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Twenty-Five Things that Caught My Eye Today: Abortion, Nursing Homes, Armenians & More (Dec. 2, 2020)

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2. Katie Yoder: Late-Term Abortion Must Stop in the US

Last year, Lila Rose, the president of pro-life organization Live Action, partnered Dr. Mary Davenport, an OB/GYN, to argue against late-term abortions. 

“There is no medical situation in which late abortion is medically necessary to save the life of the mother,” they wrote in a piece published by the Federalist. If there’s a serious pregnancy complication, the “pregnancy can be ended by inducing labor or delivering the baby via C-section.”

And if the unborn baby is diagnosed with a lethal birth defect, he or she “can be given perinatal hospice care instead of aborted,” which “involves continuing the pregnancy until labor begins and giving birth normally to the baby.”

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4. Charles Camosy: Nursing-home horrors go way beyond the virus

Nationwide, [nursing home] residents constitute 40 percent of deaths, though they represent less than 1 percent of the population. Yet the novel coronavirus has proved deadly to our elders in another, perhaps more insidious and invisible, way. According to barely noticed reporting from the Associated Press, straight-up neglect has killed another 40,000 residents.

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Reports are coming from all over the country, including New York, of diapers left on for so long, the skin peels off when they are removed. Of bedridden residents who haven’t been turned for so long, you could see their bones through their sores. Often, the profound isolation leads to deaths that certificates simply ­label as “failure to thrive.”

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6. Hong Kong’s Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow jailed for protest roles

Before a hearing Nov. 23, the 24-year-old Wong vowed to continue his activism despite what he called “political suppression.” He is set to serve his fourth jail term in three years.

“I want to be frank that, in the face of uncertainties, I just feel uneasy and anxious,” Wong wrote in an open letter during his detention. “However, as I said when I stepped into the dock in the courtroom, ‘Hang in everyone, I know the situation that the people outside face will be more difficult. Keep fighting.’”

He called attention to 12 Hong Kong activists who were arrested this past summer and detained in mainland China as they attempted to flee to Taiwan by boat.

“It’s not the end of the fight,” Wong said in a statement on Twitter, released by his lawyer, after the court handed down the sentences. “Ahead of us is another challenging battleground. We’re now joining the battle in prison along with many brave protesters, less visible yet essential in the fight for democracy and freedom for HK.”

7. Unmet Job Expectations Linked to a Rise in Suicide, Deaths of Despair

“Work plays a major role in how individuals experience their communities, derive a sense of purpose, and thus develop a sense of psychological well-being,” said lead author Chandra Muller, a sociology professor and researcher at the Population Research Center at UT Austin. “It’s possible that occupational expectations developed in adolescence serve as a benchmark for perceptions of adult success and, when unmet, pose a risk of self-injury.

8. The Washington Post: Supreme Court weighs child-slavery case agaisnt Nestlé USA, Cargill

Six African men are seeking damages from Nestlé USA and Cargill, alleging that as children they were trafficked out of Mali, forced to work long hours on Ivory Coast cocoa farms and kept at night in locked shacks. Their attorneys argue that the companies should have better monitored their cocoa suppliers in West Africa, where about two-thirds of the world’s cocoa is grown and child labor is widespread.

These “are former child slaves seeking compensation from two U.S. corporations which maintain a system of child slavery and forced labor in their Ivory Coast supply chain as a matter of corporate policy to gain a competitive advantage in the U.S. market,” the Malians’ attorney, Paul L. Hoffman, told the court. He asked the justices to “allow these former child slaves to have their day in court.”

9. Michael Young: Beirut’s elite don’t know what to do with Lebanon besides loot it

Beyond regional considerations, what does it say about Lebanon that it appears unable to have a cohesive leadership when political elites are unable to divvy up the national pie? It implies that outside of a context of official larceny, the politicians seem to have no notion of how to run the state.

10. Politics and profit are damaging Turkish heritage sites, say critics

Mahir Polat, the cultural heritage director for the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, complained that “when restoration is seen only as a construction activity and when we forget that the monument reflects the centuries it has passed through, we miss the objective of preservation. We then have brand-new reconstructions.”

11. The Providence Journal: Providence woman says her mother deserves a proper burial, more than five family members

When her mother Janet Gingras, died Sunday, all Susi wanted was to gather her family for a proper send-off. She was stunned when she read that only five people could attend an outdoor burial and so she penned this letter to Gov. Gina Raimondo to express her dismay.

“People can shop at Target, get their hair cut at a salon, eat indoors at restaurants but we cannot have a socially distanced burial outdoors for my mother? Her seven grandchildren cannot attend? Her older great-grandchildren cannot say goodbye? How can this be?” she wrote. “It is not just not fair. It disrespects my mother who has already suffered so much and inflicts yet another pain on her family.“

“This isn’t how we should be treating grieving families. The funeral and wake are for the living. We’re robbing people of the opportunity to celebrate a life, the opportunity to comfort one another.”

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13. Economic Empowerment Might Be the Key to Helping Middle East Christians

The time has come to shift our focus from state power to private investment, linking Christian businessmen in the West with those in the Middle East to open companies, develop properties, and transport local products to market. This was the survival strategy of the early church, whose members pooled their wealth for the benefit of all. It demands more creativity and determination, . . . but it promises more dignified and permanent results.

A peaceful economic crusade will prioritize Christian communities that have critical mass and favorable conditions for investment. Here, the significance of Armenia becomes obvious. Not only does Armenia rank high on the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business index, it also boasts an emerging high-tech sector and inexpensive yet skilled labor.

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15. Daniel Darling: Christmas During Corona: How This Season Speaks To Our Suffering

If we are not careful, we might assume we have to come to Christmas with manufactured euphoria and fake joy. But Jesus invites us to bring the loneliness of a lost year, the sting of division and defeat, the persistent longing for a better world. What He offers is both salvation and hope. Salvation through His perfect life, death, and resurrection. Hope that the brokenness that greeted Him in Bethlehem, that knocks uninvited on our doorsteps, will not have the last word. Christmas is a pinprick of light, leading us to that day when the darkness will be no more.

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17. The Domestic Kenosis: A Response to Ross Douthat from the Mother of Eight Children

Today’s modern woman will tolerate the wrecking of her body for a child or two. She might hazard another round of the crazy-making nightmare that is caring for a newborn while recovering from childbirth. But even with all the relief offered by medical technology, the cost of bio-mothering remains exorbitant. Its lopsided distribution between the sexes in a time when such discrepancies give real offense is another problem. A woman who can nearly outrun a teenage boy, or lose a tennis match to a middle-ranked male player, is praised for her strength. A woman who rises from her second confinement to walk, smile, and bear another child has something wrong with her.

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The idea that working in a pink-collar industry is somehow superior to performing the same duties in the immediate service of one’s family is absurd. Preferring to participate in a more prestigious line of work rather than to care for one’s own children seems to me prideful, exploitative, and sad. I also suspect that the proposed policies to support family formation and caregiving might never be realized, effective, or applicable to me. It seems more likely that the harvest reaped from these eight children will allow all of us to be laid down to our final winters merely asleep, rather than frozen or starved.

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19. How UCLA’s Catholic neuroscientist thinks we can save kids from screens

20. Joseph Keegin: Wisdom That Is Woe

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22. A reminder that in IVF, we are dealing with lives….  Tennessee baby born from 27-year-old frozen embryo breaks record

“Embryo donation is when embryos that do not genetically belong to a woman are transferred into her uterus,” explained NEDC President & Medical Director Dr. Jeffrey Keenan, who transferred Molly’s embryo to Tina’s uterus in February.

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24. Greg Erlandson: The secret of Walter Ciszek’s ‘Little Way’

When we talk about 21st-century evangelization, he could be its patron saint: Imagine the bravery and the faith it took to go into an ideologically hostile land, an atheistic Communist police state, trying to be a witness of the Gospel under the darkest, scariest, most isolated circumstances. 

At the end of “He Leadeth Me,” he tells the story of talking with ordinary Russians during his internal exile after release from prison. Most of them had been filled with anti-religious propaganda from their youth. They brought to him their criticisms of religion: “The greed of the Church … the sexual perversions of priests and nuns, the political influence and power politics of the Church. …” The same arguments we face today.

“I didn’t try to defend these things — God alone knows whether they can be defended,” Father Ciszek said. Instead, he talked about “God as I believed in him.” He told the story of mankind’s struggle with sin and evil, and the promise of Jesus Christ. He tried to show that the professed ideals of the Communist state were embodied in the person of Christ.

25.  ‘Mary on the Mantel’? Think ‘Elf on the Shelf’

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/twenty-five-things-that-caught-my-eye-today-abortion-nursing-homes-armenians-more-dec-2-2020/

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