A roundup of news and commentary from around the interwebs.
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Pat Maloney, Canada’s one-woman data collection machine, has an update on Quebec’s abortion numbers—which appear to be going down, a good news story complicated by the fact that it is almost impossible to get real data in this country.
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In my 2017 bookSeeing is Believing: How Our Culture Must Face the Victims of Abortion, I have an entire chapter examining how committing abortions impacts abortionists and other clinic workers. It may surprise you to know that nightmares about dead babies are common. As it turns out, physicians giving patients lethal injections for euthanasia or assisted suicide are also frequently tormented by their actions:
One doctor interviewed for the study said: “I had a colleague who was all for it [assisted dying] and she’s ‘I can’t do it anymore’ because even if you are in favour of it, it becomes a burden when you do it three or four times. It is stressful to kill somebody.”…
Interviews with hospice staff in Washington in the US, where a form of medically assisted dying is available, found that they encountered different types of suicide, and felt conflicted and powerless about wanting to prevent suicide on one hand and supporting a patient’s decision on the other.
It’s stressful to kill people. Who would have thought? I also note that the schizophrenic nature of offering suicide to one and suicide prevention to another is precisely the framework for debating assisted suicide Blaise Alleyne and I laid out in A Guide to Discussing Assisted Suicide.
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Over at The Upheaval Substack, where N.S. Lyons regularly disabuses people of their optimism, he points out that by any definition, there is no longer any such thing as “the liberal West.” Nearly every single country that once made up “the West” has passed laws attacking freedom of speech, religious liberty, and other fundamental principles of classical liberalism. His piece is particularly interesting in the wake of a number of liberals–Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, Caitlin Flanagan, etc.–launching the University of Austin in an attempt to reclaim liberal principles and establish an academic bridgehead.
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Speaking of liberals, over at The Tablet, Liel Leibovitz explains why he and so many others are either getting off or being booted from the progressive bandwagon. As progressives get increasingly radical, I wonder if the number of people they alienate will be sufficient for an effective backlash. They have conquered so many institutions that they may be able to hold onto power regardless of a few high-profile heretics.
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Here’s a headline you wouldn’t expect in Canada, of all places: “Clandestine churches popping up in farm sheds and machine shops in southern Manitoba.” Requiring vaccination for church is wicked. If governments demand it or churches adhere, this trend will spread across the country in no time.
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Over at Unherd, Tom Chivers explains why trans counselling is not “conversion therapy,” as trans activists would have us believe. This is an exceptionally important distinction as laws banning a redefined version of that practice take effect in Canada and begin to pass in the United Kingdom.
