfeeding from motherhood.” The statement, written by eight doctors, says the ABM “recognizes that not all people who give birth and lactate identify as female, and that some of these individuals identify as neither female nor male.” So henceforth, mothers will now be “lactating persons,” breastfeeding will be “chestfeeding,” and nursing infants will be “human milk-feeding individuals.” This sounds like something from the brilliant parody website Babylon Bee, and it would be funny were it not real. The ABM justifies its social engineering language noting that “language is power” and thus wield it to advance the cause of the transgender ideology. Yet, the ABM does not quite have the courage of its warped convictions, saying that in places around the world – did I mention the Academy admits it is “acting in accordance with the United Nations and World Health Organization”? – where “being LGBTQI+ is illegal” “using desexed or gender-inclusive language … may do more harm than good and prevent important information from reaching families.” It already seems quaint to talk about biologically accurate information about mothers and breastfeeding in place of the politically correct trans talk to which even reputable scientists and medical practitioners are hostage.
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On August 3, Martin McKernan Jr., passed away in New Jersey at the age of 75. McKernan was a founding member of National Right to Life in the United States. He served as a member of the board of directors and as general counsel for National Right to Life from 1971-1974. After the Supreme Court of the United States issued its infamous Roe v. Wade decision in January 1973, McKernan was elected to a nine-member executive committee that created the corporate structure of the National Right to Life Committee, that (as the NRLC statement said) “continues to lead the movement to this day.” In 1974, McKernan was a founding member of the National Committee for a Human Life Amendment, which has sought a constitutional amendment to recognize the humanity of the preborn child, and served as a trustee since that time. Henry Hyde, the long-time pro-life Congressman who died in 2007, once said, “When the time comes as it surely will, when we face that awesome moment, the final judgment, I’ve often thought, as Fulton Sheen wrote, that it is a terrible moment of loneliness. You have no advocates; you are there alone standing before God – and a terror will rip through your soul like nothing you can imagine. But I really think that those in the pro-life movement will not be alone. I think there will be a chorus of voices that have never been heard in this world but are heard beautifully and clearly in the next world – and they will plead for everyone who has been in this movement. They will say to God, ‘Spare him because he loved us,’ – and God will look at you and say not, ‘Did you succeed?’ but ‘Did you try’?” Carol Tobias, executive director of the NRLC, said following McKernan’s death, “As Martin is ushered into the presence of his Savior, we are sure he is hearing the ‘chorus of voices that have never been heard in this world but are heard beautifully and clearly in the next world’ speaking up on his behalf. He was crucial in establishing the foundation of the right-to-life movement and we will forever be grateful for his work in protecting the lives of the most vulnerable among us.” There are thousands of pro-lifers who toiled for years quietly, often behind-the-scenes, in the pro-life movement. Martin McKernan Jr., was one of them.
