Just Look -- And Guess What You See!

1. Well, well, even Sen. Barbara Boxer will admit, in an unguarded moment, that an unborn child is, in fact, a child. Kind of reminds me of Cardinal Egan's column "Just Look". Maybe Sen. Boxer read it and took it to heart?

2. Have pro-lifers "fallen into the FOCA trap" by centering all activity on that bill and not on the incremental threats like the move to revoke the Hyde Amendment, threats to conscience rights, etc.? I added my $.02 in the combox.

3. Katheryn Jean Lopez at National Review Online lays out the very scary lineup of anti-life people who have been appointed to serve at the Justice Department.

4. Beware this inaccurate, misleading, and very unhelpful story about FOCA from the Catholic News Service. The reality is that FOCA is a very serious threat to conscience rights; if you want to see the argument on this point laid out concisely, check out my post from yesterday on my official Archny Blog. If this story appears in your diocesan paper, please write a strong letter of protest, and you have my permission to plagiarize my blog.

5. Dawn Eden has an iteresting reflection on the difference between "chastity" and "virginity", in response to a professor who was restating the evangelical counsels as "poverty, virginity, and obedience".

6. The invaluable Fr. Thomas Berg interviews a stem cell scientist who analyzes the stem cell policy of the new Administration, and where the research is at this moment.

7. You probably read recently of the octuplets born in Los Angeles recently. Here's an encouraging story about how the mother rejected "selective reduction". In honesty, though, there are some very troubling things about this situation -- the mother does not appear to be married, she already has six other children under the age of 8, and she had all eight embryos implanted after in vitro fertilization. And we wonder why we need documents from the Vatican like Dignitatis Personae.