Pohutsky’s Pregnancy Problem

Laurie Pohutsky is a “bisexual” Michigan Democratic State Representative from northern Wayne County (the county where Detroit sits). You’d probably never hear about a member of the Wolverine State’s legislature — even the chair of the “Progressive Women’s Caucus” — except for the fact that Pohutsky took to social media to announce she had undergone sterilization. Why? To protest the pro-life/anti-gender-ideology policies of President Donald Trump. Most people would probably say, “Who cares?” They’d yawn and move on to the sports page. But I have to say: I care.

In one sense, whether Pohutsky had her tubes tied is her business, for which she alone bears responsibility. In the usual run of things, I’d leave it there, perhaps with a thought that the 36-year-old might still one day regret the loss of her potential for motherhood. But Pohutsky announcing her sterilization to the world no longer makes it just “her business.” Her announcement tacitly tells people, “This is a good thing to do and, if you were smart like me, you’d do it too.” And that’s where I take issue.

Democrats have marketed themselves as the opponents of “misinformation” and the slayers of “disinformation,” the distinction between the two being the intentionality of the latter. They were the ones who wanted to weaponize the federal and many state governments to repress “misleading” information, particularly in the health field. It was their excuse for suppressing any dissident views on the efficacy and almost supernatural charity of the COVID shot. They were also the arbiters of what was “misleading,” but they assured us they were just “following the science.”

Well, in the name of the Left’s absolute thralldom to abortion-on-demand-through-birth, the narrative is being pumped out in America and across the West that to “risk” motherhood is an inherently hazardous and life-threatening undertaking, a peril only to be considered in the presence of an absolute guarantee of abortion through birth. That narrative, of course, is nothing more than propaganda, just like the tale of 50-plus years ago that the “hundreds of thousands” of “back-alley abortions” would only be staunched if abortion was legalized. Bernard Nathanson, one of the purveyors of that nonsense, subsequently admitted the numbers were wholly fabricated but, as he noted at the time he still believed in abortion, “they worked.”

The same is true today. Once again, an infinitesimal number of truly life-threatening hard cases are being pumped up to smuggle in abortion-on-demand for pregnancies that have absolutely nothing to do with anything but socioeconomic choices. Fifty years ago they were called “abortions of convenience,” but abortionists consider that term “judgmental” since, in their orthodoxy, the rationale for no abortion can ever be questioned.

Legal protections notwithstanding, the abortion lobby now wants to pretend that treatment of miscarriage is verboten and procedures recognized even by Catholics as legitimate in cases of ectopic pregnancy are unlawful. They know these are red herrings but “they work” in ways that defending the abortion of a child in the ninth month of pregnancy followed by subsequent abandonment of the newborn doesn’t. Abortionists insist states “protect” physicians by giving them “immunity” from extradition for violating another state’s laws (presumably even if their malpractice harms patients) but question state assurances that treatment of miscarriage is lawful. Of course, all of it rests on the assumption that fertility is at best meaningless, at worst a human design flaw, pathological unless you want it. I’d like to see the “science” for that. Because the Centers for Disease Control data shows that in 2023, the year after Dobbs, maternal mortality declined (see here).

This fear-mongering chills and deters young people — especially young women of childbearing age — from getting married (people are marrying later than ever, something to consider during National Marriage Week, February 7-14) and from becoming parents. It is irresponsible. It is false. And it should stop.

Pohutsky’s public sterilization feeds that fear-mongering. It nourishes a false narrative advancing neither truth nor life but the culture of death. That’s why Pohutsky’s sterilization is our business, too. She made it so when she decided her “personal” health decision made “with my husband” required being announced on social media where the press could pick it up.

If you don’t want public critique, don’t publicize it. There’s a relation between the italicized words.

Sex and Babies

I ran across a tweet that, in 14 words, pithily captures the truth that Pohutsky et al. so want to deny (and priests who mumble about the procreative significance of marital intercourse obscure):

Sex makes babies.
If you’re not ready for babies,
You’re not ready for sex.

That claim stands despite every variation and deviation of the Sexual Revolution. It’s what the Church has always taught and still officially teaches, even if some of her daughters and sons (including her ordained sons) “dissent.” There’s nothing “doctrinal” here. It’s plain vanilla natural law. Anybody with a brain and without an agenda can understand it.

Opposite it is the temptation of Genesis: “you will be gods” who redefine rather than embrace reality. This is why people are alienated from their own bodies, pretending fertility is a pathology rather than a human good. It is why there is a lot of unnecessary pain in the world, both of abandoned women and dissected babies.

Maybe if we learned to put our teaching into succinct, 15-something word tweets, people might at least better grasp them.

On a related note, a newborn baby in Idaho was born with his mother’s IUD in his tiny hand (see here). (For those who don’t know how intrauterine devices work, they are abortifacients: they scrape the uterine lining to prevent a fertilized ovum from implanting. They only get called “contraceptives” because a pro-abortion OB-GYN medical group redefined “contraception” to mean stopping implantation, i.e., about three weeks after conception.) The baby’s picture captures the schizophrenia of modern society’s denial of the nexus between sex and procreation: a clearly human newborn boy, swaddled as a sign of love, holding the instrument whose purpose was to ensure that he was never here.

USAID Follies

Some liberals have seized upon what they think is a “gotcha” of President Trump’s/Elon Musk’s takedown of USAID. They claim the men “misled” Americans because it wasn’t USAID blowing their money on gender stuff in South America, it was the State Department! I guess they don’t get it. It’s not who blew the money, it’s why is anybody blowing taxpayer dollars on these things? And, even if it was State, well, the Administration’s young, the State Department makes lots of grants, and there’s plenty of room to audit waste there, too. I’d start in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (a nest of liberal vested interests) and the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. Of course, with USAID’s demise, I can imagine that maybe somewhere a grant recipient hoping to launch production of the Baghdad Sesame Street spinoff for Iran will be canned (as in where Oscar-the-Grouch lives). Guess that means no Big Burka Bird. Oh, the pain, the pain.

Disparate Outcomes

The Jesuit journal America has been churning out story after story about illegal aliens and how the Church can “help” them. I wish I’d seen a similar publishing intensity on their part over abortion. Because if 11 million illegals can produce such a profusion, imagine what an “equitable” outcome for 65 million dead babies spread over 48 years should have generated. I didn’t see it. Was I reading the wrong Jesuit review?

Resisting Dialogue

Brazilian Cardinal Ulrich Steiner says questioning synodality is “resistance to dialogue” (see here). You know what, Cardinal, I’ll admit it: I “resist dialogue.” I resist dialogue not because I won’t talk, but because I have spent 50+ years listening to radical nuns and various clerics yabbering about “dialogue” which typically means “we’ll keep disputing settled doctrine until people begin to doubt it.” That’s what this “dialogue” game is and always has been about. So, yes, I’ll dialogue with you once when you tell me that “the world is flat” and “women can be priests.” Beyond that, life is too short to continue to “discuss” changing reality. I am not going to waste my time endlessly establishing either fact. And if that’s “resisting dialogue,” I’ll own the title of resister, proudly.

On Catching Fish

Sunday’s Gospel, about Jesus preaching to the crowds from Peter’s boat, after which that fisherman brought in a bountiful catch of fish, got me to thinking about Peter’s and Andrew’s and the other apostles’ successors-in-office today and how that Gospel should speak to them. Jesus preached. He “evangelized.” (Hard to use a verb here, since He Himself is the “Good News”). That evangelization had effects. Peter at least was open to hearing the Nazarene rabbi who made his skiff into a marine pulpit. Surely the crowd was moved, too. But that preaching was not just a preaching. It was a sign. Having set out his teaching, he asks Peter for faith. “Let’s go catch some fish!” Peter, grizzled fisherman that he probably was, protests: I’ve been out all night and caught nothing. Peter, reliant on his own resources and work as well as the wisdom of the waters, doubts. But his doubt isn’t strong enough to overcome the possibility — admittedly unlikely — that this landlubber carpenter might be offering. “Let’s try.” The Gospel reports that not only does Peter catch a few fish to make the day worthwhile, but he nets so many that he needs help hauling in the load. Not only are his doubts dispelled but they are blown away in proportions he could never have imagined.

Peter’s successors today seem a lot like their predecessor: the returns are skimpy. But whereas Peter planned on going ashore and trying his luck tomorrow, Peter’s successors are more despairing. They’re downsizing the fleet, trading in the fishing boats, ready to pull out of the Capharnaum market and offer fish for sale only on alternate days in Bethsaida. They’ve used all the tricks in their book, and the returns are dismal.

Now, I can’t imagine that people followed Jesus if his homiletic style and seeming conviction behind his word mirrored the typical American Sunday parish. That suggests there was a seriousness about what He had to say that captured His audience’s attention. And the fact that Peter comes to realize his big fish catch came not from his “professional” reckonings but is clearly grace — evidenced by his plea that Jesus leave him, for “I am a sinful man,” recognizing Jesus isn’t — resets his perspectives. Jesus “meets him where he is,” but the critical point about that encounter is not just the reward of lots of fish but an awareness of the need for current and ongoing conversion. Yes, Peter falls and will fall again. But Peter also has a sense of his fall and the need to get up — the need to admit, “I was wrong. I did wrong.”

Perhaps all our bishops reckoning they’ve “worked all night and caught nothing” and so should close, consolidate, and downsize might draw some lessons about evangelizing, conversion, grace, and faith in Providence. Because I don’t believe the Lord was just interested in bringing in lots of first century fish. Such faith is not a tall tale.