The Family Beacon

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem has proposed draft legislation for a bill to protect fairness and opportunity in women’s and girls’ sports. If passed, the bill would prohibit biological males from competing on women’s and girls’ sports teams. Noem has indicated that she would like to get the bill through the legislature within the first two weeks of the 2022 session, which begins on January 11.

Supporters were disappointed earlier this year when Governor Noem vetoed the a similar Women’s Sports bill passed by the legislature, just weeks after she had expressed her eagerness to sign it. Along with other pro-family organizations, Minnesota Family Council sent a letter urging Governor Noem to withdraw her veto. At the time, Noem cited concerns about potential litigation, although many questioned if this was really her reason. South Dakota currently has an executive order intended to protect girls sports, but the South Dakota High School Activities Association allows male students to participate in girls’ sports on the basis of “gender identity.” An executive order applying to colleges and universities recommends banning biological males from women’s sports teams but provides no enforcement.

This draft legislation is a hopeful sign. Women and girls in South Dakota need better protection of their athletic opportunities than current executive orders provide. This bill offers much stronger protection than those orders and would preserve fairness and opportunity for women and girls in sports. Representative Rhonda Milstead and Senator Maggie Sutton, the sponsors of last session’s bill said in a press release,

We are pleased that the Governor confirms that collegiate athletes need to be protected as well as k-12. It is also encouraging that the Senate President Pro Temp understands the danger it is to female athletes success when any biological male participates in girls competitive sports. Getting a bill across the finish line is critical to the future of women’s sports.

For many years people have insisted that the online world is not the “real world.” There are elements of truth to this —a screen avatar can never capture the fullness of who someone is and the filtered versions of ourselves that we present on the internet can often hide what is actually happening in our lives — but in the nearly two years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have found ourselves, at some point or another, living significant portions of our lives online. As we grapple with this brave new world it is important that we recognize how the shifting digital landscape affects children and teens and the ways that it can harm them.

A recent report from Thorn found that 14% of 9 to 12-year-olds had shared explicit images of themselves in 2020 and 21% said it was normal for kids their age to do so. Nearly one in five teens had shared sexually explicit images of themselves. Thorn’s report also found a rise in children using secondary accounts to avoid online supervision. In 2020, 25% of 9-12-year-olds surveyed said that they were using at least one secondary account and 73% said they would prefer not to say. This lack of supervision leaves kids vulnerable to online predators and exposure to explicit content. Of the minors who reported that they had shared sexually explicit images of themselves, half said that they had shared those images with someone they had never met in real life, and over 40% reported having shared the images with someone over the age of 18.

For years, the abortion industry has denied, downplayed, and deflected on any link between abortion and depression. Abortion proponents have insisted that post-abortion syndrome is a “makey-uppy thing” and denied the reality of abortion regret. In doing so, they have consistently trivialized the real experiences of women who have been harmed by the abortion industry and have suffered through abortion regret when faced with the realization that their abortion ended their child’s life. Now, a pro-abortion researcher has come forward and said that the medical community resisted publishing his research pointing to a link between abortion and depression. Dr. David Fergusson’s 30-year longitudinal study was published in 2006. He recently told the New Zealand Herald that his study, which is frequently downplayed by the abortion industry, was rejected by three different medical journals, something that he said is very unusual, noting that his research team’s work is typically accepted the first time they submit it for publication. Although Fergusson himself is not pro-life, this study, which presents strong evidence against an abortion industry talking point, was stifled.

Fergusson’s study found that 42% of women who had undergone an abortion in the past four years struggled with depression — over twice the rate of women who had not undergone an abortion. In addition to the difficulty he faced in getting his results published, Ferusson has faced pushback in the years since publication. "Because it's not 'completely conclusive', then they say we know nothing,” Fergusson told the New Zealand Herald,

But no science is completely conclusive - it's cumulative. Our study is strongly suggestive of a link between abortion and developing mental illness. What people should be saying is, 'This is interesting ... we need to invest more to answer this important question'.

President Biden recently took to Twitter to complain that women are “locked out of the workforce because they have to care for a child or an elderly relative at home” and tout his “Build Back Better” plan so that women can “get back to work.” This sentiment is deeply anti-family and belittles women who choose to stay at home as mothers and caregivers.

Half the women in America with children under the age of 18 prefer to stay home. Not only that, but 60% of Americans say that having a parent, particularly a mother, stay at home is best for children. The research backs this up — stay-at-home parenting is good for children. Kids with a stay-at-home parent are less likely to struggle academically, have lower stress levels, and fewer behavior issues. Rather than acknowledge any of this, President Biden bemoans the fact that these women are at home instead of in the workforce. This attitude devalues motherhood and caregiving, and is completely dismissive toward children and older adults.

What if our priority was not ensuring that as many parents as possible are away from their children for at least half of their waking hours, and if we instead focused on supporting families? Devaluing families and belittling those who stay at home as caregivers is not “building back better.” It is profoundly disrespectful and shows a complete disregard for young and old alike.

Earlier this week voters here in Minnesota and across the U.S. headed to the polls to vote in local elections. The results were encouraging and showed voters rejecting radical ideology and embracing pro-family candidates, instead! Leading up to the election, it became clear that many of these races, including Virginia’s gubernatorial race, were a referendum on radical education policies that have been gaining momentum around the country. The results are in and voters have made it clear — parents matter!

During his campaign, former Governor Terry McAuliffe insisted, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach.” Virginian voters made it clear that they believe parents’ voices are important when they elected pro-life and pro-family candidate Glenn Youngkin instead. Joseph Backholm of Family Research Council commented,

Parents are an interest group now. It’s hard to overstate how good this news is. Candidates will now have to be prepared to answer questions about who should be in charge of curriculum, parents or bureaucrats…Ten years from now education could look very different than it does today. If that happens, we’ll look back to tonight as the moment it all started and we’ll all be better for it.

In response the Dobbs v. Jackson, the upcoming Supreme Court case challenging Roe v. Wade, Dr. Jon Shields of Claremont McKenna is arguing that the case should serve as a catalyst for the pro-life movement to compromise with the abortion movement. Pointing to research that shows a large number of abortionists dislike and even refuse to practice late second-trimester and third trimester abortions when an unborn child “becomes more recognizably human,” along with the fact that most Americans support restrictions on later abortions, Shields argues that pro-lifers and abortion proponents should reach a compromise. “Since pro-choice and pro-life philosophers respect the reasonableness of their intellectual foes, perhaps they, too, have rational grounds to accept a liberal compromise on abortion,” he concludes.

What Shields fails to grasp is that there is no room for a “compromise” in which pro-lifers are expected to be fine with baby-killing. This is not a question of “reasonableness.” Abortion, at any stage, is radical by its very nature because abortion takes an innocent human life—there is nothing “reasonable” about advocating for or accepting this practice.

The compromise that Shields proposes could be described as the Abortion Doctor Compromise — as Shields relates, most abortion doctors positively refuse to perform late-term abortions because they personally find them horrific, but will end the lives of 12-week-old babies all day every day. So in Shields’s compromise, the slightly less radical wing of the abortion lobby will accept restrictions on the forms of abortion that they already find too horrific to practice and defend while asking that pro-lifers accept these restrictions and absolutely nothing more. Those advocating for this so-called “compromise” would not change their position at all, they would simply demand that pro-lifers accept their terms. Doesn’t sound like much of a compromise.

Ahead of last weekend’s Women’s March in Washington, D.C., marchers were offered a reminder of what to bring and what not to bring. On the “to bring” list was “Your feminist spirit, bring your defiance to injustice bring your demands for abortion justice.” The “don’t bring” list included weapons and illegal substances, as well as a note reminding abortion activists not to use “coat-hanger imagery” saying, “We do not want to accidentally reinforce the right wing talking points that self-managed abortions are dangerous, scary and harmful.”

Abortion is never safe. Over the years, whether or not the abortion industry is willing to acknowledge the danger of abortion has depended entirely on what is most convenient for them at any given time. Only a few years ago, abortion activists used coat-hangers as a symbol of their claim that the abortion movement used coat-hangers as part of a narrative claiming that banning abortion will lead to a dangerous, dystopian future full of “back alley” abortions and to insist that banning abortion will not end abortion, it will only make it less safe, even though the evidence shows that abortion bans really do save lives by decreasing abortion rates.