Meeting a Grieving Brother of a Loving Mother

Sunday morning. I am headed to Nashville to visit HerPlan, a relatively new pro-life organization that is running a potentially game-changing pilot program.

I’m weary, on just about every level. I would have switched to a later flight if United wasn’t going to charge me almost $500 (at best) to do so.

And it’s, like, against my religion to be traveling on Sunday.

Fine. I’ll go.

I hit the Uber app. The first car assigned is ridiculously far away. I cancel, for his sake as much as mine, and give it a Hail Mary or two. I get connected with Will.

Will helps me with my small (for once) suitcase and is wearing a “life is good” sweatshirt. A good reminder to be grateful to even have the opportunity to meet good people, and in different states, doing lifesaving and life-changing work.

Heading to Newark airport, Will makes small talk. I explain what I’m doing, and he asks whether I remember the Georgia woman who was pregnant in a coma earlier this year. Of course I remember Adriana Smith and her baby, Chance.

Well, Will pulls the program from her funeral from a clip under the driver-side mirror. “She’s my sister.”

My Uber driver is Adriana Smith’s brother. Of all the people in the United States -- for us to meet this morning is somewhat unbelievable.

We had a beautiful, difficult conversation. He seems perplexed that Georgia would write a law that would make his sister hang onto life support to deliver a baby who may still not survive. He was delivered in June and is still hospitalized, on tubes.

His sister’s case should have never had anything to do with abortion debates. My understanding is that it came down to law on advance directives (she didn’t have one). But part of the wrong that was done his family was clear from afar, and he confirmed. The media heard about a pregnant woman in a coma. Local news reached out to his mother. And. That. Changed. Everything. He said police had to get involved to monitor the room because people were coming from out of the woodwork to be a part of the story. He said he didn’t even know who had what opinion, they just seemed as if they thought they were watching a movie that they could now be a part of.

He shared some intensely personal things, including photos. He loved his sister and says her older son is “whip-smart” like she was.

I used to be a news fiend. I used to wish people would pay more attention to what is going on in the world, especially politics and policy. Now that people tend to pay attention as if it’s all one never-ending reality TV show, I wish we would all get hobbies. Take on some works of mercy or charity. At the very least, realize that the people we’re reading about, watching from afar, are human beings and their suffering is not based on a real story from a Law and Order episode. It’s just real. I don’t think Adriana’s family has even begun to have their room to grieve. And the media (sorry, guilty) are still bothering his mother, as she takes on the role of mother to two boys, one who has never been home and will never know the woman who gave birth to him -- Adriana was taken off life support by the hospital shortly after the baby’s birth.

I didn’t have a profound message for Will. I don’t think words help all that much. But I did want to let him know how sorry I was that he and his family continue to suffer through this, and that I, a pro-lifer, didn’t think this should ever have been a national matter. It was a horrific tragedy and never should have been -- and isn’t -- a debate about abortion. He said his sister wasn’t political. She was loving. She was a servant -- a nurse. May she rest in peace. May her family find some peace. And may her memory be a blessing.

Please pray for baby Chance and for Adriana’s entire family. Especially her other son and her mother. I can’t even imagine their pain. And was I honored to enter into it a little through this encounter with her older brother.

There are no coincidences. Which is why I share this with you. There is humanity in every story we read about. Especially when there is intense suffering, may we always remember this.

How Many Children Can You Give Cancer to Around the World at Once?

It shouldn’t take horror stories to acknowledge that sperm donation is dangerous business, but here’s one for you, from that pro-life propaganda outlet known as the BBC:

A sperm donor who unknowingly harboured a genetic mutation that dramatically raises the risk of cancer has fathered at least 197 children across Europe, a major investigation has revealed.

Some children have already died and only a minority who inherit the mutation will escape cancer in their lifetimes.

The sperm was not sold to UK clinics, but the BBC can confirm a “very small” number of British families, who have been informed, used the donor’s sperm while having fertility treatment in Denmark.

Denmark’s European Sperm Bank, which sold the sperm, said families affected had their “deepest sympathy” and admitted the sperm was used to make too many babies in some countries.

The sperm came from an anonymous man who was paid to donate as a student, starting in 2005. His sperm was then used by women for around 17 years.

Even if there was not this cancerous horror show, no one should be the genetic father of maybe 200 children, maybe more. This is madness. And it shouldn’t take the poison of cancer for use to acknowledge this.

The report notes:

There is no law on how many times a donor’s sperm can be used worldwide. However, individual countries do set their own limits.

The European Sperm Bank accepted these limits had “unfortunately” been breached in some countries and it was “in dialogue with the authorities in Denmark and Belgium”.

In Belgium, a single sperm donor is only supposed to be used by six families. Instead 38 different women produced 53 children to the donor.

The UK limit is 10 families per donor.

Supposed pro-life politicians and organizations might consider why this kind of assisted reproduction is not a route that a pro-life, pro-family movement should ever consider. Again, it shouldn’t take a grave story like this to wake civilization up to the damage it’s doing to generations.

Surrogacy simply should not be. It is the commodification of life. It exploits women. It creates life that is destroyed. It confuses children -- and worse, as we see. And there are children without homes throughout the West, even before you get to places with especially abysmal conditions for children. We don’t need surrogacy (or IVF) for people to fulfill their dreams of raising children.

It Takes ChatGPT to Raise a Child?

Open AI CEO Sam Altman told Jimmy Fallon this week that he couldn’t be a father without Chat GPT giving him advice:

I cannot imagine . . . figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT. Clearly people did it for a long time with no problem.

They typically had the mother around. And the mother may even have had her mother visiting or just a phone call away, for expert, human advice based on experience.

Sam Altman is married to a man, and they hired a surrogate to obtain their son, who was born earlier this year. While not every mother feels like a natural, she has some biological and emotional assets lacking in two men who paid a surrogate to have a baby for them.

Around National Review

Wesley J. Smith: Purchasers of Black-Market Human Organs Often Complicit in Murder

Kamden Mulder: Major Pro-Life Group Demands FDA Commissioner Be ‘Fired Immediately’ for Slow-Walking Abortion Pill Review

Me:

Jimmy Lai Must Be Freed

On the Brink of Suicide: New York and Illinois

Pope Leo on Human Life and Death

The Real Problem for Pro-Lifers

The White House Gets the Immaculate Conception Wrong

What the Hell Is Wrong with a Country That Makes a Widow Defend Herself for Living?

Pope Leo Reveals His Secret

The Man Who Charmed the Women on The View. Plus, Singing for the Poor in Rome

Delighting in Certain Violence: Guarding Our Souls in the 2025 USA

Upcoming

“The Beauty of Truth: Navigating Society Today as a Catholic Woman” is happening January 9 and 10 at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. Mary Eberstadt, Erika Bachiochi, and Leah Libresco Sargeant are among the excellent lineup. Details here.

Leigh Snead has a long-awaited, painfully and joyfully lived book, Infertile but Fruitful: Finding Fulfillment When You Can’t Conceive, coming out on January 20. In anticipation, Kate Milligan interviewed Leigh on her 1 Girl Revolution podcast, which you can listen to here.

Leigh explains a little about the book on Substack here.

The Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life at Georgetown (which I understand currently has a pretty healthy pro-life group on campus) is always a gem of March for Life weekend in Washington, D.C., every January.

Information on the March for Life itself on January 23 here.

And the Sisters of Life/Knights of Columbus just before it, here.

My friends at the Respect Life Office in the Archdiocese of New York are hosting a retreat for grieving mothers in March. It’s called Revival and the description explains:

Revival, A Grieving Mother’s Retreat is an overnight weekend retreat that will be hosted by Red Bird Ministries for mothers grieving the loss of a child through miscarriage and stillbirth, or as an infant. This retreat offers space for prayer, connection, emotional healing, and spiritual renewal alongside other mothers who understand this type of sorrow. For more information and to register, visit: www.bit.ly/nyrevivalretreat.

It will be about 40 minutes from the George Washington Bridge at a Catholic retreat center in Stony Point, N.Y.

And check out last week’s Lifeline for a notice about the GIVEN Forum for young Catholic women and more.

Other Things

The end of Roe v. Wade has not increased maternal mortality rates. The U.S. has alarmingly high rates, and had, while Roe was still law. All maternal deaths are not necessarily equal, however. Deaths long before delivery, including because of preexisting conditions that have nothing to do with pregnancy, are counted alongside what most of us are thinking of when we hear “maternal mortality.” Absolutely, women need the best health care. We also need to document deaths more accurately. Hat tip to the Charlotte Lozier Institute for paying attention and doing the research.

Hamas hid baby formula to make it look like Israel was trying to starve babies in Gaza. You don’t have to think Israel is perfect to know that Hamas is evil.

The photos of people -- some of the children, some of them babies, who were murdered during the Holocaust, most of them because they were Jewish -- should never be looked at casually. Look always with prayers for repentance and reparation. Always with a prayer that man will never be capable of such evil again. But of course, we are. Pray that God keeps us from the being overcome by the Devil again. The Auschwitz memorial does a good job reminding us on social media daily.

When I was in high school, I naïvely joined Amnesty International, thinking they supported human rights. I’d write letters to get tyrannical governments to free journalists; I was on board for freedom. Of course, soon I realized that they were not concerned about the right to life, the voice of the voiceless unborn child -- whose mother is all too often coerced into abortion. And evidently it also takes some time for Amnesty International to think about human rights if you are Jewish. Just this week, it has issued a report saying that Hamas is guilty of crimes against humanity on October 7, 2023. Some of us knew that on that day. We didn’t need a report from an organization too captured by ideology to see human rights violations clearly and honestly.

Mayra Rodriguez was a Planned Parenthood center director, working at the abortion business for 17 years. In a new video, she explains that she came to a point where

you understand that what you have been selling has never been freedom, not for the mother and not for the child. What you have been selling, it’s pain and darkness, and it’s bloody. And it’s all about money, in realizing that for 17 years, I helped no one. I helped no one, but I destroyed many.

During the course of the testimony, she calls the abortion pills “back-alley abortions.” She says some of the worst calls she had to field were women who were terrified they were dying as the bleeding wouldn’t stop as they were aborting their babies at home.

You can watch here.

Rodriguez is plaintiff in a case against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, arguing that the state abortion laws violate the 14th Amendment.

National Review alumna Katie Yoder writes about ministries that help parents choose life for their unborn babies when faced with adverse diagnoses. In choosing life, they often must resist the pressure of doctors to abort their babies.

Okay. Enough for now. More next week.

If you know anyone who might appreciate this newsletter, sign them up or encourage them to sign up here. It’s a way to keep up with some news in these confusing, frustrating times. And, I hope, a source of occasional encouragement to, and ideas to be part of the solution of love for life.

And be in touch with ideas and feedback and asks at klopez@nationalreview.com.