“They might be thinking, ‘I’m going to keep this baby,’” Harriman explained. “But they can walk out of here, and once they tell the news to their parents or to the father, the influences that start coming into their life can really cause them to think differently or make them feel like they don’t have a choice or they need to do what they’re being pressured to do.”
In Alaska’s State Legislature this session, lawmakers face myriad bills of concern to Alaskan Catholics. Following is an update on several bills moving through the legislative process, including dates of upcoming hearings. For more information and to contact your legislators, go to akleg.gov or call 800-478-4648. To follow Catholic Anchor reports, including news updates on public testimonies and bill hearings, go online to CatholicAnchor.org. The current legislative session runs until April 19.
In the Alaska State Legislature, Democratic State Senator Berta Gardner has introduced two controversial bills to allow pharmacists in Alaska to dispense – without a doctor’s prescription – self-administered hormonal contraceptives, and to force health care insurers in the state to cover contraceptives, sterilizations and contraceptive procedures and devices – including those that cause abortion.
In Alaska’s State Legislature this session, lawmakers face myriad bills of concern to Alaskan Catholics, including legislation that deals with parental rights in education and expanding faith-based health care options. Following is an update on several bills moving through the legislative process, including dates of upcoming hearings.
Alaska’s lawmakers reconvened Jan. 19 in Juneau for the second session of the 2015-2016 legislative season where they face myriad bills of concern to Alaskan Catholics. Below is a summary of pending legislation the Catholic Anchor has identified that would affect the protection of human life, marriage, religious freedom and parents’ rights.
For almost 20 years, people from all walks of life and faith have gathered at the Anchorage Cemetery for the annual prayer service to commemorate those who’ve lost their lives in abortion and to pray for their mothers, fathers and families still suffering abortion’s aftereffects. Despite the size, religious diversity and fortitude of the hearty crowd who pray together there in frigid mid-winter, the local media rarely ever come. But absent page-one stories and despite inaccurate ones, pro-life proponents across the nation are making tremendous strides toward restoring legal protection to the smallest humans.
Anchorage Archbishop Emeritus Francis Thomas Hurley, the iconic prelate who led the Catholic Church in Alaska for three decades and was an indefatigable advocate of the poor, died peacefully on Jan 10 in his Anchorage home. He was two days shy of his 89 birthday.
A thousand years have passed since the first Crusade launched to defend Christians under siege in the land of Christ’s birth. A group of modern-day knights and ladies — including dozens of Alaskans — continue the work as members of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre. “It all got started in the Holy Land — this is where Jesus was born, grew up, worked, lived, died and rose for us,” Sir Thomas McKiernan told members of Catholic international order of knighthood. “We have been entrusted to maintain the Christian presence there.”
There are thousands of health care providers across the nation — and hundreds in Alaska — that provide health services for women, including women with low incomes, without performing abortion. And there might be more such providers if they had access to Planned Parenthood’s massive public subsidies.
In 1955, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald’s, the Vietnam War began, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus. And two friends — Loretta Leucke and Joan Oberle — professed their first vows as Sisters of the Most Precious Blood in St. Louis, Missouri. This month, Sisters Leucke, 80, and Oberle, 79, celebrate 60 years of religious life — the last 25 spent in the Archdiocese of Anchorage, Alaska.