Two legal cases concerning surrogacy made headlines this summer. Both arose after surrogates were pressured to abort in the second trimester due to fetal anomalies: in Ontario, a cleft lip and possible other health problems; in Alaska, hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Both the unnamed Canadian surrogate and the American surrogate McKenna West refused, and the children they bore are alive today as [...]
Paul Tuns: On Sept. 14, the Group of Experts of the Declaration of Casablanca for the Universal Abolition of Surrogacy, along with a group of 160 non-government organizations spanning the globe, sent a letter to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child asking it to recognize that surrogacy constitutes the sale of children according to the Optional Protocol to [...]
Gianna Baklinski An Ontario woman who carried a baby for a same-sex couple is being sued after she refused to abort at their request. The woman was engaged to act as a surrogate by two men. Part-way through the pregnancy, routine ultrasounds indicated that the baby might have a cleft lip and palate, as well as other minor defects. When the intended [...]
From sandwich bag to healthy 13-year-old Blake is a thriving British 13-year-old, with tousled blondish hair and blue t-shirt, smiling into the camera. The first time his mom, Lauren, saw Blake was as a preemie, delivered 13 weeks early by caesarean, being carried in a sandwich bag immediately after birth to the neonatal intensive care unit. As unlikely as it seems, the [...]
Paul Tuns: Popular YouTuber Jesse Ridgway and his wife, Ashley, aborted their unborn baby because of a Down syndrome diagnosis, after which they complained about the backlash they faced online. Ridgway, who runs a YouTube account called McJuggerNuggets with 4.34 million subscribers, posted a message on Instagram on June 3 saying, “This week, my wife and I made the very difficult decision [...]
Victor Penney: It sounds strange, but it’s true: the best player in college basketball this year was made in a lab. His name is Cameron Boozer. The 18-year-old just had an incredible season in the NCAA, and yet, underneath the accolades, there’s a wound at the heart of this young man’s origin story, a scar which is no fault of his own, [...]
Pro-lifers dodge a Molotov cocktail at Portugal’s March for Life On March 21, thousands of people marched in Lisbon and a number of other cities around Portugal. The Portuguese Federation for Life stressed the focus of the March was on “the dignity of all human beings for life from the moment of conception until natural death, and for families.” The March was [...]
Tanis Cortens, Feature Writer: Over the past year, six Canadian hospitals have experienced decreases in maternity care availability. Peace Arch Hospital in White Rock, B.C., has a maternity diversion in place as of this writing: Expectant mothers will have to deliver their babies at other hospitals between March 12 and 18, marking the ward’s eighth temporary closure since December. Also in B.C., Ridge [...]
Tanis Cortens, Feature Writer: In 2025, two Peruvian municipalities passed ordinances giving legal rights to wild stingless bees from the Amazon. According to the Earth Law Center, which campaigned for the ordinances, among the “inherent rights of the bees and their ecosystems” now recognized under law are “the right to exist and thrive, the right to maintain healthy populations, the right to [...]
Paul Tuns: On Feb. 3, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons issued a new recommendation that so-called gender affirming surgery should not be carried out on minors until the age of 19, citing professional ethics and the lack of quality research supporting such surgeries as reasons for the new guidelines. The next day, the American Medical Association issued a statement saying that [...]
In legal first, a detransitioner successfully sued her medical care team Paul Tuns: On Feb. 2, a White Plains, N.Y., jury awarded Fox Varian $2 million in damages after her psychologist and plastic surgeon failed to properly treat her history of mental illness before approving of a surgical “gender-affirming” mastectomy and provide professional standards of care during Fox’s medical treatment. Varian’s is the [...]
Paul Tuns: Rebel News reported that according to provincial data they obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, “The thing that gender activists claim isn’t happening, not only happened, but it happened 99 times” as records indicated. Rebel News reported that, “What the documents show is a pattern of abuse, a staggering waste of medical resources, and an alarming rise in [...]
Why do right-wing populist governments vote with the left at the EU? This is a question that has perplexed many. Why is it that conservative countries like Hungary, Italy, and Poland almost uniformly stand with the rest of the European Union countries in supporting far-left measures? Are they strong-armed, bullied, afraid of losing friends, afraid of losing trade opportunities, afraid of retaliation [...]
Rory Leishman: The United States Declaration of Independence famously asserts: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” As originally understood in 1776, the phrase “all Men” in this context referred to all humans. In [...]
Rory Leishman: In yet another deeply disturbing development in the rapidly evolving science of in vitro fertilization (IVF), Professor Shoukrhat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health and Science University announced in a paper published in Nature Communications on Sept. 30 that a research team led by him has succeeded in transforming human skin cells into human eggs. Mitalipov anticipates that once this technique [...]