We’re less than a dozen days away from the midterm elections. With such widespread early voting, I find this time of year very strange. It’s hard to have a sense of how much impact the final messages have.

That’s surely something everyone seems to wonder in Ohio, as the Republican candidate there made a monumental moral blunder with his attack ad using his opponent’s mother. The vice president is disgusted with those of us who find this Vivek Ramaswamy approach reprehensible, a line crossed that anyone of goodwill and common decency should recognize.

Since I commented on the ad this week on multiple occasions in print and radio, I’ve been told all kinds of excuses why the ends justify the means here — that she’s run mean ads, too, and is pro-abortion, anyway, so it’s okay, and that doesn’t include the other personal attacks.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad was not merely mean, though; it was unconscionably cruel. It needs to be universally understood that using childhood sexual abuse as a political weapon is beyond the pale.

There was a police report by Amy Acton’s biological father. The mother’s husband was arrested and charged with raping her — a child — and she and her brother were removed from their mother’s custody when Acton was 12.

This should not be attack-ad fodder.

People tell me she mentioned it first over the course of the campaign — I have no knowledge of her intentions, but it is common that once one talks about such things, there is sufficient feedback that the disclosure helped others, and so there’s a sense of responsibility about talking about it. Ramaswamy has attacked this, too, saying his opponent spends her time “complain[ing] about what someone else did to her.” And, for the record, I don’t think candidates’ having sought mental-health treatment for addiction or anything else should be used against them either.

Childhood sexual abuse. Really, people. How about a little decency?

Hopeful Terms for Life

On Tuesday I officially finished seven years as the chair of the Archdiocesan Pro-Life Commission in New York, established by then-Archbishop Timothy Dolan in 2011. It includes doctors, lawyers, professors, leaders of pro-life ministries; I’ve been on it since the beginning. The commission is meant to be an advisory resource for the archbishop. While I consider the contents of the meetings largely off the record, as they are in service of the archbishop, I will share a few general things: I have always been heartened that it has been consistently on the schedule, that Cardinal Dolan always made time for it, listened, brought things before it, and, frankly, put up with it. He didn’t have to. It was his idea to start it in the first place, to be “an examination of conscience for the archdiocese,” he would often remind us.

It was a joy to meet with Archbishop Ronald Hicks on Tuesday. It was his first Pro-Life Commission meeting, and he was eager to get started, listen, and act on what comes from our deliberations.

Hicks was just back from his father’s funeral Mass (his mother and father were married for 61 years, and she is still living); it is fair to say that Hicks is a phlegmatic personality, but I couldn’t help but see a renewed urgency for the charism of life, being so intimately touched by how finite it is. At morning Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, his homily was about this:

Life goes by very quickly. Life goes by in a blink of an eye, and we do not know the day that God is [going to] call us home, and we do not know the day that Jesus Himself, Christ, is going to return in His Second Coming in glory. And because we do not know that and because life moves so quickly, Jesus in the Gospel today invites us to be prepared. To be prepared always. . . . He’s asking us to keep God in the center of our lives. We’re prepared when God is in our center. In our thoughts. In our words. In our actions. And in our attitudes. God is also in the center when we keep Him in our relationship strong with prayer.

At our meeting, he emphasized both the teaching of the church on life, as at the center of the mission of the Church — which is, the salvation of souls through our Lord Jesus Christ — and that God is all-loving, compassionate, merciful.

Again, I just give you impressions. For various reasons, I left the meeting encouraged, and I look forward to serving a newly established term on the commission, the continued existence of which is meant to make a point about the inviolability of human life as a priority.

Who Doesn’t Care About Children After They Are Born?

There’s this accusation that pro-lifers don’t care about babies after they get past the in-danger-of-abortion phase. While one of my hobbyhorses is challenging us to forever be working on more accompaniment and resources for mothers and fathers and children, the “lazy slander,” as it’s been called, against pro-lifers is a lie, as anyone aware of the vast network of pro-life services around the country knows. More is always needed. But it’s a lie to pretend that helping women and children — and men when they are in the picture — isn’t at the heart of the pro-life movement.

To turn the tables: Perhaps the real reason the Democratic Party is so insistent on expansive abortion is because they have no intention of helping kids after they are born. I, of course, don’t mean that. But you’d be forgiven for the temptation to think it if you’re up on the situation for children in danger who need the state to keep an eye out.

Naomi Schaefer Riley does yeomen’s work chronicling child-protection failures across the country. She just wrote this, published by the New York Post:

What did the Administration for Children’s Services know about Francis Cabello, the mentally ill mother who murdered her 5-year-old daughter last week?
Because Gov. Hochul refuses to hold ACS accountable, the public may never find out why no one rescued little Fabiana, despite clear signs her mother was unstable.
On Wednesday afternoon, Francis took Fabiana upstairs in their Queens home and asphyxiated her. The 32-year-old then called 911 and told the dispatcher, “I killed my daughter.” Since Cabello’s arrest on murder charges, information has trickled out suggesting that this was yet another preventable tragedy.
Cabello’s history of mental illness seems to be long and widely known. In addition to her months’ long stay in a psychiatric facility earlier this year, a neighbor whose grandchildren played with Fabiana said she noticed a significant change in the mother’s behavior.

Lives Cut Short is a joint project with UNC Chapel Hill and the American Enterprise Institute that documents child maltreatment fatalities. So far it has included more than 5,000 records between 2022 and 2026 from around the U.S. “These represent only a fraction of the victims in that time period. But 830 of the cases involved a parent’s mental illness. In New York, there were 151,” Naomi writes in the Post op-ed. Lives Cut Short is a maddeningly critical resource. May the need for it be short.

We must insist on it.

We’re definitely not there. This appeared in the N.Y. Daily News on Tuesday:

The parents of a 3-year-old Bronx girl are facing murder charges after they were accused of starving their daughter to death, while her twin brother, who was also allegedly underfed, was hospitalized for a month as he was nursed back to health, Bronx prosecutors said Tuesday. . . .
Father Calvin Harris, 37, and the twins’ mother, Ymonzherae Gill, 35, were indicted on second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter charges in the girl’s death. They were also hit with assault charges for the neglect of their son, prosecutors said.

Lord have mercy. These things must be stopped.

Protecting children is a large part of why adults exist.

Other Things

After his October 13 surgery, Pope Leo is now in the clear on cancer. He resumed his usual Wednesday audience, reiterating some of what the Second Vatican Council had to say about love and marriage in the document Gaudium et Spes, focusing on a man and a woman’s mutual self-giving as one flesh (Matthew 19:6). Marital love, he said, is a reflection of the Divine Trinity, so that spouses may love one another “just as He loved the Church and handed Himself over on her behalf.”

Chaney Gooley on Public Discourse: Forgetting Women’s Bodies in Pro-Life Messaging:

A woman’s body is, in its very physicality, made to sustain another human. Instead of trying to convince women that the baby in their bodies is distinct from their own bodies, we can convince them of the unspeakable beauty and power in nurturing and sustaining another life.
To separate mother and baby, even in our talking points, is to do what abortion does. We should advance a vision of maternal fetal interdependence and how what is good for one is good for the other. Artificially and intentionally interrupting the pregnancy isn’t just about the fact that abortion ends the life of the body inside her; it goes against her own body’s purpose and ability, and in a way that attacks womanhood itself. Abortion isn’t to protect women’s bodies—it goes against them. In this way, elective abortion is a form of self-harm.

Katelyn Walls Shelton on this week’s Melania Trump focus on women’s health: What ‘Women’s Health’ Should Have Meant All Along

Feminists for Life has changed its name to Women Deserve Better, which I think is a wonderful approach. The new name bypasses intra-pro-life debates over the appropriateness of redeeming the f-word (feminist) and immediately begins a conversation. Women deserve better than what? Well, abortion. Women deserve better than just about everything that some claiming to speak for us say, often treating what makes us unique as liabilities, burdens, preexisting conditions.

Just before the announcement (which I knew was in the works), I interviewed the new executive director, Kara Sorenson-Smith, here — which will give you a good introduction to the group if you haven’t previously made their acquaintance. I think they are a frequently a breath of fresh air that approaches women who are unaffiliated in the abortion debate with a somewhat chic-feeling way in.

There was a gender reveal on Dancing with the Stars this week. After dedicating a dance to his mother and all mothers, Tyler Cameron (formerly of the Amazon Prime home renovation show Going Home with Tyler Cameron and The Bachelorette) made the announcement, exclaiming: “I get to be a girl dad. What a gift, what an opportunity.”

“It’s going to change everything in our lives,” Cameron told People. “Our parents gave us a great life, and I want us to give this little baby an even greater life. Everything that we learn from our families [I want to] take the best of it and instill it into our kids.”

He added: “I’m excited. Being a parent is the most important job in the world.”

A video of the reveal here.

Around National Review

• The Editors: Life Is on the Ballot This November

• Wesley J. Smith: Medical Journal Promotes Ideological Redefinition of ‘Infertility’

• Maria Servold: What It Means to Lose a Pregnancy

Me:

• ‘Hitting Pay Dirt’ vs. ‘Remember You Are Dust’

• Go Ahead and Hug Your Grandchild

• When Character Was Obliterated

• The Disgusting Pro-Vivek Ad in Ohio Today

• Pregnant Ten-Year-Old Girls Cannot Be a Political Talking Point

• Office of Refugee Resettlement Pushes Back on Reports of Children Facing Court Without Lawyers

Upcoming

• November 2 is the deadline for applications to join the Leonine Forum network for Catholic professionals in Dallas, Denver, and Los Angeles. I was on the ground at its conception. It is at the heart of the church, and I recommend it. Details here.

• November 8 is Mother Cabrini Sunday, as established by Springs of Love. Inspired by St. Frances Xavier Cabrini’s legacy of welcoming vulnerable children with love, faith, and dignity, Mother Cabrini Sunday invites Catholics to pray for children and families touched by foster care and adoption, raise awareness of the need, and consider how each of us can help.

• November 9: The O’Connell House Freedom Gala 2026. My friend Deb O’Hara Rusckowski founded the O’Connell House, a home for sex-trafficking victims in Massachusetts. This is their annual fundraiser, which features survivor Audra Doody, co-executive director of the Safe Exit Initiative. RSVP by October 30. (Deb talked with me a while back about the O’Connell House work here.)

• November 18: Deadline to apply for the Marianne Linane Legacy Scholarship. The National Association of Pro-Life Nurses is awarding a $1,000 scholarship to a pro-life student enrolled in a nursing school. It is open to “any student currently enrolled in an accredited school of nursing in the United States in the Fall, Winter, or Spring of the Aug/Sept 2026–May/June 2027 school year, with full-time or part-time status; LPN, RN, BSN, MSN or DNP.”

• November 20: Divine Mercy Care’s 32nd Anniversary Gala, “Welcoming the New Generation of Life-Affirming Care,” Manassas, Va.

• November 20 is the deadline to apply for Live Action’s North Star Fellowship. Formation for professionals in ministry, law, policy, journalism, business, and nonprofit work. Virtual seminars and a five-day summit in Orange County, Calif.

• December 12: End of Life Symposium: Approaching the Threshold of Eternity, Archdiocese of New York Respect Life Office, Yonkers, N.Y. Talks by the Sisters of Life, the Dominican Healthcare Ministry, Dr. Robert Brescia of Calvary Hospital, and other experts in palliative care. This one gets an extra enthusiastic K-Lo endorsement. For more information and resources, see here.

• January 23, 2027: The 28th Annual Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life is, as usual, at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. My late friend Andrew Walther helped found the Cardinal O’Connor conference — along with then-Georgetown student Stephen Feiler (who is in the national leaderships of the Knights of Columbus). It will be the sixth anniversary of Andrew’s untimely death to leukemia on All Saints Day (November 1). He was a happy warrior for life, and we can still learn a lot from the way he lived his life, however too soon it ended.

• January 23: Walk for Life West Coast in San Francisco.

• January 23: The Students for Life National Pro-Life Summit is at the Omni-Shoreham in Washington, D.C.

There’s so much more to say for life, as usual. Thanks for being here. Don’t be a stranger. I’m an open door here for feedback, topics, speaking invitations, and anything else you can come up with. The email address is klopez@nationalreview.com. Know that you are in my prayers before whatever tabernacles I stumble in front of this coming week.