Political consultant Ace Smith kept an amusing souvenir from his time working on Kamala Harris’ campaign for attorney general of California. A framed copy of a San Francisco Chronicle headline hung in his office: “Cooley beats Harris to win attorney general race.” The website clipping was amusing because it proved untrue.

When is a person a person? Who determines a child’s quality of life? What happens in an abortion procedure? 

Former NFL athlete and current father of seven Benjamin Watson started asking these questions of prominent thinkers last year. Filming for his documentary Divided Hearts of America began in 2019. Even with race issues and social justice taking center stage in 2020, Watson says abortion is the “core issue” at the center of all others. 

At the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast on Wednesday, President Donald Trump said he would sign an executive order to ensure all babies born alive “no matter their circumstances” receive proper medical care. In a prerecorded speech, the president told attendees that protecting babies “is our sacrosanct moral duty.”

Unborn children have never had a stronger defender in the White House,” said President Donald Trump to thousands of pro-lifers filling the National Mall at the annual March for Life in January. To many listening, it didn’t seem like a bold claim. Pro-life leaders and other politicians had been saying the same thing for months, pointing to the pro-life successes of his presidency. Even his speech at the march was historic: He was the first president to speak at the event in person.

The weekend that began at dusk on Friday, Sept. 18, brought us Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year's Day, and one more hard twist in a year, 2020, that already looks like three years—COVID-19 year, racial tensions year, and a knife’s-edge presidential election campaign—rolled into one. 

President Donald Trump began purging foreign assistance for abortions during his first week in office in 2016. He reinstated the Mexico City policy, which says recipients of about $600 million in international family planning funds cannot refer for or perform abortions. Then he expanded the rule to include all global health assistance by U.S. government departments and agencies, worth $9 billion in grants and cooperative agreements.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 87, died Friday of metastatic pancreatic cancer after 27 years on the U.S. Supreme Court and several bouts with cancer during her life. 

Only the second woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, she shaped her legacy as a lawyer, then judge, as an advocate of women’s rights—which in her mind included no restrictions on government-funded abortion. She described herself as a “flaming feminist.”