Everyday Life

Weekly Standard: “In an effort to convince the Democratic party to use “more inclusive language” on the issue of abortion, Democrats for Life executive director Kristen Day is “urg[ing] all Democrats, including those who would come back to the Democratic Party if it changes its abortion stance, to sign the online petition calling for the 2012 Platform to honor and acknowledge our big tent policy.” Day’s announcement came in the form of a press release announcing the petition.

The petition states that “The Democratic Platform language should be inclusive and endorse the views of all Democrats.” Its aim is to sign up the one-third of Democratic voters who are apparently pro-life.”

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US Catholic: “The Democrats for Life of America have launched a campaign to change the language of the party’s platform on abortion. Their efforts follow a call from former President Jimmy Carter, who in a recent interview made his own plea to the party to “minimize the need… for abortion and limit it only to women whose life [is] in danger or who are pregnant as a result of rape or incest.”

Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life, has called for a “big tent policy” that would make the party as a whole more inclusive of people who support Democratic ideals but are opposed to abortion.”

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Cathleen Kaveny: “The negative prohibition–do not kill — is a necessary floor in moral thinking. But for the very vulnerable, including the physically and mentally impaired, it is by no means sufficient. The vulnerable, young and old, need positive assistance if they are to thrive.  And no average family can meet the challenges of Alzheimer’s Disease –with or without Down syndrome– on its own.

It doesn’t just take a village.  It takes a nation.  It takes the common good.”

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Timothy Jost: “ Under the ACA and the exchange regulations, people will learn whether a plan covers abortion in the same way they will learn about all the other features of available plans: through the Summary of Benefits and Coverage. The SBC is an eight-page, plain-language, comprehensive description of plan coverage, limitations, and exclusions. It is the tool through which all exchange enrollees will learn about and choose their plan. Plans must disclose in the SBC whether they cover abortions. No one is going to be duped into paying for elective abortion coverage they don’t want, because the only way to get such coverage is to request it.

Yes, the ACA and implementing regulations do prohibit plans from advertising in marketing materials that they offer abortion coverage—or that they offer the cheapest abortion coverage. But nothing prohibits plans from advertising that they do not cover abortions, nor will anything keep prolife groups from informing the public about plans without abortion coverage. In the exchanges, abortion coverage will almost certainly be far less common than it is today. It is lamentable that some prolifers cannot acknowledge that fact, choosing instead to take this moment as one more opportunity to malign a profoundly prolife law.” 

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USA Today: “ The campaign to abolish the death penalty has been freshly invigorated this month in a series of actions that supporters say represents increasing evidence that America may be losing its taste for capital punishment.”

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Huffington Post: “Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) signed a bill into law on Wednesday that repeals the death penalty, making Connecticut the 17th state to do so.”

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Fox News: “Rep. Mark Critz, edged out fellow a Pennsylvania Democrat, Rep. Jason Altmire, on Tuesday in the latest primary battle that pitted two incumbents against one another.”

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CNA: “In a move surpassing anti-immigration sentiment, the Nebraska legislature overrode the governor’s veto of a bill that provides taxpayer-funded prenatal care for immigrant and imprisoned women.

Nebraska Catholic Conference executive director James Cunningham lauded the bill as “a strong pro-life policy that helps to ensure that babies are born healthy and have a good start in life.”

The legislation “identified the unborn child as an eligible recipient in his or her own right,” Cunningham told CNA April 20.”

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President Obama: “We’re making sure that the United States government has the structures, the mechanisms to better prevent and respond to mass atrocities.  So I created the first-ever White House position dedicated to this task.  It’s why I created a new Atrocities Prevention Board, to bring together senior officials from across our government to focus on this critical mission.  This is not an afterthought.  This is not a sideline in our foreign policy.  The board will convene for the first time today, at the White House.  And I’m pleased that one of its first acts will be to meet with some of your organizations — citizens and activists who are partners in this work, who have been carrying this torch.

Going forward, we’ll strengthen our tools across the board, and we’ll create new ones.  The intelligence community will prepare, for example, the first-ever National Intelligence Estimate on the risk of mass atrocities and genocide.  We’re going to institutionalize the focus on this issue.  Across government, “alert channels” will ensure that information about unfolding crises — and dissenting opinions — quickly reach decision-makers, including me.”

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Henry Paul Monaghan: “The individual health mandate surely passes constitutional muster under settled judicial principles. The Constitution’s Commerce Clause grants Congress the authority “to regulate commerce … among the several States.”  The Court’s precedents establish without question that Congress may regulate intrastate economic activities that Congress (not the Court) reasonably concludes have a substantial effect on interstate commerce. The existence of such congressional authority is especially clear when the challenged provision itself is part of a comprehensive legislative scheme that regulates interstate commerce.

Moreover, the market for health care is distinctive (if not entirely unique) in several key respects. Virtually all of us will need and obtain health care at some point, but we often cannot predict when or in what ways we will need it. And for the vast majority of us, direct payment for the health care services we obtain would be prohibitively expensive. Yet not obtaining needed medical care can be the difference between life and death.

These features help explain why, unlike many other markets, insurance is the overwhelmingly dominant means of payment in the health care market. They also explain why Congress has required that individuals be given emergency care without regard to their ability to pay. As a result, and again unlike other markets, uninsured individuals who are unable to pay directly for needed medical services necessarily shift the cost of those services to others—to health care providers, the government, individuals with insurance, and taxpayers.

In that way, Congress is not creating a market which it then seeks to regulate.  The insurance-based structure of the health care market is already firmly in place. That is why it was well within Congress’s discretion to design legislation to operate within, and to address problems posed by, this vast market.”

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David Gibson: “A week after House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan claimed his Catholic faith inspired the Republicans’ cost-cutting budget plan, the nation’s Catholic bishops reiterated their demand that the federal budget protect the poor, and said the GOP measure “fails to meet these moral criteria.”  That and other strongly-worded judgments on the GOP budget proposal flew in a flurry of letters from leading bishops to the chairmen of key congressional committee.”

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Reuters: “The Connecticut House of Representatives gave final legislative approval on Wednesday to the repeal of the state’s death penalty, moving it one step closer to becoming the fifth U.S. state in recent years to abandon capital punishment.”

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Nicholas Kristof: “For those who are wavering, think for a moment about the arc of empathy. Centuries ago, we humans amused ourselves by seeing other people executed or tortured. Until modern times, we considered it sport to see animals die horrible deaths. Now our sensibilities have evolved so that there is an outcry when animals are abused — unless it happens out of sight on farms.

The police would stop wayward boys who were torturing a stray dog, so should we allow industrialists to abuse millions of hens? Shouldn’t we agree on minimum standards?

Granted, it is not easy to settle on what constitutes cruelty to animals. But cramming 11 hens for most of their lives into a cage the size of an oven seems to cross a line.”

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Melinda Henneberger: “This is certainly not a partisan perspective; as someone who doesn’t think corporations are people but does think unborn children are, I don’t really have one of those. I do, though, hope the day will come when we will look back on both capital punishment and abortion as we now look back on slavery – as a wrong so culturally accepted we couldn’t see it at the time.”

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Article I co-wrote with Christopher Hale, Anne Roan Thomas, and Sarah Rosemann: “Neither ideological extremism nor partisanship should stand in the way of accomplishing this worthy goal.  The time has come to dial down the nasty rhetoric and the perpetual vitriol and work together on a goal everyone can agree on without compromising their deepest values: to create a country whose political and economic structures, whose social and cultural values, make it a place where abortion is no longer needed or desired by pregnant women.  The conflict over the legality of abortion will inevitably persist, but feminists on both sides of the issue can and should work together on issues where there is common ground.”

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Andrew Koppelman: “What the Court actually accomplished in 1918 was to thwart democracy and consign large numbers of children to the textile mills for more than two decades. Health care is another context in which the fear of federal power creates a serious risk of ravaging the lives of large numbers of actual people. If the law is upheld, no one is going to be forced to buy broccoli. But if the law is struck down, large numbers of people will die of preventable or treatable diseases, or be bankrupted by medical expenses.”

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Washington Post: “Burmese democracy champion Aung San Suu Kyi all but completed her transformation from imprisoned icon to elected member of parliament Sunday as her party claimed it had won a resounding victory in an election considered a key test of political reforms in Burma.”

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Daily Caller: “According to Carter, reducing the focus on abortion, and advocating for its increasing rarity, would attract more voters to the Democratic Party.”

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