Free Republic

The Supreme Court’s landmark opinion on same-sex marriage isn’t the only high-profile precedent the justices will have an opportunity to tinker with – or entirely scrap – when the court reconvenes this fall. ... Even before Trump was reelected, the Supreme Court’s conservatives had put a target on a Roosevelt-era precedent that protects the leaders of independent agencies from being fired by the president for political reasons. The first few months of Trump’s second term have only expedited its demise. ... A recent Supreme Court appeal from Kim Davis, a former county clerk from Kentucky who refused to issue marriage...

Forcing nuns—nuns!—to buy birth control (in the form of Obamacare medical insurance) should have been the canary in the coal mine of progressives’ vile, out-of-control authoritarianism. And to a large extent, in the center-right media space, it got the attention it deserved, but it truly deserved a deeper and wider audience, for it was a blinding flashpoint in the whole groin-focused-”reproductive-care”-gay-marriage-”gender-fluid”-what-are-your-pronouns arc launched in earnest during the Obama era. Last November, when analyzing why Kamala lost, Clarice Feldman summed it up brilliantly: For some reason I keep thinking about the saga of the Little Sisters of the Poor, beginning back...

There is a large and growing faction of the left that hates Catholics. Well, unless they are pro-death and anti-natal. As long as a Catholic bows down to the alphabet gods, they are fine by Democrats. Think Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. The FBI famously labeled traditional Catholics--read, those who hew most closely to catechism--as domestic terrorists in waiting. They placed informants in churches, for God's sake, as if they were Islamist terrorists because they were skeptical of birth control and abortion. The Little Sisters of the Poor are an order of Catholic nuns who have cared for the elderly...

Defunding Victories: 41 Planned Parenthoods Have Closed or Announced Closure Washington, D.C. – The nation’s leading political pro-life group has launched an interactive map tracking Planned Parenthood closures, as the One Big Beautiful Bill’s defunding provision begins to hit America’s largest abortion businesses. This year, 34 Planned Parenthoods have closed their doors and seven have announced they will. SBA Pro-Life America’s new tracker includes a table with Planned Parenthood closures while also pointing to community health centers within a 50-mile radius where women on Medicaid can receive better, more comprehensive care. The map is now live at lifesavinglaws.com under the...

The high school teacher who blew the whistle on allegations that Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) enabled a minor student’s abortion now says that she has raised concerns about the claims seven times since May 2022. CatholicVote previously reported that Zenaida Perez, a teacher at Centreville High School, met with a school investigator in May to tell him about the allegations that a school social worker facilitated one abortion for a student and tried to convince another to go through with an abortion. According to the claims, both students were minors at the time and their parents were not...

A U.S. district court decided on Wednesday to strike down a 2017 federal regulation that exempted religious employers from the Affordable Care Act’s mandate for employer-sponsored health insurance to cover the cost of contraception. If the ruling holds, religious non-profit organizations such as the Little Sisters of the Poor may now be required to file for an accommodation process with the government that still maintains employees’ access to contraception without the religious organization having to pay. For-profit employers would have access to no religious exemption from the mandate whatsoeve

From today's decision in Melton v. City of Forrest City, written by Judge David Stras, joined by Judges Lavenski Smith and Ralph Erickson: Steven Melton is a pro-life, evangelical Christian. In June 2020, he reposted a black-and-white image on Facebook that depicted a silhouette of a baby in the womb with a rope around its neck. His intent was to convey that he was "anti-abortion." Others did not view the image the same way. Two weeks after he posted it, a retired fire-department supervisor complained to Melton that he thought it looked like a noose around the neck of a...

Veya Vanderbrugghen, a baby girl with Down syndrome and other medical complexities whose parents fought the Canadian health care system to get her the care she needed, has passed away. Key Takeaways: * Krystal Vanderbrugghen believed the Canadian healthcare system was discriminating against her daughter, Veya. * Veya received care at Sick Kids in Toronto at one point, considered the premiere children’s hospital in Canada. * At Sick Kids, Veya’s mother was told her daughter would not receive a breathing tube or a living donor liver transplant. * Vanderbrugghen said it appeared as if doctors were “slow-coding” Veya, and other...

Although the backlash to the overturning of Roe v. Wade appears to have subsided, vandals, arsonists, and worse targeted hundreds of churches in 2024, according to a new report. Travis Weber, vice president for policy and government affairs at the Family Research Council, which released the report Monday, said most Americans would be surprised to hear that 383 churches suffered 415 attacks in 2024. “We have a tendency in the West and in the United States to think of ourselves as safe and freedom-loving, tolerant, and protective of religious freedom, including religious freedom to practice Christianity,” he told The Daily...

A Texas woman is suing a U.S. Marine, alleging he spiked her drink with nearly a dozen abortion pills, killing their unborn child, after she rebuffed his repeated requests to “get rid of it,” according to a wrongful death lawsuit filed in federal court Monday. Liana Davis alleges Christopher Cooprider secretly dissolved at least 10 abortion pills into a cup of hot chocolate that he prepared for her April 5 and then left the house and stopped responding as she profusely bled, the suit says. Cooprider, 34, declined to comment Monday. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for...

Doctors and nurses who want to help women with abortion pill reversal treatment after taking chemical abortion pills have won a permanent injunction blocking a Colorado law that prohibited the treatment. In April 2023, Colorado enacted a law making it illegal for medical practitioners to assist women who wanted to reverse a chemical abortion after they had taken the first of two pills in the regimen. The law threatened professional discipline for practitioners who use progesterone to attempt to save the baby’s life. Bella Health and Wellness, a Catholic pro-life clinic in Colorado represented by the Becket Fund for Religious...

The conference representing the New York Catholic bishops in public policy issues is criticizing Planned Parenthood for reportedly requesting $35 million in emergency state funding amid federal Medicaid freezes. “The abortion industry in New York is looking increasingly like an irresponsible and spoiled adolescent, spending its generous allowance too fast,” Kristen Curran, director of government relations for the New York State Catholic Conference, said in an Aug. 6 statement. “New Yorkers should ask them: What happened to the $35 million you already got?” Curran said. CatholicVote reported in August 2024 that the conference questioned the abortion giant’s use of state...

In another major pro-life victory, Planned Parenthood said it will shut down its clinics in Louisiana Sept. 30 after losing access to federal funding under President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” While Planned Parenthood is barred from performing abortions in Louisiana, the organization has been a key player in directing patients to receive out-of-state abortions, The Hill reported. Pro-life advocates praised the shutdown as a decisive blow to the abortion industry’s influence in the state. Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, said on X that he has “fought hard as Attorney General and now as Governor to rid our state of...

Teen Vogue is sounding the alarm over a growing number of states requiring students to view fetal development videos like “Meet Baby Olivia” in sex education classes — calling the pro-life material “manipulative” and accusing its creators of advancing a political agenda. The animated video, produced by Live Action, shows a child developing in the womb from the moment of conception. It has already been adopted in six states as part of newly passed fetal development education laws. According to Live Action, the goal is to educate students on the science of life in the womb and foster “a reverence...

A Virginia public school system has launched an investigation into allegations that high school officials arranged and paid for two minors to obtain abortions without notifying the girls’ parents, violating Virginia law. Fairfax County Public Schools’ (FCPS) investigation comes after a bombshell Aug. 5 Substack report by Walter Curt that states that a social worker at Centreville High School, Carolina Díaz, was involved in procuring abortions for two students. The first incident allegedly occurred in November 2021, when the student was 17 years old. The girl claims Díaz scheduled the appointment, paid for it, and “kept everything quiet without informing...

A man who assaulted two elderly pro-life men outside a Planned Parenthood in Baltimore in 2023 was sentenced Aug. 7 to one year of home detention and three years of probation. Prosecutors had asked for a sentence of 10 years in prison. In a news release, Tom Brejcha, president and chief counsel of legal nonprofit Thomas More Society, called 28-year-old Patrick Brice’s sentence a “get out of jail free” card and “a slap on the wrist.” “This was not a minor altercation between two parties with differing views on abortion. It was a vicious, targeted assault on two senior citizens...

Baltimore Circuit Judge Yvette M. Bryant gave zero prison time to a violent criminal named Patrick Brice, even though there is video proof that he brutally assaulted two people, ages 84 and 72. One of the victims has permanent damage to one of his eyes from the assault.

Los Angeles County is struggling with a massive budget crunch. Sales taxes are rising to over 10% in some areas and many departments are being cut down the line over what Fesia Davenport, the county’s first black female CEO, has described as “unprecedented financial challenges” and “extraordinary budgetary pressures.” But those challenges are not coming so much from the massive wildfires that devastated Los Angeles over the winter, but from the even more massive tide of sexual abuse complaints. Los Angeles County is dealing with $2 billion in costs from the wildfires, after the city’s first black female mayor and...

Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia has partnered with several democratic lawmakers to launch Bros for Repro.’ The group includes male lawmakers running in tight races who are committed to “amplifying the voices of men who champion reproductive rights and bodily autonomy—not just as allies, but as active leaders in the movement.” Specifically, they want to see a surge in Democratic voters so that once they win, they can pass a constitutional amendment to entrench abortion rights in the state. One of these ‘bros’ is Del. Joshua Cole, who told MSN: “I would just ask that we speak up, we show...

Today, the Trump administration published a proposed rule to rescind the Biden-era Veterans Affairs policy that pushed illegal abortions at VA hospitals and clinics.