Pro-lifers grieved last week when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a law stripping unborn babies in the state of all legal rights and erasing previous protections for mothers. New York wasn’t the first state to legalize abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, and it likely won’t be the last.

The state previously protected babies from abortion after 24 weeks of gestation. The new law allows an abortion at any time during a pregnancy if it “is necessary to protect the patient’s life or health.” (The word “patient” refers to the mother.)

The European Court of Human Rights agreed last week to hear from Tom Mortier, a Belgian man who says doctors misused the country’s euthanasia law when they killed his mother in 2012.

The Ohio state Senate last week came one vote short of overriding a veto by Ohio Gov. John Kasich on a bill that would have protected babies from abortion after a detectable heartbeat. Kasich, a Republican, said he vetoed the bill for the second time in two years because it would saddle the state with a costly court battle and would ultimately be declared unconstitutional.

Pro-lifers worked tirelessly in 2018 to save unborn babies from new and old threats. Drug-induced abortion threatens to eclipse surgical abortion as the country’s preferred method of ending pregnancies, and side-effects from the grisly process threaten moms, too. Much of the effort to protect the unborn happened at the state level, but the Supreme Court issued a groundbreaking ruling in favor of pregnancy care centers in June, and federal agencies said they would take a hard look at taxpayer-funded experiments using tissue from aborted babies.

Three Belgium doctors may have gone too far, even for the pro-euthanasia nation, when they approved the 2010 killing of a 38-year-old autistic woman. The doctors decided that Tine Nys’ mild form of autism, called Asperger’s syndrome, diagnosed two months earlier, qualified as “unbearable and untreatable suffering” under Belgium’s euthanasia law.

ARGENTINA: An earthquake near Buenos Aires Friday shook an already dicey G-20 summit, with U.S.

Pro-life activists worry that two recent assaults on peaceful demonstrators, combined with ongoing vandalism of pro-life displays, indicate a growing trend of pro-abortion violence.

Authorities charged Gabriela Skwarko, a 23-year old student at Ryerson University in Toronto, with assault after she attacked pro-life demonstrators at a rally in Toronto on Oct. 1.