12 Rules for Protecting Life (Part Two)

This is Part Two of "12 Rules for Protecting Life: An Antidote to Abortion"

Rule #3 Make friends with people who want the best for you

The book of Proverbs has a lot to say about friendship. So does Jordan Peterson. “If you’re going to take responsibility for your own life,” Peterson told one of his Canadian audiences, “then one thing you do is you surround yourself with people who are unhappy when you do things for yourself that aren’t good.” That’s something worth thinking about. There is a category of things you can do for yourself that are not good. The question to ask then is this. Do your friends love you enough to get upset when you do one of those things, or do they just cheer you along towards any end? Love is a tricky thing, you see, and it bears little resemblance to its pop culture depiction.

Love is discerning. Love is judgmental. Love…

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12 Rules for Protecting Life: An Antidote to Abortion

Since its release in 2018, millions of people—myself included—have read Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. For the uninitiated, you might call it a book-length treatise of Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror.” If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make a change. Peterson—who has become a cultural phenomenon in his own right—puts it this way: “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.” That’s rule number six, and while I might question the inclusion of the word “perfect,” maybe that’s the whole point. So long as there is work to be done in my own life, why waste precious time blaming my ills on someone or something else?

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What the Admitting Privileges Debate Tells Us About Those Who Kill Babies for a Living

I came upon an interesting discovery this month while doing background research for my article on abortion in Ireland. The article itself focused on the massive uptick in Irish abortions following legalization, but it also took me to the most recent state-level efforts to regulate abortion in the U.S.—including the Louisiana admitting privileges ordinance that was just revoked by the Supreme Court. It was the Court’s first abortion-related case since 2016, though we might say that it was the same abortion-related case—except that the 2016 iteration emerged from Texas.

On the one hand, it shouldn’t surprise us that in both 2016 (Whole Woman’s Health) and 2020 (June Medical Services), the Supreme Court came to the same conclusion. In both cases, it ruled against the state ordinance which required anyone who performs or induces an abortion to have active admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the abortion facility. In 2016, it was a 5-3 decision (following the death of Justice Scalia). In 2018, it was 5-4. What is surprising…

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It Turns Out Abortion Laws Do Matter

Abortion had been declining among residents of Ireland for 10 straight years, until 2019. Total resident abortions suddenly jumped from 2,879 in 2018 to 6,959 in 2019. That’s an increase of 142%. What could possibly account for such a huge jump in total abortions? Actually, that’s easy. Abortion was legalized in the Republic of Ireland in 2018. The new law went into effect on January 1, 2019. Instead of having to traverse the Irish Sea to obtain an abortion in the UK, Irish mothers can now abort their unborn children right in their own backyard—and the government pays for each and every one. Not surprisingly, total abortions increased dramatically. 

Something similar happened in Northern Ireland as well. After a decade of steady abortion declines, the United Kingdom decided in 2017 to start paying for abortions for residents of Northern Ireland. Prior to this, women from Northern Ireland—where abortion was illegal—could have an abortion in England or Wales but had to pay for it themselves.…

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Planned Parenthood Kills Black Babies. Legally. En Masse.

Planned Parenthood did something remarkable this week. You might call it appalling—not necessarily for the substance of the message—but for the context in which it was made. Yesterday, of course, was #blackouttuesday. Anyone with an active Instagram presence already knows as much. And while there was some confusion as to what the precise message was—even at the highest levels—the gist of it was fairly simple. Violence against black lives—specifically, police violence—will not be tolerated. 

In light of the sweeping wave of blackout posts, I got to wondering about Planned Parenthood. Would the largest abortion business in America dare to join the angry and grieving masses by posting that simple black square? As it turns out, they did and they didn’t. Planned Parenthood doesn’t have a corporate Instagram account, but many of their affiliates do. The Instagram account for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund did not post…

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Abortion in the Age of Coronavirus

It’s a strange time when churches and abortion clinics are both suing the federal government for ostensibly the same thing. Namely, the right to stay open. Then again, we may be living through the most quintessentially strange time in modern history—and nobody knows when it will end or what will emerge on the backside. Life lessons have been ours in abundance; consensus has not. The ever-shifting COVID-19 containment measures have become every bit as contentious as abortion itself. One man’s “essential” is another man’s “superfluous,” and vice versa. Hence the lawsuits. 

Those who oppose abortion are outraged at the notion that an elective procedure could be deemed a medical necessity, just as those who support abortion insist that easy access is more essential during a pandemic than at any other time in history. The outrage on both sides demonstrates again that we little understand our ideological opponents—which is worth considering. Ironically, many of the principles being used to justify this forced (“anti-choice”) lockdown are the same ones that are routinely flouted when the context…

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