Her Term as President Was Aborted at 8 Months

 She didn't even make to full-term.

Washington D.C., Jul 16, 2019 / 03:52 pm (CNA).- Citing disagreements with board leaders over whether Planned Parenthood should focus on health care or abortion advocacy, the organization’s president is stepping down.
Dr. Leana Wen took the reins at Planned Parenthood eight months ago. On Tuesday, she announced that she was resigning.
Wen’s statements about her departure suggested internal turbulence within the organization.
She initially posted on Twitter, “I just learned that the @PPFA Board ended my employment at a secret meeting. We were engaged in good faith negotiations about my departure based on philosophical differences over the direction and future of Planned Parenthood.”
A few minutes later, she posted an official statement.

“As a physician and public health leader, I came to Planned Parenthood to lead a national health care organization that provides essential primary and preventative care to millions of underserved women and families, and to advocate for a broad range of policies that affect our patients’ health,” she said.

“I believe that the best way to protect abortion care is to be clear that it is not a political issue but a health care one, and that we can expand support for reproductive rights by finding common ground with the large majority of Americans who understand reproductive health care as the fundamental health care that it is.”
Wen said that she is stepping down due to philosophical differences with the new board chairs over the direction that the organization should be moving.

From National Review:


Perhaps the most revealing detail from Buzzfeed’s report? Two sources said Wen angered staffers by refusing to use “trans-inclusive” language, “for example saying ‘people’ instead of ‘women’ and telling staff that she believed talking about transgender issues would ‘isolate people in the Midwest.’”

This anecdote might well be the key to understanding what happened to Wen and where Planned Parenthood’s leaders intend to go from here. Surely she wasn’t fired for her recalcitrance on preferred pronouns. But with a national spotlight on the abortion debate, Planned Parenthood’s leaders are ready to take off the kid gloves.

 

Wen’s firing suggests that, instead of claiming to be just a normal health-care organization, Planned Parenthood intends to capitalize on its status as an influential left-wing interest group. To do that, it must become a purveyor of the entire progressive agenda, to the point of embracing the “intersectional” language promoted by transgender activists. So the mild-mannered Wen had to go.
 

The Case For Being Born

 Read the whole thing...

It's from National Review and written by Kevin Williamson.

From radical feminists to radical environmentalists, the word has come down: Children are not the future, but the future’s enemies.
Why are pro-abortion activists such as Brian Sims so angry? Because they abhor the alternative.
Sims, a Democratic member of the Pennsylvania state legislature, filmed himself berating an old woman and a few children who were praying outside of an abortion clinic in Philadelphia — a city that, as the home town of that ghastly butcher Kermit Gosnell, knows something about the horror of abortion. Sims even went so far as to share photos of the children on social media with requests that his followers help him “dox” them, meaning to track down private information about them for the purpose of harassment.

Children, these were.
And that is what this is really all about.
The Left’s war on children is by no means restricted to the project of maximizing the scope of opportunity to surgically dismember them prior to birth, preferably at public expense. From radical feminists to radical environmentalists to academics and such mainstream figures such as Bill Nye, the word has come down: Children are not the future, but the future’s enemies.

I blogged about Sims here:

http://stjoespsr.blogspot.com/2019/05/brian-sims-is-small-mani-mean-racist.html

BOOM!

Michael Brendan Dougherty at National Review is not happy about Pope Francis. Read the whole thing.

Here's a sample:

There is a type of churchman that Francis seems to favor: the morally compromised and the doctrinally suspect. The archbishop of Bruges, Jozef De Kesel, was known to promote the ordination of women and the making voluntary of priestly celibacy, and was credibly accused of knowingly appointing a pastor who had molested a child. Francis made him a cardinal. There was the archbishop of Stockholm, Anders Arborelius, who ignored calls to investigate a pedophile priest for years. The victim was told to go see a therapist instead. Arborelius is sympathetic to the idea of creating a female version of the College of Cardinals. Francis made him a cardinal, and Arborelius speculated that his elevation was a way for the pope to honor Sweden’s commitment to refugees. There’s also Giovanni Becciu, who was working for the pope’s secretary of state. When the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers began uncovering financial fraud in the Church, Becciu suspended its audit. The auditor general from PwC later said he was forced out on trumped-up accusations; Becciu accused that accountant of being a spy. Francis then made Becciu a cardinal. Another cleric, Archbishop Luis Ladaria Ferrer, is set to stand trial in France for his role in covering up a child-sex-abuse scandal in Lyon. Francis made him the head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, which adjudicates abuse cases.

 His conclusion:

What Francis is slowly instituting is a religion of presumption. A religion of “good enough,” where our misguided efforts put God in our debt. Communion becomes a participation trophy. And by freeing the Church from its preoccupation with outdated sins such as adultery, Francis can refocus the Church on the things he likes to denounce, such as the building of border walls, or air conditioning.

And no wonder, then, that the Vatican itself is filled with moral mediocrities, with men who are sexually and financially compromised. No wonder the Vatican investigates and inveighs against whistleblowers immediately but waits decades to investigate predator bishops. Believing in sin is now worse than sin itself. No wonder this church has a pope who refuses to wear red shoes. They symbolize martyrdom. That’s for heroic Christians, not for men like Pope Francis.

Gloom, Despair and Agony on Me

Modern American society drives people to become Christians, and then the Catholic Church drives them away.

From an articvle in Natiuonal Review, by Michael Brendan Dougherty

There is an undeniable psychological tension between my religious belief that I cannot have hope for salvation outside the visible, institutional Church and my honest conviction that of all the institutions and societies that intersect with my life, the Church is by far the most corrupt, the most morally lax, the most disillusioning, and the most dangerous for my children. In that tension, personal prayer will dry up like dew at noon.

Movie Review

From a review of a new movie, "Novitiate" on the National Review site::

 

 

What caused the ranks of these women (nuns and sisters)of deep devotion so rapidly to diminish after that 1965 peak? American life certainly started changing rapidly in the 1960s, but factors such as the sexual revolution, the explosion in drug use, and the Vietnam War didn’t apply so much to the Catholic sisters. What did apply to them — what tore the foundations out from under them — was the 1962–1965 work of the Second Vatican Council, known as Vatican II, which ordered several steps meant to moderate and modernize Church practices. Henceforth, Mass would be celebrated in English or any other contemporary language rather than Latin, by a priest facing the congregants instead of standing with his back to them. And nuns learned that they could no longer consider themselves closer to God than anyone else. Their lifelong devotion to sacrifice seemed to be rendered moot.

The Trouble With Jesuits, Part 56

Even as Pope Francis seems to want to discard a core truth of the faith, there’s nowhere else to turn. I think Ross Douthat is clearly right. Pope Francis wants to let divorced and remarried Catholics take communion even if their first marriages were valid. Francis is taking a rather well-worn, and perhaps I could say Jesuitical, path for Catholics, in somehow wanting to keep the doctrine and abandon the discipline of indissolubility by suggesting to bishops and priests that they can privately readmit divorced-and-remarried Catholics to communion after a suitable amount of “accompaniment.”