Life Advocacy Briefing

Question of the Week

WHEN WILL THE JUSTICE DEPT. ENFORCE the Comstock Act of 1873, which prohibits use of the US mail to deliver abortion poisons?

Confirmed!

ANOTHER PRO-LIFE ATTORNEY HAS BEEN CONFIRMED by the Senate as a federal judge. We publish the roll call on the confirmation of Judge Joshua Divine at the close of this Life Advocacy Briefing. His nomination was opposed by the Left but surprisingly secured a “yes” vote from Maine’s Sen. Angus King (I/D), who had voted against bringing the nomination to a vote.

Reports Jay Willis, a writer for a left-leaning blog called Balls and Strikes, Sen. King explained, in a conversation with Law360’s Courtney Bublé, “that he voted ‘yes’ on Mr. Divine … after speaking with Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley, for whom [now Judge] Divine worked as a deputy back when Hawley was Missouri’s attorney general. This private conversation, King told Bublé, had ‘convinced’ him that Divine ‘would be a capable judge.’” Good work, Sen. Hawley!

We include Sen. King in the “pro-life” column on this vote because of his specific vote, with no intention of characterizing the Senator himself. The vote was a departure from his pro-abortion voting record, and now that it has caused a stir in the leftwing blogosphere, it probably will not happen again.

And Another New Judge in the Making

THE NOMINATION OF EMIL BOVE crossed a major hurdle Thursday with a vote to close debate and move forward with his nomination as Circuit Judge in the 3^rd Circuit Court of Appeals. Mr. Bove has been serving in the Justice Dept. as Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General, and committee Democrats staged a walk-out to protest his nomination when his appointment came before the panel.

There are many controversies surrounding the Bove nomination, principally several documented illustrations of his loyalty to President Trump, and Senate Democrats raised loud objections during floor debate on the cloture motion, which passed with 50 votes. Among their objections to his appointment is his commitment to the Dobbs decision as a standard against which to rule; we publish the cloture voting record below and anticipate publishing the final vote on his confirmation next week.

Another Consequential Confirmation Vote Coming

CONFIRMATION OF ANOTHER TRUMP JUDICIAL NOMINEE, Maria Lanahan, has emerged from committee and could come before the Senate at any time. Readers are urged to contact Senators (Capitol switchboard: 202/224-3121) and seek “yes” votes to confirm Ms. Lanahan as a federal judge for the Eastern District of Missouri. She is a target of the Left, and one of the most noteworthy reasons for their opposition, according to the leftwing Alliance for Justice, is that she has “fought to overturn access to mifepristone [RU-486].”

Getting It Right

A FEDERAL APPELLATE JUDGE HAS AFFIRMED the right of West Virginia to ban distribution of mifepristone (originally named RU-486) within the state. The ruling was handed down on July 15 by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, US appellate judge in the 4^th Circuit, appointed to his lifetime post by the late President Ronald Reagan.

West Virginia has specifically outlawed mifepristone, prompting Nevada-based RU manufacturer GenBioPro to sue the state, reports S.A. McCarthy for The Washington Stand, “arguing that the Food & Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug should supersede the state law. A [federal] district court initially sided with West Virginia,” notes Mr. McCarthy, “and the appellate court did the same.”

Said Judge Wilkinson, quoted by Mr. McCarthy: “‘After the Supreme Court “return[ed] the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives” in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org. … West Virginia enacted a law prohibiting abortion in most circumstances. … He clarified, ‘For us to once again federalize the issue of abortion without a clear directive from Congress, right on the heels of Dobbs, would leave us one small step short of defiance. … We take no position on the wisdom or folly of West Virginia’s abortion law. As Dobbs makes clear, that judgment belongs with the people and their elected representatives. … At a time when the rule of law is under blunt assault, disregarding the Supreme Court is not an option.’”

Family Research Council’s Mary Szoch is quoted in the McCarthy report: “‘Mifepristone is an incredibly dangerous drug – it is literally designed to take the life of a human being, an unborn child. It’s not shocking that a drug designed to do this also maims many mothers who are carrying that child along the way – sending more than one in 10 of them to the ER and killing others. Abusive boyfriends and family members have used the drug as a weapon to murder their unborn child by slipping it into the mother’s food without her knowledge. … The rest of the country should follow the example of West Virginia and protect unborn children and their mothers from this horrific drug,’ [Ms.] Szoch asserted” in the Washington Stand report. Amen!

Stepping Down But Not Out

VETERAN PRO-LIFE LEADER BRAD MATTES ANNOUNCED HIS RETIREMENT this month from his long-held post as president of Life Issues Institute, where he has served since 2003 as successor to the late Dr. Jack Willkie. “After Oct. 1,” he writes in the organization’s newsletter, “my association with Life Issues Institute will continue as President Emeritus. And I will retain my role as president of the International Right to Life Federation. When asked I will speak at events, particularly on the issue of abortion’s impact on men. And I plan to continue speaking internationally … .”

Succeeding him in the LII president’s post will be Victor Nieves, who for nearly two years has co-hosted with Mr. Mattes the group’s half-hour weekly radio program Straight Talk on Life Issues. We wish both the best.

Facing Reality

June 25, 2025, BreakPoint commentary by John Stonestreet & Brad Ditmer

             Paul Erlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb warned of mass starvation and environmental collapse. The cause of the coming apocalypse, he said, was too many babies. The only way to stave off disaster was to reduce the human population.

             Countries around the world took those warnings to heart, especially Communist countries. Most famously, China adopted laws that attempted to control fertility, but so did a few other nations, including VietNam. Today, facing aging populations and record-low birth rates, countries are rethinking the edicts and incentives they designed to reduce the number of children born, and some, including China, are even adopting incentives and policies designed to encourage more children.

             Earlier this month, VietNam scrapped its long-standing two-child policy that has tanked the nation’s birth rate and threatened its economic stability. At just 1.91 children per woman, VietNam’s fertility rate sits below replacement but above much of the Western world. Far from a population bomb, the greatest existential threat the world faces right now is a demographic winter. It’s clear that national attempts to control fertility have not worked, and it’s just as doubtful that financial incentives and appeals to national identity will work to reverse the trend.

             There are many theories why fertility rates have been falling, especially across Western nations. Affluent and educated women in the West have long been told to not want children because they will interfere with their freedom, careers, lifestyle choices and personal happiness. Some studies also point to a gender gap, in which women want babies but men do not. Thankfully, that trend seems to be changing.

             In short, ideas can be just as powerful as policy when it comes to reducing fertility. Whether those ideas promise happiness and fulfillment or a way of saving the planet from an ecological crisis makes no difference in the end. The result is still a crisis that will manifest both in economics and national security.

             In his magisterial work The Way of the Modern World, Regent College professor Craig Gay noted that as the world became more godless and secular in the modern period, its values changed. Prioritized above all else, Dr. Gay argued, were the values of convenience, efficiency and choice, each of which implied a level of control that humans, whether individuals or governments, could exert over nature: this is our world, not God’s, and we should live like it [he opined].

             In no area of human interaction has this been more evident than in the realm of human procreation. Decisions about family and having children are almost exclusively understood as matters of personal or, as in the cases of China and VietNam, state choice. This is the precise opposite of thinking of children as blessings and our decisions to have them in light of our responsibilities as human beings in particular times and places.

             The narrative that children are a matter of choice is often couched in promises of freedom and autonomy. But like the false narrative of overpopulation, this one has also proved to be flatly wrong. In the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey for 2022, almost 40% of married women with children described themselves as “very happy,” a number significantly higher than any other group of women. Less than 22% of unmarried women without children felt the same, and unmarried women with children were the least likely to say they were “very happy,” at just over 16%.

             As my colleague Shane Morris put it in a recent BreakPoint commentary, “The cultural impression that diapers and demands of little ones rob people of joy is simply wrong.” Children are a gift from God. That’s a fact of reality, not mere religious opinion. Those individuals and societies that embrace children, despite the obstacles and challenges that come with them, will flourish. Those that reject children cannot and will not.

Cherishing Life on the Edge

July 21, 2025, Commentary by Heidi Klessig MD for LifeSiteNews

             On July 21 … the US Dept. of Health & Human Services (HHS) under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a major push to begin reforming the US organ procurement and transplantation system. This announcement was prompted by a Health Resources & Services (HRSA) investigation that uncovered multiple examples of patients who were not dead when they were taken for organ procurement.

             The HRSA investigation revealed that out of 351 cases studied, 103 (29.3%) were found to have problems. They discovered 73 patients (21%) who were authorized for organ procurement despite having neurological signs incompatible with organ donation. And disturbingly, at least 28 patients (8%) may not have been deceased when doctors began surgery to remove their organs.

             The independent HRSA investigation began after the Organ Procurement & Transplantation Network (OPTN) claimed to find no major concerns in their review of the 2021 TJ Hoover case. TJ Hoover, a supposedly “brain dead” man, began thrashing and crying as he was being wheeled to the operating room to donate his organs. His family was told that this was just “reflexes.”

             Whistleblowers claimed that even after two doctors refused to remove Hoover’s organs, Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates ordered their staff to find another doctor to perform the surgery. Thankfully, the surgery was called off, and Hoover went on to recover and even dance at his sister’s wedding.

             On July 20, 2025, the New York Times published an article reporting multiple cases of donors who were not dead when they were scheduled for organ procurement. This article focused on the problems of “donation after circulatory death” (DCD). In DCD, patients are not “brain dead” but either are not expected to survive or have decided that their quality of life is unacceptable. Their deaths are planned to occur at a specific place and time so that they can become organ donors.

             The patient is [declared] “do not resuscitate” (DNR), ventilators and infusions are withdrawn, and doctors wait until the patient’s heart stops. Then depending on the transplant center, a two-to-five- minute “no touch” period is observed, following which (if the heart doesn’t restart on its own) organ procurement immediately begins. However, it is well documented that people are routinely resuscitated after just two-to-five minutes of pulselessness – and if you could possibly be resuscitated, you were never dead. But because DCD donors have been [declared] DNR, they will not be resuscitated. In 2007, Dr. Ari Joffe published a report of a dozen patients whose hearts started beating again spontaneously after as many as 10 minutes of cardiac arrest, with some of them making a full recovery. This shows that people cannot be known to be dead until at least 10 minutes after their cardiac arrest. But doctors are currently moving more quickly because waiting 10 minutes makes it too late to successfully harvest most of the organs.

             The current two-to-five-minute “no touch” period is much too short and essentially guarantees that more people will be waking up under the knife. Other countries recognize these dangers, and DCD is banned in Finland, Germany, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Lithuania and Turkey. …

             Living donation, in which both the donor and the recipient remain alive after the procedure, is completely ethical and can provide every organ except the heart. And a fully implantable artificial heart is currently in clinical trials. I am hoping that greater transparency will actually lead to more life-saving transplants, not less. After all, “brain death” accounts for less than 1% of reported deaths nationwide, whereas the number of living donors is potentially vast. Hopefully we can provide justice for the families who have been hurt by the current unethical system without jeopardizing ethical forms of organ transplantation.

LifeSiteNews editor’s note: Heidi Klessig MD is a retired anesthesiologist and pain management specialist who writes and speaks on the ethics of organ harvesting and transplantation. She is the author of The Brain Death Fallacy, and her work may be found at respectforhumanlife.com.

Wisdom from the Great Communicator

EXCERPT #13 from Abortion & the Conscience of the Nation, 1983 treatise by then-President Ronald Reagan, published in Human Life Review, then as a hardcover book from Thomas Nelson Publishers

             Federal law does not allow federally-assisted hospitals to decide that Down’s Syndrome infants are not worth treating, much less to decide to starve them to death. Accordingly, I have directed the Departments of Justice and Health & Human Services to apply civil rights regulations to protect handicapped newborns. All hospitals receiving federal funds must post notices which will clearly state that failure to feed handicapped babies is prohibited by federal law. The basic issue is whether to value and protect the lives of the handicapped, whether to recognize the sanctity of human life. This is the same basic issue that underlies the question of abortion.

Senate Voting Records

Confirmation of Joshua Divine as District Judge for the Eastern & Western Districts of Missouri – Confirmed 51-46 – July 22, 2025 (Democrats in italics; “Independents” marked “I”)

Voting “yes” / pro-Life: Britt & Tuberville/AL, Murkowski & Sullivan/AK, Boozman & Cotton/AR, Moody & Scott/FL, Crapo & Risch/ID, Banks & Young/IN, Ernst & Grassley/IA, Marshall & Moran/KS, Paul/KY, Cassidy/LA, Collins & King(I)/ME, Hyde-Smith & Wicker/MS, Hawley & Schmitt/MO, Daines & Sheehy/MT, Fischer & Ricketts/NE, Budd & Tillis/NC, Cramer & Hoeven/ND, Husted & Moreno/OH, Lankford/OK, McCormick/PA, Graham & Scott/SC, Rounds & Thune/SD, Blackburn & Hagerty/TN, Cornyn & Cruz/TX, Curtis & Lee/UT, Capito & Justice/WV, Johnson/WI, Barrasso & Lummis/WY.

Voting “no” / anti-Life: Gallego & Kelly/AZ, Padilla & Schiff/CA, Bennet & Hickenlooper/CO, Blumenthal & Murphy/CT, Blunt–Rochester & Coons/DE, Ossoff & Warnock/GA, Hirono & Schatz/HI, Duckworth & Durbin/IL, King(I)/ME, Alsobrooks & VanHollen/MD, Markey & Warren/MA, Peters & Slotkin/MI, Klobuchar & Smith/MN, Cortez–Masto & Rosen/NV, Hassan & Shaheen/NH, Booker & Kim/NJ, Heinrich & Lujan/NM, Gillibrand & Schumer/NY, Merkley & Wyden/OR, Fetterman/PA, Reed & Whitehouse/RI, Sanders(I) & Welch/VT, Kaine & Warner/VA, Cantwell & Murray/WA, Baldwin/WI.

Not voting: McConnell/KY, Kennedy/LA, Mullin/OK. 

Cloture Motion to end debate on Emil Bove as Appellate Judge for the 3^rd Circuit – Adopted 50-48 – July 24, 2025 (Democrats in italics; “Independents” marked “I”)

Voting “yes” / pro-Life: Tuberville/AL, Murkowski & Sullivan/AK, Boozman & Cotton/AR, Moody & Scott/FL, Crapo & Risch/ID, Banks & Young/IN, Ernst & Grassley/IA, Marshall & Moran/KS, McConnell & Paul/KY, Cassidy & Kennedy/LA, Hyde-Smith & Wicker/MS, Hawley & Schmitt/MO, Daines & Sheehy/MT, Fischer & Ricketts/NE, Budd & Tillis/NC, Cramer & Hoeven/ND, Husted & Moreno/OH, Lankford & Mullin/OK, McCormick/PA, Graham & Scott/SC, Rounds & Thune/SD, Blackburn & Hagerty/TN, Cornyn & Cruz/TX, Curtis & Lee/UT, Capito & Justice/WV, Johnson/WI, Barrasso & Lummis/WY.

Voting “no” / anti-Life: Kelly/AZ, Padilla & Schiff/CA, Bennet & Hickenlooper/CO, Blumenthal & Murphy/CT, Blunt–Rochester & Coons/DE, Ossoff & Warnock/GA, Hirono & Schatz/HI, Duckworth & Durbin/IL, Collins & King(I)/ME, Alsobrooks & VanHollen/MD, Markey & Warren/MA, Peters & Slotkin/MI, Klobuchar & Smith/MN, Cortez–Masto & Rosen/NV, Hassan & Shaheen/NH, Booker & Kim/NJ, Heinrich & Lujan/NM, Gillibrand & Schumer/NY, Merkley & Wyden/OR, Fetterman/PA, Reed & Whitehouse/RI, Sanders(I) & Welch/VT, Kaine & Warner/VA, Cantwell & Murray/WA, Baldwin/WI.

Not voting: Britt/AL, Gallego/AZ.