How about a happy story about pregnancy? Anne Hathaway!

Oh wait. I forgot. That’s controversial. She’s 43. Controversies like this suggest we don’t want to be happy. Or don’t want others to be happy.

These mysteries are why Arthur Brooks has a whole happiness business!

Regardless: Hathaway will forever be Princess Mia from The Princess Diaries to me. But she’s 43 now — and once she announced her pregnancy, that was the first round of commentary, about her age.

A second round seems to be particular to the pro-life crowd: admonishing anyone heralding her motherhood, because she’s one of the actresses who has spoken in support of legal abortion. But, of course, it is so much more than that. It’s intimately personal.

On The View in 2022 (of course, doesn’t every week bring us back to Whoopi’s table?), Hathaway shared that she’s had personal experience with abortion, and she said abortion can be another word for mercy.

That’s a woman in pain, folks. Yes, she has money and fame and the love of a husband and other children, but she’s struggled. We know she’s struggled with infertility, and we know what she revealed on The View.

And now she’s pregnant. Pregnant women have a unique beauty — new human life within does that. She just finished one movie tour for The Devil Wears Prada 2 and now is on one for The Odyssey. And she’s coutured to the max — stunningly so, purposely accentuating her baby bump. And thanks be to God for that. Perhaps her expressions of joy in blue have helped a couple embrace life. I always think back to that Rick Santorum C-SPAN miracle — a gal was going to have an abortion without telling her boyfriend, and a nighttime exchange Santorum had on the Senate floor with Dianne Feinstein wound up being the nudge she needed to tell him and embrace the life of their child. Celebrate life. Pray for mercy and healing and conversion.

Sometimes the best we can do in life is to be present to the present and, well, what’s present before us. I can’t undo a Hathaway abortion. I likely can’t convince her that abortion and mercy are not synonymous. But I can celebrate her unborn child and wish her and her family well — and pray that God’s grace works healing miracles in her life and in our culture.

Making Way for Old Ways of Making Babies

For all sorts of reasons, I’m delighted the New York Times is profiling Emma Waters from Heritage as a Gen Z role model (not for the first time — they clearly find her normalcy exotic).

And, honestly, it’s sweet, in a way, how they can’t help themselves. Consider this, from the piece:

Mrs. Waters, 28, works on policy related to reproductive technology and the family for the Heritage Foundation. In a few short years, she has become a rising leader for a conservative movement that is trying to change the trajectory of modern life. And she is at the movement’s vanguard, driven by her belief that life begins at conception — which she says is grounded in biology and her Christian faith — and that family life is paramount for women.

“Belief.” This isn’t like she’s trying to sell you on minions who come at night to entertain her children and tell them about Jesus when she’s sleeping. What she “says” has basic scientific proof. There are photos that people put on their social media accounts — or refrigerators, if they are old-school like Emma clearly can be, despite having a podcast and things.

And then after pointing out that she wanted to be referred to as Mrs. Waters, as if she asked to be referred to as Marvin the Martian, there’s this:

Another goal is to evangelize a competing system of reproductive care, called “restorative reproductive medicine.” It is based on the idea that “natural” fertility has been impaired by untreated health problems or poor lifestyle choices, and that it needs to be repaired and restored — an approach that many medical experts argue may give false hope to couples who have not been able to have children.

Seriously, is the Times trying to be a parody of itself? Scare quotes around “natural” modifying fertility. There is such a thing. We’ve spent a lot of cultural/ideological/political time treating fertility like a preexisting condition to be medicated away through carcinogenic contraceptive pills early and often.

Women deserve better than all of this, but girls are never told to insist on it.

But forgive me, please. There I go “evangelizing” about something “natural.” Mrs. Waters must be contagious.

Honestly, I wish she’d asked to be referred to as “Mrs. Jackson Waters” (Jackson being her husband’s name) just to see how they’d handle it. As she has written in response, apparently the concept of a woman embracing her role as “wife” appears to be a novelty.

Homework Time: Affirm the ‘Natural’: RRM Helps a Pro-Life, Pro-Family, Pro-Woman Culture

In all seriousness, though, it’s a good thing the Times is covering restorative reproductive medicine. AND the newspaper happens to be doing so with time still for everyone reading this to consider making a comment on a proposed regulation that would make it more accessible. The deadline is midnight Eastern time on Monday. It’s an “Excepted Fertility Benefits” rule by the IRS, the Employee Benefits Security Administration, and Health and Human Services. And I can tell you it was a hard-fought struggle to get it this far — so that administration efforts around reproductive policy are not all about making promises it frankly can’t keep on in vitro fertilization. The rule would make room for “natural” means of dealing with infertility. Restorative reproductive medicine is basically doctors doing what doctors do best: looking at the patient in front of them and seeing how best to treat her. The scandal of women’s medicine is that this is not the norm, especially when it comes to reproductive-medicine protocols.

Too many couples have experiences with doctors going straight to IVF as an option when they are struggling with infertility.

Some patients have religious prohibitions/objections to IVF. Some are concerned about the lives created and destroyed in the process. IVF is also expensive and leads to further heartache more often than not.

“Natural” means of reproduction do not need scare quotes. And the International Institute for Restorative Reproductive Medicine has an education up on its website for anyone interested — including some suggestions if you are inclined to contribute a comment before Monday night. These comment periods are critical for policymaking, and the abortion industry has been known to flood the zone at such moments with orchestrated propaganda campaigns. If you have a personal experience, especially, I encourage you to contribute. It doesn’t have to be long or scientifically advanced in its explanation — just true!

Honestly, everything you ever needed to know but were afraid to ask about “natural” RRM is here.

Do send a comment. It matters.

Other Things

When Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he’ll be pressed on mail-order abortion and the Trump administration’s refusal to prioritize rolling it back. The Biden administration made it possible during Covid, and this week 14 women who say they were harmed by chemical abortion wrote him on behalf of a Louisiana woman whose baby was killed by pills her boyfriend obtained from a doctor in California. She is suing the federal government.

“The Department of Justice must act now to protect women by listening to and standing with Rosalie Markezich, rather than fighting against her in litigation,” the letter says. “The federal government should not defend policies that make it easier for men, abusers, traffickers, or anyone else to obtain abortion drugs in a woman’s name and pressure her to take them in isolation.”

Mary Margaret Olohan has more here.

All 50 states — and Puerto Rico — have joined the “Home for Every Child” initiative run out of the Administration for Children and Families at HHS. The goal is to get children in permanent, healthy homes — cutting bureaucratic obstacles and having the focus be on the child and her needs. It’s going to look different in every state, but it’s shining a light and even getting competitive.

Naomi Schaefer Riley (American Enterprise Institute) and Darcy Olsen (Center for the Rights of Abused Children) are among the revolutionary leaders of foster-care and adoption policy — and then some — in America today. Read and support; be challenged in the role meant for you. We all have one.

My view is that we must be on board with everything that we can do to get people practically thinking about foster care and children in need of healthy, permanent homes.

Darcy Olsen, by the way, has this in the Washington Examiner: “Every 12 minutes, a child goes missing. One bill can make all the difference.” She focuses on the scandal of children going missing from foster care and trafficking.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, 70% of trafficked children were first exploited while missing from foster care. . . .

A child in care goes missing every 12 minutes. In 2014, Congress recognized this crisis and required states to report any child missing from care to law enforcement within 24 hours.

But nine years later, a 2023 federal audit examined more than 74,000 missing foster care episodes and estimated that 34,869 were never reported. Agencies failed these children tens of thousands of times.

We’re going to have to revisit this one, but for now: Marvin Olasky is in Christianity Today: How Foster Care Can Be Training for Homelessness.”

Ditto this on death doulas.

Again, the more we know about the topic of foster care and the reality of it in our country today, the more we don’t look away — the more children have the hope of healthy, permanent homes. (Even if temporary in the eternal sense — cue to Carrie Underwood.)

There’s an ongoing important/instructive trial happening in California concerning abortion-pill reversal.

Please pray for my friends Chelsea and Michael Sobolik, who have been matched with a little girl in India for adoption, to join their son from there. This process can be the hardest part — knowing she’s coming, but working through the international bureaucracy, knowing she belongs with you, but isn’t yet. All of these things having to do with life and family, they take everything, they are as intimate and heart-wrenching as they get — and joyful. Nothing is worth more. And takes more!

Calendar Items & Resources

Gen Z and young Millennials: Check out the Sustaining Revival Conference sponsored by the Plough journal and the Fox Hill Bruderhof community in Montgomery, N.Y. It’s July 31–August 2. I’ve seen good things from this crew, so I encourage the young among us Lifeline readers. Details here.

There’s a call for papers for the September meeting of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore on September 25–27. What you need to know here. Theme is Person and Word.

Post-Adoption Support from BraveLove. Much-needed love for birth mothers.

Around National Review

Wesley J. Smith:

• ‘Death by Organ Donation’ Pushed in the New England Journal of Medicine

• Bioethicists: Prepare People for Public Health Coercion

• Ed Whelan: ‘Sotomayor and Abortion: The political tide turns’

• Michael New: Planned Parenthood Regains Access to Federal Funds

Me:

• Dorothy Day and Her Abortion

• Nuns in Court, Again: The Ongoing — Unnecessary — Little Sisters Ordeal

• When Does Lyndsey Fifield Get Her Post-Platner-Campaign Apology?

• The Fourth Is a Celebration of Life

• Happy Birthday, W.!

• There Are No Christians Without Jews

• Shameful Days in America: Funding Planned Parenthood Again

I’ll leave you with one last link. The re-funding of Planned Parenthood has been mentioned in these parts. Because parody is dead — because life is parody — Politico had a headline about the matter that read “Conservatives rage . . .” No such thing is happening. Not in a concerted, organized way. But this is yet another gut-check moment. Is it one more year of non-funding you want or an end to abortion in America? How about making abortion implausible? How about inundating people with the love that is on the front lines — pregnancy-help centers and person-to-person mentoring and encounter. New medical centers that look at the whole of a woman and her life. Plans for her.

Always keep an eye on nationalreview.com. Feel free to send me your pro-life challenges, news, and ideas. Send me your speaking invites on the future of the pro-life movement and such so I have an excuse to cover the cool pro-life ministries in your backyard. And whatever else I’m not thinking of — I’m klopez@nationalreview.com

God bless your mid-July!