Welcome to G3 Weekly—a summary of this week’s top news stories on Christianity and the public square.
This week, the Pentagon announced that service members can receive funds to travel across state lines for abortions. New data may show that government lockdowns caused a small bump in fertility as more women started families. Meanwhile, eleven pro-life activists were charged by the Biden administration and could face lengthy prison sentences.
United States Military Will Fund Abortion Tourism
“You shall not murder” (Exodus 20:13).
The Department of Defense announced that service members are now eligible for travel and transportation allowances to obtain abortions across state lines.
The Biden administration has been exploring various mechanisms to promote abortion among residents of conservative states, many of which recently passed more regulations on child sacrifice, since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced a variety of initiatives to ensure that service members and their families “can access reproductive health care and health care providers can operate effectively,” according to a statement.
The Pentagon will “establish travel and transportation allowances” for service members and their dependents “to facilitate official travel to access non-covered reproductive health care that is unavailable” near the service member’s permanent duty station.
Beyond the federal government, Planned Parenthood has begun sending mobile abortion facilities to southern Illinois so that mothers traveling from nearby conservative states can more conveniently murder their children.
Government Lockdowns Cause Small Baby Bump
“Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward” (Psalm 127:3).
Government lockdowns inadvertently caused a small baby bump as young women opted to start families and some abortion centers temporarily closed their doors.
Forecasts initially projected a baby bust of as many 500,000 children due to disruption from the lockdowns. American-born mothers, however, saw a net increase in births of roughly 46,000 children by the end of 2021, according to a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The phenomenon was driven by women having their first babies, women under the age of twenty-five, and older women with college degrees who benefited from newfound virtual work arrangements.
The number of births in the United States had been consistently falling for the past few decades. The lockdown baby bump was the first birth rate increase in seven years, reversing the 4% drop between 2019 and 2020, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
Biden Throws the Book at More Pro-Life Activists
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20).
The Department of Justice arrested eleven more nonviolent pro-life activists for alleged violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act.
Several individuals, ranging from twenty-four years old to eighty-seven years old, had coordinated on social media to blockade an abortion facility in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, allegedly using “force and physical obstruction to injure, intimidate, and interfere with employees of the clinic and a patient who was seeking reproductive health services,” according to a statement from the Department of Justice.
Some face up to eleven years in prison and fines of up to $250,000, while others face up to one year in prison and fines of up to $10,000.
In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, the Biden administration has opened cases against a number of pro-life activists, even as officials refrain from investigating violent bombings and vandalism against crisis pregnancy centers. In another example, Mark Houck, a Roman Catholic activist in Philadelphia, was arrested in front of his seven children by some twenty-five armed FBI agents.
