Canada

Police in Vancouver are describing the crime as a “double shooting” after a 23-year-old man shot a pregnant 31-year-old woman. The woman lost the baby but she is expected to survive the shooting. Under Canadian law, police cannot charge the assailant for killing a preborn child as a baby is not a victim of a crime until after it is born. This raises the question of how it can be a double shooting? The investigation is on-going.

While pro-life and pro-family groups were upset with the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party’s dismissal of Tanya Granic Allen as a PC candidate in the June 7 provincial election, some groups applauded the move. “The dismissal [by Doug Ford] of Tanya Granic Allen is long overdue given the Islamophobic and bigoted comments attributed to her,” the National Council of Canadian Muslims said. “There is no place for that kind of intolerance in Canadian politics.” The NCCM, formerly known as CAIR-CAN, is the Canadian arm of the Council on American Islamic Relations, an organization, Jihad Watch reports, with documented ties to terrorist organizations such as Hamas.

In 2009, the Toronto Catholic Archdiocese decided that “due to concerns about problematic partners in numerous countries … it would require the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace (CCODP), [the arm of the Canadian Catholic Bishops that provides aid to developing countries] to provide greater scrutiny of its projects with overseas partners to ensure that they are consistent with Catholic teaching.” Funding continued to be funnelled to CCODP, but reports continued to question whether CCODP was conforming to its mandate.

On April 1, Toronto Cardinal Thomas Collins issued a statement that 2018 funding to Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace from the Toronto archdiocese annual ShareLife appeal would be stopped until CCODP could prove that “it allocates no funds to projects or groups that operate contrary to the moral and social teachings of the Church.” Several other Canadian Catholic dioceses have also pulled funding from CCODP.

United States

“Nothing is more powerful than God.” With these words, U.S. President Donald Trump declared that he was signing an executive order establishing a White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative to ensure that “faith-based organizations have equal access to government funding and the equal right to exercise their deeply held beliefs.” Present at the announcement in the White House Rose Garden on May 3 were representatives from a number of faith communities.

The U.S. Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights is investigating the state of Hawaii for “forcing pro-life pregnancy counseling centers to provide information about abortion.” This means that pregnancy counseling centers will have to direct a person looking for an abortion to a state agency that provides abortion referrals; they will also be required to erect signs and publish fliers about abortion, providing website addresses and phone numbers for abortion services. Attorneys for a pregnancy center in Hawaii submitted a complaint to the HHS explaining that “the rights of doctors and pregnancy care centers to offer medical assistance to women in need without compromising their religious convictions relating to abortion or abortion-causing drugs are protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in addition to federal law and the Hawaii Constitution.”

An example of “linguistic engineering’ was recently displayed by an Oregon delegation which recommended to the American Medical Association that it adopt a “neutral stance” on physician aid-in-dying. Oregon was the first state in the U.S. to legalize physician-assisted-suicide, calling it “The Death with Dignity Act,” which, of course, uses words such as “compassion,” “choice,” and “dignity” to put a positive spin on the practice of doctors helping patients commit suicide. Pro-lifers can relate to this scam, where unborn babies are dehumanized as “blobs of tissue,” “clumps of cells,” and “fetuses” and women are referred to as making “healthy choices” in terminating a pregnancy. To its credit, the AMA was having nothing to do with the spin. It said: “The terms aid-in-dying” and “death with dignity” could be used to describe either euthanasia or palliative/hospice care at the end of life and this degree of ambiguity is unacceptable for providing ethical guidance.” The recommendation was dismissed.

Iowa has passed a bill banning abortion once the baby’s heartbeat can be detected, usually around 12-13 weeks. Iowa now has the most stringent pro-life law in any of the American states. However, abortions are still available for the following reasons: babies conceived in rape if reported within 45 days; babies conceived in incest if reported within 140 days, fetal abnormalities deemed “incompatible with life,” and for physical threats to the mother. Planned Parenthood vows to challenge the law, which it calls “gross.”

Mary Ann Glendon, Harvard law professor and former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, has accepted the Evangelium vitaemedal from the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture, the most prestigious pro-life prize in the U.S. which honours “individuals whose outstanding efforts have served to proclaim the Gospel of Life by steadfastly affirming and defending the sanctity of human life from its earliest stages.” Glendon’s defense of life is outstanding. She led the 1995 Vatican delegation to a U.N. Women’s Conference in Beijing, where she “successfully led the efforts against enshrining abortion as an international right.” She also served on the President’s Council on Bioethics and is past president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. In 1990 she and a group of women formed the organization Women Affirming Life, committed to “pro-life, pro-woman, pro-child, and pro-poor.” In 2009, Glendon refused to accept the University of Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal saying that she could not accept the award when then-president Barack Obama (the most pro-abortion president in U.S. history) was receiving an honorary doctorate at the same Catholic institution.

Boy Scouts of America, formerly one of America’s best known organizations in the development of young men, has succumbed to the ‘Gender Revolution.’ The term “boy” will be dropped and Scouts BSA, as it is to be known, will be open to ‘all’ genders. Up to now, scouts learned how to survive in the woods, tie knots, learn safe boating practices, and, of course, sell apples. But more importantly, as Andrew Walker wrote in Public Discourse, “for boys to mature into men, they need to be exposed to the virtues of manliness –fortitude, self-sacrifice, bravery, integrity, skillfulness” – things that were always taught to boys in the Scout movement in a male environment. Yes, girls also need to acquire virtues, but separately. So it seems that the decision is in keeping with a cultural movement that forbids distinctions between (or among?) the sexes in this gender-fluid age.

The Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) is teaming up with Planned Parenthood to push “women’s empowerment” with a campaign called Take a Seat, Take a Stand. Funds from this campaign will financially benefit not only Planned Parenthood but also five other far-left groups, including the gay advocacy group Glsen. Women’s basketball fans beware: you will be supporting abortion providers and their allies by contributing to this campaign.

International

“I love ancient languages because they hold encoded within them the recognition of life from the womb. Today I learnt that ‘unborn’ in Irish is ‘beo gan breith’ which directly translates to ‘alive but not yet born’.” That was Obianuju (Uju) Ekeocha on Twitter. If you are on the social media platform, she is worth following. She challenges pro-abortion politicians and activists, calls them out on their hypocrisy, and highlights interesting pro-life tidbits. You may remember that Ekeocha spoke at the 2016 National March for Life in Ottawa, and returned to Canada in 2017 at the invitation of Campaign Life Coalition to speak to several groups and again in April.She has just written a book Target Africapublished by Ignatius Press and is working on a documentary.

104-year-old Australian scientist David Goodall travelled to Switzerland in early May to die at a euthanasia facility in the town of Liestal. Goodall said he had considered assisted-suicide for nearly two decades, and finally acted because of reduced mobility and the lack of available doctors to treat him in Australia. Notably, he was not ill. He was also mobile enough to travel from Australia to Switzerland to take advantage of their lackadaisical euthanasia law.

“We are building a Christian democracy. An old-fashioned Christian democracy whose roots are in the European tradition, where human dignity is essential and where there is a separation of power.” Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban responded to the European Union, which is trying to force Hungary to accept large numbers of illegal, undocumented immigrants. He says the massive number of mostly Middle Eastern Muslim refugees is a deliberate attempt to de-Christianize Europe. Orban won an overwhelming majority on April 8, running on a platform that Hungary will decide its immigration policies, not the EU. Orban and his Fidesz party and its small ally, the Christian Democratic People’s Party, won 133 of 199 seats in the national assembly and was asked to form the government on May 8. With the two-thirds majority, Fidesz can legally amend the constitution of Hungary unchallenged. Fidesz was founded by Orban when he was a young anti-Communist dissident.

George Soros’ Central European University is set to cease its operations in Hungary and relocate in Vienna, following criticism from the Hungarian government that the institution operates as an “offshore university” and is in violation of education laws. Of interest to Canadians is the fact that the president and rector of CEU is erstwhile Canadian Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.

Jean-Claude Junker is president of the European Union. In his unelected position, he claims to speak for a large number of European countries, including countries that have only managed to throw off the yoke of communism in the past 35 years. One would think that the evil of the communist ideology, in whose name millions of people have been murdered, would give one pause at saying anything remotely positive about communism or its malevolent creator Karl Marx. However, Junker not only unveiled a statue to Marx on the 200th anniversary of the birth of the writer of the Communist Manifesto, but he also said the following at a ceremony commemorating the occasion: “Karl Marx was a philosopher, who thought into the future, had creative aspirations, and today he stands for things which he is not responsible for, and which he didn’t cause, because many of the things he wrote down were redrafted into the opposite.” University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson, who has studied communism and its disastrous consequences over a number of years, remarked on Twitter that the EU president’s remarks were “shameful and appalling.” (Jordan Peterson is another person worth following on Twitter.)