The Daily Signal - Nun Hails Legal Victory for Life and Privacy in Pro-Abortion State

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

After filing a lawsuit, a Catholic community of sisters in New York has won a victory for life and for privacy. In June 2022, New York passed a law allowing state officials to access pro-life pregnancy resource centers' sensitive information. The state Department of Health was granted permission to investigate pro-life pregnancy centers via demanding access to information about the centers’ policies. The law was immediately concerning to the Sisters of Life because “It's so important that they feel safe,” Sister Maris Stella says, referring to the women they serve. Stella, vicar general of the Sisters of Life, says the community of nuns is dedicated to serving women facing unplanned pregnancies, and part of that service often involves having “sacred conversations with them, and we come to know their history, their hopes, their fears, their dreams.” To protect the nuns' privacy and the privacy of the women they serve, the Sisters filed a lawsuit asking a federal court for an order to protect them from government investigation. In November, New York agreed to comply with the federal court order. Stella joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" with Mark Rienzi, president and CEO of Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which litigated the case on the sisters' behalf, to discuss the legal victory. Stella also offers her insights on the future of the pro-life movement. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, December 4th. I'm Virginia Allen. A convent in New York has just won a major legal battle for life. The Sisters of Life filed a lawsuit against the state of New York over a law that would have forced the sisters to release sensitive information about the pregnant women that they serve. Victor General of the Sisters of Life, Maristella, and president and CEO of the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, Mark Rienzi,

join us on the show today to explain this legal fight and their victory. Sister Maristella also shares about the future of the pro-life movement. Stay tuned for our conversation, but first, I want to tell you all about a great opportunity for young people right here at the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is the most effective conservative policy organization in the country, and the Daily Signal is, of course, the news outlet of the Heritage Foundation. Every semester, we have interns that come from literally schools across the country, recent graduates, and they can intern both right here at the Daily Signal and across the Heritage Foundation building.

We pay competitively, and we develop talent and give our interns access to some of the sharpest minds in the country. We are going on offense, so join us if you are a young person. Learn more about the Young Leaders Program at the Heritage Foundation by visiting Heritage, and as a former Heritage Foundation intern, I can speak from experience saying it is one of the best intern programs in all of Washington, D.C. Today, we are celebrating a victory for life and for privacy today with Vicar General of the Sisters of Life, sister Maristella, and president and CEO of the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, Mark Rianzi. Thank you both so much for being with us today. Thanks for having us. You're welcome. Good to be with you. Well, sister, I would

love to start by asking you if you would share a little bit of the history and the mission of the Sisters for Life. Sure. Sisters of Life, well, we were founded in 1991 and as Sisters of Life, we believe that every person is sacred, unique, and unrepeatable, and incidentally loved by God. And we know that when people are loved for who they are, not for what they can do, produce, or achieve, but for who they are, they thrive and live in the fullness of life. We want everyone to know that their life is a good gift. So our primary work is prayer, and all of our works flow from that prayer. So for years, we've been supporting women who are pregnant and in difficult circumstances. And as they come to know that they're loved and discover the gift of their own life, so often they're able to choose.

life for their children. We have a comment where pregnant women live with us, and we host retreats, and we speak on the good news of the dignity of a given person across the country. And we also have a special mission of serving those who are suffering after the experience of abortion, and that they can receive God's mercy and healing and live in the fullness of life. So that's a little bit of who we are and what we do, and we just want everyone to know that their life has value in meeting, and we especially stand in solidarity with women, are pregnant and in difficult circumstances.

At any given time about how many pregnant women are usually living with you all at the convent? Our convent has anywhere between 8 and 10 will be living with us over the course of a year, and they'll come at any point in their pregnancy and stay with us maybe six months or a year after the baby is born. And so it's a beautiful for time for us to support and love these women. And they become really a part of our lives, a part of our sisters of life family. And it's a privilege to have them with us. That is beautiful.

And our work with pregnant women, we just, in a small portion of the women that we serve will come to live with us. But the majority, we serve hundreds of women each year in the United States across the country and also in Canada, close to 1,000 each year. we're serving in that way. Wow. That is so many. That's wonderful and just so neat to hear about the work that you all are doing, really on the ground being the hands and feet of Christ. And you all have just won a really significant legal victory. And Mr. Enzi, I'd love to pull you in on this conversation and just get your thoughts a little bit on this legal case. So the Sisters of Life,

They've just won a legal battle that involves protecting the privacy of the women that they work with, specifically the women that they work with in New York. This goes back to the overturning of Roe v. Wade when the Supreme Court was about to hand down their decision on Dobbs v. Women's Health Organization. About two weeks prior to that, New York passed a law authorizing the New York Commissioner of Health to demand private information from pregnancy. centers that do not offer abortion services. Can you just explain what exactly this law is that New York passed? Yeah, happy to. And it's really a very bad law. It's a good thing that we won the case. In response to the Dobbs decision, some folks in New York government thought that the best thing to do was to attack pro-lifers and women who wanted help keeping their babies. And so they said the Department of Health needs to study these.

people who don't provide abortions, we need to study them so that we can figure out what they're doing. And part of the study that they said is that they can demand to see all your documents and information about how do you train people and who are the women who come to see you and what is the demographic information and so forth. So it's a lot of just intrusive information with the government picking out its political opponents and saying, I'd like to go through all those of your papers and look for trouble. And of course, we live in a country with a first amendment. We live in a country with a fourth amendment. The government's not just allowed to come and go through all your papers because they disagree with your politics about something.

And so the government never should have tried to do that. We filed a lawsuit against it as soon as they did. The government spent the last year really backtracking in court and trying not to defend it. But thankfully, the case ended just a few weeks ago with a federal court order ordering New York that it can't harass the sisters. It can't ask them for their documents. It has to just leave them alone, which of course is the right answer in a free country. So this victory, does it apply only to the sisters of life and the work that they're doing, or does this apply to other pro-life pregnancy centers in New York? So the sisters were the only ones in the lawsuit. No one else had suit over it. But so technically, I guess it only applies to the

sisters, but in reality, the state of New York has admitted that it doesn't need this information. So I think they'd be pretty hard pressed to try to go enforce this law against somebody else. If that happened, that somebody else would just point to our case and say, obviously, the state knows it doesn't need these documents. And obviously the state knows that it would be violating the Constitution to insist on it. So I suspect it just means the state's going to back down from everybody. Sister Maristella, when you learned about this new law, what were your concerns? And what gave you the impetus to say, you know what, we actually need to take legal action.

This is of so much concern. Yeah. So everything we do for the women that we serve is we do it for love, love of them and respect for them. And our visitation mission, where we're serving pregnant women who are vulnerable and in difficult situations, it's so important that they feel safe there. And we have very sacred conversations with them. and we come to know their histories, their hopes, their fears, their dreams. And these are very confidential conversations.

And so we want to be a refuge for those who are suffering in our culture, and we want to preserve the integrity that they deserve, and we want to preserve their privacy. And so it's really important for our work that so much of our mission, as I said, is built on these relationships of trust and care. And so it's important to us that we were, able to keep that. Yeah, that's a foundational element. Absolutely. That, that privacy. Yeah. That's right. And so much we want women to be able to move in freedom and not in fear.

And so much of us, our work is providing a safe space so that she can be free to choose life for herself and for her children. When we look at the pro-life movement right now as a whole and where it stands, you know, there have been a lot of pro-life ballot initiatives that have failed recently in states across the country since Roeby Wade was overturned. You know, what do you think the path forward is for protecting life and for standing for life in America? You know, that's a great question. I think it begins really one heart at a time. And when each person knows that their lives have value and that comes to discover their own dignity, then we begin to recognize that in other people.

And you begin to see the value in each person you encounter. I think so much in our culture is based on externals and what people can do and produce and achieve or how much money they make. But that's not where our intrinsic work comes from. So each person has value and meaning. And I think when people realize that about their own lives, then they have this awareness that each person I encounter has dignity.

And that person has a right to life, a right to be born. When women come to you and they come to the sisters of life and they say, I'm pregnant and I need help, what do you most commonly hear from them as to why they have made the decision to choose life? So often women choose life when they feel supported and when they're loved. A lot of the reasons why we know that women have abortions is not because. it's something they want to do or something they choose, but so often they make that decision because they feel all alone

and that they have no other choice. And so when we surround the woman with love and care and walk in solidarity with her, so often she discovers who she really is and makes choices that she can live with and live in joy and freedom. Yeah. Of course, while protecting the privacy of the women that you serve, but we'd love to hear just maybe a little bit about one or two of the women that you all have recently had the privilege of caring for. Oh, yeah, there's so many great ones, so many great ones over the years.

The first one that comes to mind is a woman who, she'd recently moved into this country, and she became pregnant and he didn't know what else to do. And so she took a taxi to Planned Parenthood. and friends of ours were praying outside of Planned Parenthood. And when they saw her, she was looking for a way out. And when she saw her friends praying there, they brought her over to our convent. And for the next five or six hours, she just spent with us sharing her heart, sharing her hopes and her dreams. And when we listened to her and she was able to say for herself, I never wanted to have an abortion. And we said, great, we're here to help you.

And so she ended up moving in with us. She lived with us. She grew so much in every way, spiritually, intellectually, socially. And now she has a beautiful daughter. And we're just so proud of her and her daughter. And I know that this mom and child will be part of our lives forever. So like so many of them, yeah, we're just grateful. We have a Christmas party every year with all the women and children reserved over the years.

And it's incredible. It's really stunning to stand in a room of people that might not ever have existed. And so we love to be with them and to celebrate their lives each year. That's so beautiful. Mr. Rienzi, the Beckett Fund is a nonprofit public interest, legal, and education institution. Why was this such an important case for the Beckett Fund to say we're going to stand in and for the sisters of life and make sure that they can continue doing the work that they are called to do? Yeah, we represent people of all states, but we're particularly on the lookout when the government is aggressively hostile to somebody and the government is trying to interfere with somebody's religious order.

And of course, the Sisters of Life are a religious group and a religious order. And it's particularly bad when the government says we're going to come into your convent and we're going to go through your papers and look at everything you're doing. The government has no ability to do that. And honestly, when the government does things like that, it makes us all poorer. It makes our whole society weaker and worse. And it's just really important for people to stand up and hold the line and keep the government in its right place. The world is a much better place for all the reasons sister was just describing. The world is a much better place with the sisters of life able to freely and fully help people and live their faith out freely and fearlessly.

That's a great thing for the world. And at Beckett, we try to protect that. We try to protect the ability of people to live out. faith to do it in the public square to help their fellow man and woman and to keep the government doing the things government should do and not the things government shouldn't do. Well, you all have taken multiple cases to the Supreme Court in the last 10 years. Beckett has won seven Supreme Court cases. And I encourage all of our listeners to check out the work that you all are doing by visiting

Beckettlaw.org. That's B-E-C-K-E-T-Law.org as well as to make. sure to explore the work, the amazing work that the Sisters of Life are doing their website is SistersofLife.org. I want to thank you both for your time today. And it's good on a day like today when we have so much going on in the world to have some good news and to know that there are individuals who are standing for life and who are taking the fight so far that protecting the privacy of those who have chosen.

chosen life. So thank you both for your time today and thank you both for what you do. Thanks for having it. Good to be with you. And that's going to do it for today's episode. Thanks for being with us here at the Daily Signal podcast on this December morning. Make sure that you check out our evening show every weekday around 5 p.m. We bring you the top news of the day to keep you up to date on the breaking stories as they develop. Also, take a minute to subscribe to the Daily Signal podcast wherever you like to listen. and if you would, this holiday season, give us a gift by taking a moment to leave a five-star rating and review. Thanks again for being with us today.

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