Abortion When it Involves a Rape: See the Faces
by Jim Hewes
Addressing abortion following criminal rape is sensitive and complex. Below I draw from nearly two decades of direct experience as the director of Project Rachel, where I have accompanied many women wounded and hurt by abortion.
I also rely on people directly affected such as Rebecca Kiessling, Lianna Rebolledo, Stephanie Reynolds, Jennifer Christie, Kathy Barnette, Ashley Sigrest, Kay Zibolsky, Julie Makimaa, Aimee Murphy, Jennifer Christie, Rebekah Berg, Paula Peyton-IIari, Serena Dyksen, Ayala Isenberg, Teresa delMilagro, Ryan Bamberger, and Steventhen Holland, to shed light on this very difficult and emotionally charged issue.
Understanding the Trauma of Rape
A forcible rape is a horrible violent act, but how society responds to this hideous crime is critical. Many women report that abortion only deepens their trauma, making healing far more difficult. Alternatively, in choosing life, they benefit from recognizing the power they possess to break the cycle of violence and reclaim their lives.
There are many stories in the book “Victims and Victors,” as well as in the DVD “Except in Cases of Rape? 12 Stories of Survival.” I urge you to get these resources so that you can hear for yourself firsthand from a group of women whose voices are not often heard in this debate.
Survivor Stories: Transforming Pain into Purpose
Ryan Bomberger’s biological mother was raped, and he was conceived. Instead of having an abortion, she placed Ryan for adoption. Ryan started the Radiance Foundation and has become a passionate advocate for adoption, knowing that the birth mother may keep in touch with the family that adopts her baby, if there is a mutual agreement.
Kay Zibolsky was raped and became pregnant at the age of 16. She placed her daughter Robin for adoption. She said that her baby became part of her healing. Kay’s response to this difficult part of her life was to start the Life after Assault League, which helps women in similar situations that Kay had faced. Her memoir is The Sorrow of Sexual Assault and the Joy of Healing.
Julie Makimaa was conceived in rape. Her response was to start Fortress International, which has helped with the concerns and needs of women, children and families affected by sexual assault.
Aimee Murphy was raped at the age of 16, and her rapist threatened her with violence if she didn’t get an abortion. Aimee didn’t want to aid the rapist by doing more violence to her pre-born child if she was pregnant. She eventually started Rehumanize International (a member group of the Consistent Life Network) to help educate people to respect all life.
Steventhen Holland’s mother was in a mental institution. They were pressuring her to have an abortion, but she placed him for adoption; he is a part of “Broken, Not Dead” ministries, which helps people in similar situations.
Twenty-year-old Ayala Isenberg was raped more times than she could count during four years of abuse beginning when she was just a little girl, eventually at age 15 conceiving through rape. When she conceived her daughter Rachel, she chose not to get an abortion when she realized that there were people who wanted to really help her. Her daughter was the one person in the world whom she really loved. She knew that children like hers don’t deserve to be erased and that they do really matter.
Lianna Rebolledo was raped at age 12. She saw her daughter not as a reminder of the violent act of rape or some type of punishment, but someone precious who resulted from a horrible, tragic experience. But good can come from evil. Her child was a reminder that love is always stronger than hate. It isn’t how one begins life, but who one will become that matters. Our ultimate value isn’t based on the act that brought any of us here, but the intrinsic dignity of every life. Lianna and other such women refused to let the rape define who they were or who their child was but relied on something much deeper. This is reflected as she speaks out trying to help victims of abuse.
Challenging Common Assumptions
These women and men, as well as others, put a name, a face, a voice, and a story on what too often is just an abstract concept or a theoretical argument. These victors who don’t abort remind us that life is always a gift, never a punishment. In addition, these mothers refuse to allow these horrible traumas to define their identities.
Moreover, there is a flawed underlying assumption in the media discussions:– that all women who have conceived by rape want an abortion. Studies, including those reported by Shauna Prewitt in in her Georgetown Law Journal article, found that at least half, and in many studies the majority, of women with a pregnancy resulting from rape choose not to abort the baby. Many survivors realized that they had the opportunity (because of their great courage and compassion) to show that they are far greater than the rapist. These women knew they could break the chain of destruction and the cycle of violence.
An assault by the rapist is compounded by an assault by the abortionist committing violence within the rape victim. Abortion is a decision and act that can never be reversed but could add more guilt and additional traumas to an already burdened woman (if not immediately, maybe years later).
A rape is a conscious intentional violent act done to a woman. Someone larger and more powerful than her “took over” her body in her vulnerable state. She is the innocent victim of a sexual assault. Why would she, who is bigger and stronger, in turn make a conscious decision to perpetuate this type of violence by intentionally victimizing her child, who is also an innocent like her? Why would she lower herself to the level of the rapist by aborting a defenseless baby who had done nothing wrong? A woman who chooses to bring her child into the world after she’s been raped is refusing to let the rapist turn her into him.
Choosing a Different Path
Abortion after rape won’t “unrape” the victim, and the womb will be forcefully opened again by the abortion. She may feel “forced” at some level to have an abortion. She may because of this become a victim for the second time. Also, she may compound her pain because she will not only have to heal from the rape but also from the abortion.
The abortion could even hide or cover up the crime committed against her.
Rapists should not be executed but should be sentenced to the full extent of the law, including strengthening laws that don’t accomplish this justice.
Yet should we continue to allow the death penalty of innocent pre-born babies where we don’t use the death penalty for the terrible crime of their fathers? In fact, one of the reasons for opposition to the death penalty for those on death row is the possibility of executing someone who is innocent. Aborting the child after the mother is raped gives the child fewer rights than the rapist.
In states where abortion is illegal except for rape, the message of the “rape exception” might give a green light to potential rapists, including those predators of sexual abuse. In these instances, legal abortion may mask the true problems of a criminal rape. Males having a sense of entitlement to female bodies may cause more criminal rapes to occur.
The alternative is more thorough criminal investigations, as well as more rape prevention measures, aimed at addressing the underlying problem of a rape culture.
Love Triumphs Over Hate
Unfortunately, many sectors of society only offer women who have conceived in rape a “quick fix,” a band-aid solution of abortion. Women know that what is bad for their child will be bad for them, and what is good for their child will be good for them. Ultimately, women deserve better than a violent solution of abortion, and so do their pre-born children. They deserve comprehensive support and genuine compassion. True healing occurs when they receive true compassion, an abundance of resources, and encouragement to choose life, knowing others will be right there for them in long run.
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For more of our posts on abortion and rape, see:
Two Women Pregnant from Rape, Two Outcomes
Abortion Facilitates Sex Abuse: Documentation
How Abortion is Useful for Rape Culture
A Pro-Life Feminist Critique of the “Rape and Incest Exception”
The Message of “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”: Abortion Gets Sexual Predators Off the Hook
Persuading People to Act against the Nuclear Threat: Some Findings and Recommendations
by John Whitehead
A perennial question for activists is “How do you get people to join you?” Persuading people to accept your views on an issue and then to act on these views is a major challenge.
Addressing this challenge, specifically regarding activism against the threat of nuclear weapons, is the subject of the recent report Rewriting the Narrative on Nuclear Weapons. A joint project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and Ploughshares, the report seeks to identify a more effective way of communicating to the American public about the nuclear threat.
Rewriting the Narrative on Nuclear Weapons is designed to “support the work of anyone pursuing changes in policy to reduce nuclear threats and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons globally.” The report’s findings and proposed communications strategy, or “narrative,” are intended to “create an opportunity to explore new ways of engaging the public on nuclear weapons and open windows for meaningful policy change” (p. 8).
A crucial feature of the new anti-nuclear narrative is an emphasis on the goal of reducing the threat from nuclear weapons. This goal, rather than the more ambitious goal of eliminating these weapons altogether, is likely to be more appealing to people who are not yet committed anti-nuclear activists.
The narrative’s central idea is “Every step we take to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons brings us closer to creating the safe and sustainable future we all deserve.” As the report explains, “In the face of deep skepticism about the possibility of totally eliminating nuclear weapons…this narrative was accepted by audiences as believable, worthwhile, and achievable” (p. 7).
The recommendations in Rewriting the Narrative on Nuclear Weapons are worth serious consideration by anti-nuclear peace activists. Some of these recommendations may also be applicable to other forms of activism within the Consistent Life Ethic movement.
Useful Approaches to Addressing the Nuclear Threat
Rewriting the Narrative on Nuclear Weapons draws on various forms of research. NTI and Ploughshares retained the services of Metropolitan Group (MetGroup), an organization that develops social justice-oriented strategies, including communications strategies.
MetGroup reviewed research on communications strategy conducted by the nuclear risk reduction and disarmament community, as well as how nuclear issues have been covered by the media in recent years. The group also conducted surveys of the public and extensive consultations with activists and experts from a variety of organizations. MetGroup then developed a narrative on anti-nuclear activism that was refined through a series of focus groups.
The narrative crafted through this process is meant to motivate those most open to anti-nuclear activism while also reaching out to those who may be more ambivalent but are open to persuasion. The narrative and the rationale and research that went into it are complex, and reading the full report is worthwhile.
I will highlight just a few points from the report about communicating the anti-nuclear message that struck me as particularly significant:
- Begin with a comprehensible, even modest, goal.
As the report notes, “There is overwhelming skepticism about the total elimination of nuclear weapons” (p. 30). Talking to people about nuclear abolition tends to elicit wariness. Talking to people about reducing the nuclear threat elicits a more positive reaction. Focus group participants agreed with the statement “Even if we never get all the way to that goal [abolition], every step in that direction will only make us safer” (p. 30).
Although the report doesn’t delve into which steps to advocate, the Back from the Brink Campaign, which I have described before, certainly offers specific goals, short of abolition, that can reduce the nuclear threat. These could be starting points for outreach.
- Emphasize ordinary citizens’ ability to make a difference.
A telling comment in the report is that “People do not think they have a role to play in nuclear risk reduction and disarmament and are consistently left out of the success stories we tell” (p. 27).
A review of media coverage of nuclear issues found that such coverage neglects ordinary citizens’ efforts and instead focuses on policymakers and experts. In news stories from 2020-2023 on nuclear weapons, most people quoted were government officials, with only 2% of the people quoted being ordinary citizens.
Identifying actions anyone can take to reduce the nuclear threat, such as participating in demonstrations or contacting elected officials, can make people more engaged and willing to act. For example, people can contact their representatives in Congress to support the recently introduced H.Res 317, which calls for several useful measures to reduce the dangers of nuclear war.
The next point nicely combines the two above:
- Talk about past successes.
Showing how activists have reduced the nuclear threat in the past demonstrates that success is possible and can also provide an opportunity to show how ordinary citizens have had an impact.
The dramatic reduction in the number of nuclear weapons in the world—from over 70,000 weapons in the mid-1980s to roughly 12,000 in 2025—is an extraordinary accomplishment. Multiple focus group members identified this accomplishment as giving them hope that further nuclear reduction was possible.
Among anti-nuclear slogans shared with survey respondents, the slogan that received the most positive response was “We’ve Come So Far, We Can Finish the Job” (p. 37).
- Be prepared to address the notion that nuclear weapons keep us safe.
Research by the Chicago Public Affairs Council in 2023 found that a significant majority of Americans thought having nuclear weapons made the country safer. This notion is presumably rooted in the idea that American nuclear weapons deter other nuclear-armed countries from attacking the United States.
To counter this notion, activists can highlight previous times the world has come close to nuclear war, including because of false alarms; the danger of an erratic or incompetent president making decisions about nuclear weapons; and the danger of accidents involving nuclear weapons. Emphasizing the immense costs of current US plans to invest trillions in nuclear weapons may also be helpful.
As the report explains, the goal is to shift the discussion away from an “us vs. them” understanding of nuclear weapons that pits the United States against nuclear-armed nations such as Russia or North Korea and replace it with an understanding that “all of us” are threatened by nuclear weapons.
Rewriting the Narrative on Nuclear Weapons also has a valuable observation about the language we use to discuss the nuclear threat. Talking about “The dangerous idea that threatening mass destruction somehow makes the world safer” is more effective than talking about “The dangerous misconception that nuclear weapons keep us safe.” As the report notes,
The “dangerous idea” language frames the issue in terms of logic and common sense (i.e., how can threatening mass destruction be safe?). The “dangerous misconception that nuclear weapons keep us safe” implies a degree of naivete, or worse unwitting complicity, on the part of the public, closing the door to further discussion (p. 27).
- Highlight opposition to nuclear weapons within the national security establishment.
The report notes that “survey research indicates that most people say they are likely to trust nuclear weapons experts, U.S. military leaders, and cybersecurity experts more than academic experts, religious leaders, or even current or former top government officials” (p. 27). The example of someone like General George Lee Butler, a Vietnam veteran and former head of the Strategic Air Command who has since become a fierce critic of nuclear weapons, may be persuasive.
Conclusion
Rewriting the Narrative on Nuclear Weapons offers findings and recommendations that may help anti-nuclear activists craft more persuasive messages. Some of these findings and recommendations may be applicable to other issues covered by the Consistent Life Ethic. In particular, the three principles of identifying comprehensible goals, emphasizing the power of ordinary citizens, and talking about past successes are broadly relevant. Let’s take these insights to heart to make our activism for peace and life more effective.
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Some more of our posts on the practicalities in opposing nuclear weapons:
Abortion and the Unwanted Child
by Fr. Jim Hewes
In the 1990’s I was invited to be a presenter to a non-profit organization who was considering moving to support abortion rather than continuing to stay neutral. It was in a home filled with quite a few people. There were two of us on the pro-life side and two on the pro-abortion side. I asked the facilitator if I could go first. At that point I had be involved in the pro-life movement for about 10 years, but I had discovered a new insight that I shared with the group.
I grew up in a home with the disease of alcoholism. My dad was what you would call a functioning alcoholic. He wasn’t bad or mean, but the disease took a toll on our family. That is why alcoholism is called insidious, baffling and powerful. What happens is the focus of the family is on the disease of alcoholism, not the children; they become secondary, a fallout from the disease. This was affirmed for me with others who I met with for years in Adult Children of Al anon groups.
What this meant was I grew up with a sense of feeling of being unwanted. I knew that most abortions were done because the child was unwanted. It was a “light-bulb” moment because I realized that was why I was so involved in the pro-life movement — to help unwanted children not be devalued and destroyed. After sharing this, on my way home, a friend who had come with me said that I changed the whole atmosphere in the room.
In the last pro-life talk I gave, I began with this story. A young woman came up to me after the talk and thanked me. She said that her father always made clear to her that he wanted a boy; now she realized why she became a strong feminist. So, I now begin every pro-life talk this way, inviting people to reflect on what experiences have influenced their decision about abortion.
Do We Kill for Unwantedness?
Kathi Aultman
Dr. Kathi Aultman, a former abortionist and Medical Director of Planned Parenthood of Jacksonville, stated this clearly in her testimony before Congress: “The fact that the baby was unwanted was no longer enough justification for me to kill it. I could no longer do abortions.”
This belief—that the unwantedness of a child justifies ending its life—is a completely distorted belief. If the timing of an unexpected pregnancy is “wrong” for the parents, it doesn’t mean life is wrong for the child. An unexpected pregnancy may come at an inconvenient time for some—but it doesn’t follow that all unwanted pregnancies translate into unwanted children.
What happens if there is an unwanted situation of a child after birth? One doesn’t kill the child. Rather, the child is given protection and support by society.
Unwantedness Beyond the Womb
It would be wonderful if there were not only no unwanted children, but also no unwanted frail elderly, no unwanted people of color, immigrants, etc. The key is how someone is treated whether they are unwanted or not. Being wanted is not the measure of the dignity or value of one’s life.
History gives tragic examples of what happens when society deems some people unwanted. Hitler’s Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the Rwandan genocide, slavery in the United States, demonization of enemies in war, of those on death row, of immigrants from other countries, all began with the belief that certain lives were less worthy. The same logic is applied today subtly to groups of people, especially to pre-born children.
Feelings Can Change
Many women initially feel overwhelmed by an unexpected pregnancy, especially under difficult circumstances. But these feelings often change as the pregnancy progresses. When women see their baby via ultrasound or feel that first movement, a powerful connection can form. In fact, Save the Storks reports 80% of women who board a Mobile Ultrasound Van, and see their child, choose life.
Cheryl Meyer and Michelle Oberman, in Mothers Who Kill Their Children, document numerous cases of mothers who have killed their children after birth, and they discovered that for one reason or another their children only became unwanted after they were born. This demonstrates once again from another perspective how unwantedness is subjective and changes. A human life shouldn’t hang in the balance.
Additionally, placing a child for adoption is a loving option.
The Power of Support (or Lack of It)
In surveys of women who have had abortions, they were asked: “what would it have taken for you to have had the child?” A significant number answered: “if the father had wanted the child.” So, the mother often first feels unwanted by the important people around her. Sadly, that unwantedness is transferred to her pre-born child. Unwantedness often stems not from the child’s nature, but from the loneliness or pressure or rejection the mother feels.
Offering support can make all the difference.
A May 2023 peer-reviewed study by the Charlotte Lozier Institute surveyed 1,000 women who had abortions and found that a staggering 60 percent said they would have carried their child to term if they had greater emotional or financial support, or both. Two-thirds said their decision to abort violated their own values and preferences.
Child Abuse: Wanted Doesn’t Always Mean Loved
Dr. Edward Lenowski did a study of 674 battered children that were seen in a medical center (Heartbeat, vol.3 no. 4 Dec.1980). He was surprised to find that 91% of these children were planned and initially wanted. Apparently, these children at some point after birth, failed to satisfy unrealistic expectations or emotional needs of their parents, who reacted with violence toward them.
In fact, since abortion has been legal, society has experienced a dramatic increase in the number of reported cases of child abuse. In 1972, before the abortion law was changed, it was reported that there were 167,000 cases of child abuse; but in 1999, there were 1,220,000 cases of child abuse reported. Although there have been better ways to report child abuse today, the significant increase may in part because of the fact that at the earliest stage of life ( gestation) we treat children as unwanted objects that can be discarded violently through an abortion, and this mentality begins to spread in our society like a deadly virus even after birth.
See more on this at the CLN blog post: Prevention of Child Abuse.
A Profound Example
When I was pastor of an inner-city parish, I received a call one day from a couple that I had married over a year before. They asked me to come to a nearby hospital to baptize their son Jose who had been born prematurely. I met them in the waiting room and then we went into the neo-natal unit. My jaw dropped when I saw Jose because he was born at only 22 weeks gestation. Even though I had seen all the pictures of the pre-born child at various stages of development for many years, this was the tiniest human being I had ever seen outside the womb. He was so small that I could literally hold him easily and completely in my hand. The nurse brought me an eye dropper and I baptized this incredible gift of life.
I left them and went outside the door at this hospital. As the cool breeze hit my face, a profound realization came to me; somewhere in another part of this same hospital there probably was a baby like Jose having his or her life ended through a late term abortion. Intrinsically they were both in the image of God, but Jose was wanted by his parents and thus valued and protected, whereas this other nameless vulnerable life was ended, simply because he or she was not wanted or valued. I wondered what terrible things would happen to us as a society if we continued to use the external and passing notion of being wanted or not wanted to determine the value of life and who will live and who will die.
We Deserve Better
Violence at the beginning of life has made us more tolerant of violence in other areas. It won’t heal the deep pain of an unexpected and unsupported pregnancy, nor fix societal wounds. These women and men, their pre-born children, and society deserve a better solution than the violence of abortion.
Through violence like abortion one can kill the unwanted, but one can’t kill unwantedness. What we need is a culture that affirms the dignity of every life—born and pre-born—and surrounds women, men, and children with real love and real options, before birth as well as after birth.
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For similar posts, see:
Signal Chat: The Media Misses the Actual Scandals
by Rachel MacNair
A journalist is mistakenly invited and included in a group chat of top officials discussing a military strike in Yemen. Details of the operation that’s about to happen are given there, but the reporter doesn’t divulge them to anybody at that point. Indeed, it’s not until the strikes happen as detailed that he knows the texts were real and not a prank.
So the mainstream media and late-night comedians are discussing the illegality of using the Signal app for such a chat since it isn’t sufficiently secure for keeping secrets. They comment on the incompetence of having included the reporter. They wonder whether anyone should be fired over this.
As is their custom, they’re missing the real scandals here.
Scandal 1: People were Killed, Including Children
According to a Yemen Data Project report, from March 15-21 there were at least 53 civilians killed. At least four of them were children.
Anti-war demonstration of Yemeni children (1994)
Much of the discussion in the press is about how the information being leaked might potentially have put the pilots carrying out the strikes in danger. Far rarer is any discussion of the danger that actually happened to dozens of innocent bystanders.
Scandal 2: Callous and Gleeful
The term “collateral damage” has always been an outrageous euphemism, but at least it acknowledges that something undesirable happened. Not even noticing the “collateral damage” is way more callous.
There was a celebratory attitude about having hit the intended targets, totally oblivious to the nightmare caused to those killed and to their loved ones who must mourn them. Here’s a screenshot of emojis in response:
It’s one thing to make the case that military actions are a tragic necessity, that killing may be unavoidable for an important goal that will save other people’s lives. This is common in just war theory, but that’s not what’s happening here. Glee is not sorrow. For those who think it was justified, only sorrow is called for.
Scandal 3: Pointlessness
But it’s not justified under just war theory. It’s not good strategy for the stated goals, since it’s a strategy that’s been tried for years and never worked yet. There’s no good rationale for why that would change and suddenly work now. As is common for the war mentality, it’s out of touch with reality.
As Daniel McCarthy puts it in The Real Scandal of the Signal Leak | Compact:
Yet something else endangers the lives of America’s military personnel in a far more significant way—namely, sending them into another Middle East conflict in the first place . . .
What the Signal chat revealed is that Donald Trump is making the same mistakes as Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush before him—egged on by his conventionally hawkish national security advisor, Michael Waltz, the figure most likely to have been responsible for Goldberg’s accidental inclusion in the conversation.
Scandal 4: Secrecy
It seems so very obvious to almost all media commentators that the scandal is that secrets weren’t kept. Yet we live in a democracy. There aren’t supposed to be secrets kept from the people, since the people are the ultimate decision-makers.
Secrecy doesn’t merely protect the people tasked with fighting a war. It also protects the war planners from public scrutiny. This is a recipe for disaster.
As Daniel McCarthy put it:
The scandal here isn’t what the government failed to keep secret, it’s the secrecy itself and the dangerously ill-conceived policies it serves . . .
What’s remarkable here is the concern with looking indecisive rather than with making a bad decision. Which should be the criterion of whether or not America goes to war? Secretary Hegseth ought to discuss that with the American people—and President Trump, too.
Main Scandal
The overarching, biggest scandal of all is one that we already knew before this specific one arose, and which we’re bound to have evidence for yet again. In two parts:
- We’re still immature enough to kill people in wars.
- Much of the media understand this as normal, and present it that way.
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For similar posts, see:
Seeing War’s Victims: The New York Times Investigation of Civilian Casualties in Iraq and Syria
Heartbreakingly Common: Suicide Among Veterans
The Preferential Option for Nonviolence in Just War Theory: Opportunities for Just War and Pacifist Collaboration
The Civil War Conundrum, 150 Years Later
U.S.A.I.D. – The Good and the Bad
by Rachel MacNair
The Trump administration is trying to shut down the United States Agency for International Development. The courts are weighing in and developments are likely to change between the time I write this and the time you read it.
The US Congress is supposed to have a say since it created the agency and legally has to have a say in shutting it down, but it seems to be amenable to the idea. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said the humanitarian aid will be transferred to the State Department and that he’ll then work with Congress to shut down the agency itself.
So what’s a consistent lifer to think? We at the Consistent Life Network aren’t going to have an opinion on how the bureaucracy defines which group is doing what so long as it’s done well. We wouldn’t get into an argument over whether humanitarian aid like food and medical care is administered by U.S.A.I.D. or instead by the US State Department, or some other entity, as long as it’s distributed with life-saving impact that preserves the dignity of recipients. But the extent to which that’s been what’s been happening all these decades isn’t as total as it should be (as discussed under negatives below).
Opponents of war as we are, the division of sides into the white hats and black hats is something we know better than to do. That’s not how the real world works. It’s a mixture, as practically all of life is, and so I’m going to offer thoughts on two positives and two negatives about U.S.A.I.D.
Positive – Humanitarian Assistance
This New York Times opinion piece says it well: As Fellow Pro-Lifers, We Are Begging Marco Rubio to Save Foreign Aid (February 10, 2025).
One of George W. Bush’s major achievements was the PEPFAR program, giving medical help to HIV-AIDS patients. It has provided help to over 20 million people world-wide, so the lives saved are probably far greater than the number that were taken in his wars. The wars still shouldn’t have happened, of course, but it gives you a sense of the magnitude.
As the “Fellow Pro-lifers” say:
We think PEPFAR should be a special priority of the pro-life movement. Its treatments empower mothers to protect their unborn children and provide hope that the births of these children will be moments of joy, not despair. It’s the same kind of hope we’ve tried to give mothers when we’ve stood outside abortion clinics to offer alternatives, or counseled women through high-risk pregnancies.
This is one of many U.S.A.I.D. initiatives fighting disease. Food aid to places of famine is also crucial.
Elon Musk is claiming “no one has died” due to his cuts, but this is clearly untrue. The lack of care with which sudden cuts were made has led to deaths; The New York Times details some in the linked article.
Even if the administration gets its act together to undo the damage to the organizations that sudden cut-off caused, there will have been deaths in the meantime. Heartless bureaucrats that can’t be bothered to be careful or well-informed about what their policies are actually doing on the ground should be mortified to realize it. They need to repent.
Positive – Autocrats Hate It
From Jon Lee Anderson in The New Yorker: Growing Up U.S.A.I.D. (February 25, 2025):
Perhaps the best advertisement for U.S.A.I.D. is that autocrats tend to hate it. In 2012, Vladimir Putin expelled the agency from Russia, purportedly for inciting pro-democratic unrest; Evo Morales, the left-wing president of Bolivia, ejected it the next year. When Trump announced recently that the program would be killed, there were celebratory announcements from petty despots around the world—in Belarus, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán chortled on Facebook that Trump was upending the world order by ending support of U.S.A.I.D., “gender ideology,” “funding for the globalist Soros,” “illegal migration,” and “the Russia-Ukraine war.” Orbán added that he intended to hunt down recipients of U.S.A.I.D. funding in Hungary. “Now is the moment when these international networks have to be taken down,” he said. “It is necessary to make their existence legally impossible.”
Negative – A Pro-Abortion Organization
Last year, about $607.5 million of the U.S.A.I.D. budget was for family planning.
Under Republican administrations since Reagan, this has by executive order not included abortion. Reagan established this as “the Mexico City policy” because of a conference in Mexico City in 1984, and the name has stuck.
All Democratic administrations since then have rescinded the policy by executive order.
So under Democratic administrations, U.S.A.I.D. has become one of the major promoters of abortion internationally. Millions of dollars have not only gone to abortion provision, but lobbying governments to legalize abortion.
It has been common to call the Mexico City policy a “global gag rule.” This pejorative view of what’s actually a life-saving policy, when held by the people supposed to carry out aid under Republican administrations, will do great damage. Aid workers have gotten used to being able to re-establish abortion advocacy when Democratic administrations come to power.
Promoting abortion in countries that view it as baby-killing that they don’t want is a form of cultural imperialism.
From Is Legal = Safe?, May 15, 2014, Culture of Life Africa
As International Planned Parenthood Federation (and other like-minded groups) continues to mount coordinated pressure on African nations for legal and “safe” abortion for women, we see them pouring astronomical amounts of money to grease corrupt palms, confuse undecided minds and harden unsuspecting hearts towards the unborn in various African countries.
This is most unfortunate because throughout our Continent, there is a unanimous celebration of human life from the womb . . .
But all of this is under severe attack by the well-paid proponents of Abortion who have flown into Africa on the wings of wealthy, western pro-abortion organizations . . . They speak with the unmistakable force and arrogance of 21st century imperialists
Negative – Imperialism
Again from Growing Up U.S.A.I.D:
As my family moved around the world, it was clear that perceptions of the United States were far more complicated than that, and not just because of the bloody debacle in Vietnam and the racist outrages back home. In my twenties, when I told people that my father had worked for U.S.A.I.D., the inevitable knowing response was “You mean the C.I.A.”
The proximity between the two agencies was hard to deny. In the sixties, America often disbursed aid as “credits” to foreign governments, which in turn supplied the equivalent amount of local currency to the U.S. Embassy. The funds were apportioned by the “country intelligence team”—which invariably included the C.I.A. station chief. The C.I.A. also partnered with the Office of Public Safety, an American program that trained police forces in Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and elsewhere. In 1973, after reports emerged that its graduates had engaged in terror and torture, Congress disbanded it. A Senate Foreign Relations Committee report lamented that the program’s notoriety had helped “stigmatize the total U.S. foreign aid effort.”
And a final thought from that article:
Recently, the left-wing author Ignacio Ramonet, who is close to the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, took a moment during his weekly podcast to ponder the significance of Trump’s dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. “It’s just incredible,” he exclaimed. “Is he destroying the U.S. empire from within?”
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For more of our posts on recent politics, see:
Not Panicked / Always Panicked
Trump Sabotaging the Pro-Life Movement
The Deserving and Undeserving Poor vs. the Worthy and Unworthy of Life: How Both Major Political Parties Pick and Choose Who They Help and Whom They Kill
Aftermath of State Ballot Initiatives
Presidential Election 2024: Consistent Life Perspectives
Pro-life Voting Strategy: A Problem without an Answer
The Uniqueness of the Fetal Body: A Distinct Human Life
by Fr. Jim Hewes
Introduction
March 30 marks the 30th anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s The Gospel of Life. Just days earlier, on March 25, Catholics celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation—the moment Jesus was conceived in Mary’s womb. This prompts a profound question: Was Jesus, at His conception, a mere part of Mary’s body, or was He a separate and distinct human person? This question is relevant not only for Jesus but for every pre-born child.
- Distinct DNA and Genetic Identity
From the moment of conception, a pre-born child possesses a unique, unrepeatable genetic identity, separate from the mother’s body. Each human has an individual DNA code. If the pre-born child were merely part of the mother’s body, their genetic code would match the mother’s—but it does not. In fact, in half of all female pregnancies, the child is male, carrying XY chromosomes, distinct from the mother’s XX chromosomes. One person cannot have two sets of different chromosomes.
- Independent Physical Characteristics and Systems
A pre-born child develops distinct physical features and biological systems independent of the mother. For instance, neither Mary nor any pregnant woman suddenly has four arms, four legs, 20 fingers, 20 toes, two hearts, two nervous systems, two sets of internal organs (livers, lungs, kidneys, etc.), two brains, four eyes, four ears, or two noses. The child develops their own organs, heartbeat, brain waves, and fingerprints—all unique and different from the mother’s.
Moreover, a child in the womb can exhibit behaviors independent of the mother, such as thumb-sucking or movement. The child can be kicking while the mother is not but rather stationary The child can be awake while the mother sleeps, or vice versa. Additionally, the child can experience illness independently of the mother’s health. For example, a mother may be ill while her child remains healthy, or the child may be ill while the mother is perfectly well.
- Separate Blood Supply and Life Processes
The blood type of the pre-born child is often different from the mother’s. Since a single body cannot function with two different blood types, this distinction further proves that the child has a separate circulatory system. The placenta acts as a mediator, not a merger, ensuring both mother and child maintain their own distinct biological processes.
- Impact of External Substances
A pamphlet from New York State’s Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services warns about the effects of alcohol on unborn babies, citing Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). The damage caused by alcohol to the pre-born child demonstrates that the child’s body processes substances separately from the mother’s body.
- Life and Death as Distinct Realities
There are documented cases where a fetus has survived briefly after the mother’s death or died while the mother continued to live. If the child were merely a part of the mother’s body, such a separation in life and death would be impossible.
- Legal and Ethical Recognition of Separate Lives
The law acknowledges the distinct humanity of the pre-born child. For instance, it is illegal to execute a pregnant woman on death row because the fetus is recognized as a separate life who should not be punished for the mother’s crimes.
- Emotional and Psychological Evidence
The grief experienced by many women following an abortion reflects the inherent value of the life that was lost. Women who undergo procedures such as tonsil or appendix removal (parts of their body) do not experience the same profound sorrow. Programs such as Project Rachel, Rachel’s Vineyard Retreats, Silent No More, After Abortion, Abortion Recovery International, and many others help women heal from the deep pain following an abortion, further highlighting that what was lost was more than a “part” of their body—it was a distinct life.
- A Right to One’s Own Body
The pro-abortion argument often emphasizes bodily autonomy for the mother but overlooks the autonomy of the developing child. A pre-born female child aborted is denied any future bodily autonomy for the rest of her life. The environment of the womb is not the child’s identity; it is their temporary home.
- A Sacred Space for Life
The womb is designed to nurture life—a space that, month after month, prepares to sustain a unique individual. Every human being once occupied this space. The monthly cycle is a reminder of the life with so much potential—a distinct, individual life separate from the mother.
- A Fitting Analogy: The House and Its Resident
An electric vehicle that is plugged into the house to receive its sustenance is still not part of the house, but only a car. The electric vehicle plugged in, symbolically like the umbilical cord connecting the child to the mother; a child growing within the womb is not a part of the mother’s body but a distinct individual living within her.
Conclusion
The evidence from biology, behavior, law, and human experience points to one conclusion: The pre-born child is a distinct and unique human being, not a mere part of the mother’s body. As Jesus was uniquely Himself within Mary’s womb, so is every child—a sacred life, an image-bearer, deserving recognition, protection, and love.
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For some more of our posts from Fr. Hewes, see:
Death Penalty and other Killing: The Destructive Effect on Us
Consistent Life History: Being Across the Board
Reflections from My Decades of Consistent Life Experience
Abortion and Other Issues of Life: Connecting the Dots
A Personal Reflection on a Just War
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Turning Back the Nuclear Threat: Some Practical Steps
by John Whitehead
The following is adapted from remarks given at the Vigil to End the Nuclear Danger, a peace witness outside the White House on March 8, 2025. The vigil was co-sponsored by the Consistent Life Network, as well as the American Solidarity Party of DC and Maryland, Pax Christi Metro DC-Baltimore, and Rehumanize International.
We’re here this morning to witness for peace and for the protection of human life. We’re here to witness for the protection of life against one of the greatest threats to life in the world today, nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons pose a threat to every human being on earth. If nuclear weapons were ever used on a large scale, or even on a relatively small scale, they would kill billions of people and probably wipe out human civilization as we know it.
Nuclear weapons have threatened humanity since their invention almost 80 years ago. Today, however, the nuclear threat is especially severe. The danger of nuclear war is probably greater today than at any time since the darkest days of the Cold War arms race in the 1980s.
Over the past three years, the war in Ukraine has pitted the nuclear-armed nations of NATO — the United States, Britain, and France — against the nuclear-armed nation of Russia. The Ukraine war has the potential to escalate to a nuclear conflict. Less severe but still significant is the danger from the ongoing rivalry and tensions between the United States and China, another nuclear-armed nation.
Amid these dangers, international limits on nuclear weapons have become all too frail. Important arms control agreements among nuclear nations have been cast aside in recent years.
Among the most significant remaining arms control agreements today is the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START. New START places limits on how many nuclear weapons Russia and the United States can possess. The New START Treaty is set to expire in a little less than a year, in February 2026.
If New START expires, then there will be no international agreement limiting the Russian and American nuclear arsenals. This situation could set off an arms race as Russia and the United States each tries to increase its nuclear weapons stockpiles as much as possible.
Other nuclear-armed nations might take such a Russian/American arms race as an incentive to increase their nuclear weapons stockpiles as well. Such a situation, in which nuclear-armed nations build up their arsenals in a futile effort to “get ahead” of each other, would only heighten the already extreme tensions among nuclear-armed nations.
The situation today is dire. However, efforts are underway to turn humanity away from its present course of ever more nuclear weapons and ever greater dangers. I will highlight two significant efforts.
A Call to Renew Arms Control Negotiations
A resolution introduced in the US Congress calls for renewing nuclear arms control agreements. This resolution, House Resolution 100/Senate Resolution 61, condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s accompanying nuclear threats. The resolution also calls for the United States to pursue new nuclear arms control negotiations with Russia so that limitations on nuclear weapons will continue past 2026. The resolution also calls for the United States to pursue nuclear arms control negotiations with China, which would be another crucial step in checking a nuclear arms race.
House Resolution 100 and Senate Resolution 61, by calling for new negotiations to prevent an arms race among nuclear-armed nations, is an important measure for reducing the nuclear danger today. We should support these resolutions.
Back from the Brink Measures
The second important effort to lessen the nuclear threat is the Back from the Brink Campaign. Back from the Brink calls for the United States to pursue the ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons. As intermediate steps to this goal, Back from the Brink advocates crucial changes to the United States’ policies toward nuclear weapons that can decrease the dangers of nuclear war. The changes advocated by Back from the Brink include the following four measures:
The United States should officially adopt a policy of “no first use.” A “no first use” policy means the United States will pledge never to be the first nation to use nuclear weapons in a conflict. While such a policy falls short of pledging never to use nuclear weapons at all, it does at least dramatically restrict the possible situations in which the United States might use such weapons.
The United States should take nuclear weapons off the high level of alert that enables these weapons to be launched in just a few minutes. Hundreds of American nuclear weapons (and about 2,000 nuclear weapons worldwide) are currently on this high level of alert. Having nuclear weapons ready to be used at a moment’s notice greatly increases the danger that they will be used impulsively and without reflection, perhaps in response to a false alarm or incomplete information. Taking nuclear weapons off high alert lowers the danger of their use.
The United States should end the policy that allows nuclear weapons to be used on the authority of a single human being, the president of the United States. Currently the president has the awesome power to order the use of nuclear weapons and no one else in the executive branch or any other branch of government has the legal power to stop him. The use of nuclear weapons rests entirely on the president’s decision. This policy of sole presidential authority makes it more likely that a trigger-happy, or erratic, or cognitively impaired president might initiate a nuclear war. Changing this policy and introducing legal checks on the president’s power to use nuclear weapons would decrease this danger.
The United States should cancel plans to spend a staggering $1.7 trillion over 30 years to build a new generation of nuclear weapons and related technologies. Such spending on new nuclear weapons is completely unnecessary since, as Back from the Brink notes, “The U.S.’s current nuclear arsenal is more than sufficient to deter an attack (and indeed sufficient to destroy life on this planet as we know it many times over).” Spending over $1 trillion on nuclear weapons is a colossal waste of money. Any politician concerned with reducing government spending should make cancelling these plans for more nuclear weapons his or her top priority.
Take Action
These changes advocated by Back from the Brink will not eliminate the nuclear threat, but they will greatly reduce it. Another resolution in the US Congress, House Resolution 77, calls for making these four changes to US nuclear policy. We should support this resolution as well.
American citizens should contact their elected representatives in the House and Senate to urge them to support House Resolution 100/Senate Resolution 61. The Arms Control Association provides a form for easily sending this message to elected officials.
In addition to or as an alternative to using the form above, people can contact their representatives and senators directly by phone or email to urge them to support these resolutions
Americans should also contact their representatives in the House to urge them to support House Resolution 77. Back from the Brink provides resources for contacting representatives on this issue.
Back from the Brink also offers recommendations on a variety of other actions people can take to promote efforts against nuclear weapons.
The nuclear danger today is very grave. We need to protect human life and humanity’s future from this danger. Let’s raise our voices in favor of efforts that reduce this threat to all of us.
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For more of our posts on nuclear weapons, see:
The Persisting Threat of Nuclear Weapons: A Brief Primer
Nuclear Disarmament as a Social Justice Issue
A Global Effort to Protect Life: The UN Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons
Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian: A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons
Not Panicked / Always Panicked
by Rachel MacNair
I was visiting a large Quaker Meeting for Worship in January 2025, just days into Donald Trump sending a lot of heads reeling with his initial set of executive orders and actions. We Quakers (Friends) are the type of folks especially inclined to be upset about many of those. This was expressed by some who spoke. They were worried. They were freaked out.
So here’s the message I gave:
Back in 1972, when I was 13 and 14 years old, I had a lot of angst over the American war in Vietnam. I worked hard for George McGovern for president, thinking that would help end the war. But Richard Nixon won by a landslide. The war would continue, and I was distraught.
If you had come to me the day after the election and said, “Here’s how we’re going to do it. In less than two years, he’ll resign from office in disgrace.” I would have said, “I enjoy the impishness of the idea. But let’s do be realistic.”
Friends laughed a bit at this point, knowing that’s exactly what happened. I went on to say that ever since then I haven’t worried about the trajectory of events. I’ve observed that things go off the trajectory so often. I intended to maintain my faith that over the course of time, kindness is stronger than cruelty.
I think the Trump administration is far more likely than most to come up with surprising events. It’s practically designed for it. “Being realistic” doesn’t preclude as much as it used to.
Biden
Part of why I wasn’t as freaked out as other Friends is that I had a lower opinion of the Obama-Biden-Harris set of actions. I was horrified about the re-imposition of money pushing abortion internationally. I knew several thousand babies would be killed because of that funding, along with a long list of other things those administrations did or would do to promote abortion.
But when many of my fellow Quakers understood Harris to be the “lesser evil” between the two, I think many were succumbing to our system’s fixation on discerning which of two candidates is less bad. That lends itself to minimizing what’s wrong with the one you decided on. In the case of Biden, I un-minimize a bit:
- Modernization of nuclear weapons continued, when instead eventual elimination should be the focus.
- Obama used weaponized drones in Afghanistan, bombing wedding parties, terrifying children, and giving the civilian population a constant sense of danger. See Pro-Life Means Anti-Drone in The American Conservative.
There was also ample corruption in the Afghan government that further eroded the population’s trust in it. By the time of the U.S. withdrawal, the situation had essentially been set up to be a disaster. Afghan soldiers abandoned their weapons and the Taliban re-took the country.
While the drones were striking, we pointed out that the strategy was not only astonishingly cruel but markedly stupid. The fairly predictable end result shows that. The Taliban and the corrupt officials are mainly to blame, but those were a given, and they weren’t dealt with well.
- We can blame Russia for the war in Ukraine; there would be no war if they stopped. But the Obama administration had a tepid response when Russia invaded Crimea back in 2014, at a time when non-military options for a stronger response were known to the administration. Biden’s belligerency at some times mixed with insufficient opposition at other times was a major bungling. Harris made clear she wouldn’t have changed how she approached it.
- We can blame Hamas for its horrific October 7 attack. We can blame the current Israeli government for its long-standing policies that hurt Palestinians and its response that killed thousands of children and others. But the U.S. sending weapons to Israel and otherwise tolerating the war has been dealing badly with a bad situation. Peace activists have spent the last year asserting our outrage at this.
In February 2020, Rachel adds a stone to the growing peace mosaic on the Gaza Strip wall, which can be seen at one spot by the people stuck inside, showing them support for their plight.
Most peace activists will agree with my bullet-point assessment above. But they tend to forget about all that when election time rolls around. We can’t contemplate evil so much when we’re trying to make the case that one candidate is lesser about it.
Trump
Trump is deliberately “flooding the zone” with highly objectionable policies in rapid-fire succession. As a consistent-lifer, with the criterion of which ones might get people killed, I’d currently give these ones the highest priority:
- The cut-off of humanitarian aid in U.S.A.I.D. will result in many dozen deaths at least even if the aid gets restored soon. For example, already paid-for medicines treating HIV – they can prevent pregnant women from giving the disease to their preborn children. But without it, a large portion of the children die before turning two. This is covered in The New York Times opinion piece: As Fellow Pro-Lifers, We Are Begging Marco Rubio to Save Foreign Aid.
- Immigration policy was especially cruel in the first Trump administration and bids fair to be again. Some of the cruelty will stick, and some will be inflicted and then walked back, perhaps to be inflicted again.
- Medicaid and SNAP (food assistance) are both essential services. Proposed massive cuts – especially when the purpose of the cuts is to fund more military, greater cruelty to immigrants, and tax cuts for the rich – can foreseeably be predicted to increase abortions. It will also lead to the deaths of unborn children and other people through inadequate medicine and food. See our post Social Programs to Help the Poor are Pro-life.
- There’s already been a lot of bungling on foreign policy which could be pernicious if wars result or are exacerbated. The February 28 Oval Office public shouting match between Trump, Vance, and Zelenskyy springs to mind, and that was just part of Trump using the talking points of an aggressor and war criminal. I also think of talk about clearing out Gaza for a real-estate deal, and of starting up fresh new belligerency with Panama and Greenland and Canada that weren’t even on our radar before. All these situations are volatile, so by giving specifics this paragraph will be the most quickly outdated one of this post. We can count on Trump to come up with new ones and don’t know how long he’ll stick with these.
The one area where Trump is the lesser evil is on abortion, and as I’ve explained before, I fear there will be all kinds of damage there, too. His heart isn’t really in it. He works on it for transactional reasons, and when the transactions change, so will he. This can be seen by abortion opposition being badly watered down in the Republican platform last year.
Consistent lifers who work with our fellow peace activists all the time know full well that he makes being persuasive harder.
graphic from our member group Rehumanize International
Conclusion
My feelings are that the Trump administration, while having some good points, is mainly stomach-churning. But also that the Harris administration would have been stomach-churning. We can’t get out of stomach-churning by looking at who gets elected in an only-two-options system.
But who knows what will happen? As I said before, Nixon resigning wasn’t on the table early on. Also, he did get some good things done – the Environmental Protection Agency, opening to China, etc.
Trump has said he’d like to cut the military budget in half. I don’t believe that’s a serious proposal, but I’ve never in all my life heard a U.S. President say that before. And he’d like to be the grand person who gets denuclearization talks going with Russia and China. Again, that may be part of a narcissistic delusion. But I’m not about to rain on his parade if he tries.
As I learned back in my teens, trying to predict the future by looking at current trajectories turns out to not be all that realistic.
Predicting that this president will do some admirably good things and some stunningly terrible things is a safe prediction, so long as we don’t specify which good and bad things. It’s been true of pretty much every president the U.S. has ever had.
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For more of our posts on voting and politics, see:
Trump Sabotaging the Pro-Life Movement
Political Homelessness is Better than a Wrong Political Home
Pro-Life Voting Strategy: A Problem without an Answer
How Consistent-life Advocacy Would Benefit from Ranked-Choice Voting
The Deserving and Undeserving Poor vs. the Worthy and Unworthy of Life: How Both Major Political Parties Pick and Choose Who They Help and Whom They Kill
Dorothy Day and the Consistent Life Ethic: Rejecting Conventional Political Paradigms
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For updated information on an aspect of elections we can get behind, see our project website:
Preborn Babies, Infants, and Government Programs
by Sarah Terzo
A recent study looked at food insecurity and government benefits among pregnant people in the United States. Researchers determined that 14% of their sample was “food insecure,” meaning they couldn’t afford enough to eat.
These were all people who weren’t receiving government assistance through SNAP or WIC, two programs that provide food for the poor.
Food insecurity was associated with:
- gestational diabetes,
- preeclampsia,
- preterm birth, and
- neonatal intensive care unit admission.
Gestational diabetes can threaten the lives of both mothers and babies. Prematurity can lead to infant death and disability.
Preeclampsia will kill the pregnant person if the pregnancy isn’t ended . Pro-life groups have pointed out that doctors don’t have to kill a baby directly in these cases but can induce labor rather than performing an abortion.
But if preeclampsia occurs before viability, as it often does, the baby gets a death sentence either way. Whether the child dies by dismemberment in an abortion procedure or is born and suffocates due to prematurity, she dies. And either way, it’s a horrible death.
The study didn’t directly address infant mortality, but prematurity is a risk factor both for infant death and long-term disability.
In cases where the mother was receiving SNAP or WIC, most of the effects of food insecurity were eliminated. Mothers receiving SNAP or WIC were less likely to have premature babies and less likely to develop gestational diabetes. Their babies were more likely to be healthy and not need to spend time in the NICU.
In fact, the babies of pregnant people receiving SNAP or WIC were just as healthy as those of wealthier women. Only the babies of poor women not receiving SNAP or WIC suffered higher rates of prematurity and complications.
Government assistance led to healthier children and less prematurity. Children born from mothers who have enough food to eat have a much better start in life.
This really isn’t a surprising finding.
But the U.S. House of Representatives is poised to pass a budget resolution package which includes drastically cutting SNAP. This will inevitably lead to more food insecurity, which will leave preborn babies at greater risk of prematurity and NICU stays after birth, as well as increase the prevalence of gestational diabetes. More food insecurity means more complications for pregnant people and babies.
If we are concerned about abortion, we should be concerned about this. A baby who dies in the NICU is just as dead as one killed by abortion.
All preborn babies are valuable. All babies have a right to life and a right to have the best start in life.
The children of poor mothers aren’t exempt. And the pregnant woman’s poverty is never the child’s fault.
What Will the Proposed Cuts to SNAP Mean?
Right now, Republican House members are working on a budget that seeks to cut $230 billion from SNAP.
- Lower Monthly Amounts
The average monthly SNAP benefit is already very low. It’s $129 per person per month. The proposed cuts to SNAP would make this amount even lower.
Think of the last time you went grocery shopping. Could you buy a month’s worth of groceries for yourself for $129? Could you afford to feed your family on that?
The $230 billion in cuts would make this amount even lower.
- Work Requirement
The other proposed change is a work requirement. A single mother would have to prove she is working in order to get SNAP. If she can’t, she can only collect SNAP for one month out of a year for a maximum of three years.
What single mother can afford to feed her children on $129 for an entire year?
And if she’s providing child care to her own child directly rather than paying someone else to, doesn’t that mean she’s already working, and working at something society should value greatly?
Lack of Affordable Childcare
While ideally, people should work, many single mothers can’t work because of a lack of childcare services. A mother with an infant can’t simply leave her baby home alone while she works.
As of 2018, some 51% of Americans lived in what is known as a “childcare desert.”
In childcare deserts, there is either no access to childcare facilities or the number of children is three times higher than the spaces in childcare facilities. These women can’t access childcare at all. If they aren’t lucky enough to have a friend or family member to watch their baby while they work, they cannot work.
Even in areas where childcare options are available, they are often unaffordable.
According to one government website, childcare is becoming less available and its cost is going up.
The National Database of Childcare Prices reported on childcare costs in 2,360 U.S. counties. Their report:
shows that childcare expenses are untenable for families throughout the country, and highlights the urgent need for greater federal investments, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
A full-time job at minimum wage pays roughly $15,080 a year. The average cost of childcare for an infant varies based on where one lives. But the median amount ranges from $7,461 to $15,417.
At the very least, a mother with an infant working for minimum wage would pay 49% of her income in childcare. And in some cases, the cost of childcare would exceed her yearly income, meaning that if she were to work, she would actually lose money.
Things are even more dire for a single mother who already has another child. The cost of daycare for a toddler is nearly as expensive as that for an infant. Among preschool-aged children, childcare prices per child ranged from $6,239 to $11,050.
If a woman has both an infant and a toddler, her childcare costs would range from $13,700 to $26,467 a year- impossible to pay on a minimum wage salary. Even many single mothers earning above minimum wage wouldn’t be able to afford it. Don’t forget that these mothers must also pay rent and utilities.
Difficulty Documenting Work
What if the single mother or pregnant person is working? She has to prove it through submitting paperwork.
The Office of Temporary Assistance, which administers SNAP, is very slow in processing paperwork. When I submitted my application for food stamps, it took six months for it to be processed. I survived with the help of friends and family and also contacted a food pantry. The food pantry wasn’t able to give me much help because they didn’t have enough donations to cover the needs of the community.
Sarah Terzo
At the time, I was working. I just wasn’t making enough money to afford food. SNAP administrators made it very, very difficult for me to document my income, which was a requirement to prove eligibility.
I provided my bank statements for an entire year and my tax return. They could easily have seen, from these documents, how much money I was making. But they refused to accept either of them as proof of income.
Instead, I had to contact Live Action and get them to write a letter verifying the amount of money they paid me going back six months. Whoever wrote the letter had to go to the bank, get it notarized, and mail it to me. The letter had to be on official letterhead.
This was a huge inconvenience for them, and I hated asking. They were willing to do it for me, however. They sent me the letter – and the Office of Temporary Assistance rejected it. Why? Because it wasn’t signed. They never told me it had to be signed.
I had to ask Live Action to do it all over again. Write the letter, get it notarized, and put it in the mail – this time signed. For the whole time I was on food stamps, they had to do it every year.
I was very lucky they were willing to do that for me. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten SNAP. How many employers would go through all that inconvenience?
(I also had to reveal to them I was collecting SNAP. That was information I would’ve preferred to keep private.)
None of that was necessary. The office had my tax return and my bank statements, which clearly showed my income.
These are the kind of hoops a pregnant or parenting woman would have to jump through to prove she is eligible to receive SNAP. The application process is bad enough. She would have to go through another whole level of paperwork.
A Brief Overview of SNAP
Many people believe that those collecting SNAP are lazy people who refuse to work. Actually, 51% of people receiving SNAP work full-time. The elderly make up 18.3% of recipients. And 28% of adults under 60 who received SNAP in 2015 were disabled. In 2019-2020, 65% of households receiving SNAP contained children.
The tiny percentage of nondisabled, non-elderly adults receiving SNAP who aren’t working full-time include those employed part-time and mothers of young children who can’t afford childcare.
Nearly everyone on SNAP who can work does work. Work requirements will only hurt the people, like caretakers, who can’t work.
What You Can Do Right Now
For those of us living in the U.S., write to your legislators and tell them not to cut SNAP benefits. This letter will also encourage them not to cut Medicaid, which provides health insurance for many poor single mothers and their children. It will only take you a few clicks of the mouse to do this through this link. Writing to your U.S. Senators would also be timely now.
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For more of our posts on governmental social services, see:
Social Programs to Help the Poor are Pro-life
SNAP Cuts? More Poverty, More Abortion
Home of the Brave? A CLE Response to City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson
The Impact of Family Caps on Abortion
Why the Hyde Amendment Helps Low-Income Women
Seeking an End to a Catastrophic War: The Ukraine War after Three Years
by John Whitehead
The Ukraine-Russia war will soon enter its fourth year. The war has become, in one sense, a relatively static conflict, with neither the Ukrainian nor Russian forces advancing dramatically and battles being fought over very small pieces of territory. However, in another sense, the war has changed significantly over time by becoming ever more costly and dangerous as it continues to claim lives, cause suffering, and escalate to greater levels of violence. The need for a ceasefire is greater than ever today.
The State of the War
Following Ukraine’s 2023 counter-offensive, the initiative in the war shifted to the Russians. From late 2023 to the present, Russian forces in eastern Ukraine have been advancing very slowly. Russia also still occupies a small part of northern Ukraine, close to the city Kharkiv. In August 2024, the Ukrainians responded to Russian advances in the east with an incursion from northern Ukraine into Russia’s Kursk region. The Russians were subsequently able to regain some territory but have not pushed the Ukrainians out of Russia altogether.
While the situation on the ground may well change, at present the war is set in a pattern reminiscent of western Europe in World War I: the two sides face each other along an over 1,000-kilometer front that shifts only marginally over time.
The War’s Toll
Precisely how many people have been killed in the war to date is unknown. Both Russia and Ukraine likely exaggerate the other side’s losses while playing down their own. A rough sense of the scale of the war’s losses can be discerned, though.
In December, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since the war began in February 2022. An estimate by the Russian media website Mediazona, based on open-source data such as obituaries, placed the number of Russian soldiers killed in 2024 alone as at least 31,481. The total number of Russian military personnel killed since the war began is presumably much higher.
In January, United Nations deputy human rights chief Nada Al-Nashif reported that more than 12,300 civilians, including 650 children, have been killed in Ukraine during the war—and these numbers are likely underestimates. Civilians have been killed both close to the frontlines and far from it, with Russian bombing being a significant cause of death. Almost 7 million Ukrainians have been forced by the war to flee their country.
Ukrainian civilians are also suffering from repeated Russian attacks on their country’s energy infrastructure. Russia has attacked Ukraine’s power grid over 1,000 times since the war began and these attacks escalated in 2024. A major attack in late November 2024, for example, left millions of Ukrainians without power. The attack left the city of Kherson without electricity and the city of Zhytomyr without power or water.
Because of the assaults on its energy infrastructure, Ukraine is in a precarious position. Since the war began, Ukraine has gone from a net exporter of electricity to Europe to a net importer, and it is currently struggling to pay for these imports. In the middle of winter, Ukraine is currently unable to supply the country’s full energy needs, with residential blackouts being frequent. Household electricity was out almost 40 percent of the time in December. Continued attacks on the energy infrastructure will likely only worsen this severe deprivation.
scene of wartime devastation in Ukraine
The war has also involved the use of weapons that are not only lethal in the current conflict but have longer-term consequences. Both sides have used cluster bombs and land mines. These weapons have already caused harm—over 1,000 people in Ukraine have been killed or injured by cluster bombs since the war began—and will continue to cause harm for years, even after the war ends.
Both cluster bombs and land mines can remain active and unexploded in the ground for years, posing a continuing threat to people’s lives long after the wars that originally put them in place have ended. Because of these weapons’ long-term dangers, much of Ukraine’s land has been effectively blighted. Almost a quarter of Ukrainian land may be contaminated with explosives, including perhaps 10 percent of arable land
This contamination of land seriously damages Ukrainian agriculture, one of the country’s most important economic activities. Further, the effects of the damage to agriculture go beyond Ukraine. The disruptions wrought by the war have strained global food supplies, as both Ukraine and Russia are major grain exporters. Prior to the current war, nearly 90 percent of Ukrainian wheat exports went to food-insecure countries in Africa and Asia. With so much Ukrainian farmland contaminated by explosives that it may take decades and tens of billions of dollars to clean up, global food supplies will likely be affected for a long time even if the war ends today.
The most dangerous weapons connected to the Ukraine war, though, are ones that have not yet been used, namely nuclear weapons. Because the war has pitted nuclear-armed Russia against the nuclear-armed United States and NATO, Ukraine’s leading supporters, the threat of possible nuclear war has hung over the Ukraine conflict from the beginning.
The nuclear threat moved closer to becoming reality this past November. That month, the United States and United Kingdom gave Ukraine authorization to use long-range American- and British-made missiles to strike targets within Russia, which the Ukrainians did.
Russia responded to the Ukrainian missile strikes by striking a Ukrainian city with a longer-range missile that, although it carried conventional explosives, could be armed with a nuclear warhead. The choice of weapon was clearly meant to be a demonstration of what the Russians could potentially do to retaliate.
Seeking a Ceasefire
These extraordinary costs and dangers make ending the war imperative. US President Donald Trump has expressed an interest in trying to negotiate an end to the war and apparently has already spoken by phone to Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Zelenskyy.
We shall have to see what becomes of future negotiations. At present, though, how to end the war diplomatically is far from clear. The Institute for Peace & Diplomacy recently sponsored a symposium in which various experts offered ideas on this topic. Informed partly by that symposium, I will offer a few tentative ideas of my own.
The central challenge to negotiating an end to the war is that, because Russia is currently in a stronger position than Ukraine, Putin’s government has little incentive to withdraw from the Ukrainian territory Russia has already occupied. Fighting has manifestly not gained back this land, and negotiations are not likely to either. Nevertheless, because of how costly the war has been to Russia, Putin at least has an incentive to stop the fighting.
Given this situation, a plausible ceasefire deal would involve Ukraine withdrawing its forces from Russia’s Kursk region in return for Russian withdrawal from around Kharkiv and freezing the conflict along its present lines. The ceasefire could be followed by a gradual reduction in both Ukrainian and Russian military forces along the current frontline and the two countries’ borders, with the frontline eventually becoming an internationally monitored demilitarized zone. To provide Russia an additional incentive, this demilitarization process could be accompanied by gradual relief of international sanctions.
If the demilitarization process is successful, the United States and NATO can then provide what Russia has been seeking throughout this conflict: a written guarantee that Ukraine will not be admitted to NATO.
Such a resolution would hardly be satisfactory since it means responding to Russia’s invasion with concessions. Nevertheless, I don’t see a realistic alternative. This resolution would at least stop the killing and suffering and offer an opportunity for the Ukrainians to begin to rebuild their country.
Those of us who wish to support the Ukrainian people can consider donating to humanitarian groups working in Ukraine, such as Catholic Relief Services and Mennonite Central Committee. People can also donate to the Halo Trust, which works to clear explosives from Ukrainian land.
We should also all mourn the tremendous suffering and loss of life caused by three years of this catastrophic war.
Ukraine countryside
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For more of our posts on the war in Ukraine, see:
A Catastrophe Decades in the Making: The Russian Invasion of Ukraine
A Hidden Cost of the Ukraine War: How Russia’s Invasion Encourages the Spread of Nuclear Weapons
Looking Beyond Anti-Imperialism: A Response to Some Arguments about the Ukraine War
Not Your Pawns: A CLE Examination of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict
For more of our posts on war in general, see:
The Preferential Option for Nonviolence in Just War Theory
Gaza War: Outrageous and Foolish
A Personal Reflection on a Just War
The Civil War Conundrum, 150 Years Later