Tag: Birth

The Democratic governor directed the One World Trade Center and other landmarks to be lit in pink Tuesday to celebrate the passage of "Reproductive Health Act." "I shudder to think of the consequences this law will wreak. You have already uttered harsh threats about the welcome you think pro-lifers are not entitled to in our state. Now you are demonstrating that you mean to write your warning into law. Will being pro-life one day be a hate crime in the State of New York?" (flickr/governorandrewcuomo) New York was the first state to legalize abortion in 1970. Cuomo directed the 408-foot spire on the One World Trade Center, the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, the Kosciuszko Bridge, and the Alfred E. Smith Building in Albany to be lit pink to “celebrate this achievement and shine a bright light forward for the rest of the nation to follow.” Under the Reproductive Health Act, non-doctors are now allowed to conduct abortions and the procedure could be done until the mother's due date if the woman's health is endangered or if the fetus is not viable. The previous law only allowed abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy if a woman's life was at risk. "Our governor and legislative leaders hail this new abortion law as progress. This is not progress," the bishops wrote.

Fifty years ago, on the day before St. Patrick’s Day, Robert F. Kennedy announced that he was running for the presidency of the United States. “I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man, but to propose new policies,” said Kennedy, who four years earlier had been elected U.S. senator from New York. For a brief period it seemed Bobby was the only one who could bring a deeply divided America together. Assassinations, riots, war, protests. In American Pastoral, his beautiful, chaotic novel about how these events tore apart the seemingly perfect marriage of an Irish American beauty queen and a Jewish American striver, Philip Roth refers to 1968 as the high-water mark of “the indigenous America berserk.” And Irish Americans -- from Bobby Kennedy to blue collar workers - -were central players. On the national stage, two Irish Americans -- Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy -- began the year as political outsiders, challenging the Vietnam War policy of President Lyndon Johnson, who would eventually shock the world by not even running for re-election. But out in the working class ethnic neighborhoods of New York and Boston and Chicago an anger was bubbling. Consider a small moment from Chris Mathews' recent book Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit. Kennedy was campaigning in Manhattan. Just five months after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, it was Richard Nixon who skillfully figured out how to tap into this anger, and move into the White House.