The ChicagoBears appear to be poised to take Davis Mills, Kyle Trask, or Kellen Mond in the NFL Draft this weekend. Each of these second-tier prospects comes with their own risk.
Lollapalooza staff cool the crowd with water as Gary Clark Jr. performs at Lollapalooza in 2019. | Sun-Times file
Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the “Vax Pass” is still just a concept, but the idea is to use it as a carrot, instead of a stick, to bolster vaccination rates among young people most likely to attend outdoor musicevents this summer.
But, the concept is to use the “Vax Pass” as a carrot, instead of a stick, to bolster vaccination rates among young people most likely to attend outdoor music events like Lollapalooza and Riot Fest.
“We’re gonna be looking at ways in which we can incentivize people to get vaccinated and do that by looking at preferred seating. Preferred admission,” she said.
Chicago Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady on Tuesday had said the city will launch the vaccination passport program next month, but stopped short of saying large summer events such as Lollapalooza are officially back on.
Lightfoot discussed the program Wednesday at an unrelated event in Bronzeville, where she also sounded the alarm once again about the need to get vaccinated.
Vaccine “uptake among Black Chicagoans still lags behind every other demographic,” the mayor said, and that needs to change, particularly among African-Americans between the ages of 18 and 44.
“We need you to get vaccinated. Do it, of course, for yourself, but [also] for your family, for your grandparents. When you get vaccinated , it’s gonna be an easier return to a different life. I won’t say a normal old life because I don’t think that’s ever coming back. But I think the opportunities for opening up the city increase with the number of people who get vaccinated,” the mayor said.
“So, please folks. There’s plenty of opportunity now all over the city to get vaccinated for free. … Don’t be a bystander. Get in the game. Get yourself vaccinated.”
Steppenwolf Theatre’s new 50,000-square-foot theater and education center (shown in rendering) will debut on Halsted Street as part of the 2021-2022 season. | Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture
The 2021-2022 season marks the first time in Steppenwolf history that all works will be written exclusively by ensemble members.
Steppenwolf Theatre Company on Wednesday announced its 2021-2022 comeback season, which will see a planned return to in-person productions and the debut of its highly anticipated 50,000-square-foot theater building/education center.
“Steppenwolf is first and foremost a Chicago theater, and that understanding has guided the design of every inch of the building,” said Steppenwolf artistic director Anna D. Shapiro. “Our company’s role is to create experiences that are in conversation with the diverse life of our hometown and that motivate youth and adults toward participating in a future that is aware, connected and inclusive.”
Every production slated for the season, either streaming online or live on-stage, is written by a Steppenwolf ensemble member, with new virtual works by Tina Landau, Tracy Letts and Tarell Alvin McCraney planned for the fall.
Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill ArchitectureAn architectural rendering of Steppenwolf’s new Round Theater, slated to make its debut in spring 2022.
In November, in-person audiences will be invited to Steppenwolf’s main stage theater for a revival of Letts’ “Bug,” directed by David Cromer, with Carrie Coon and Namir Smallwood reprising their roles in the production which closed last March amid the mandated pandemic shut-down of all theaters. (For in-person productions/events, the company will adhere to the pandemic safety protocols in place at time/date of presentation.)
The Downstairs Theater will also include several 2020-2021 productions postponed due to the pandemic, including the world premiere of “King James” by Rajiv Joseph, directed by Shapiro, and a newly staged production of “Choir Boy” directed by Oscar winner Tarell Alvin McCraney.
In April 2022, Yasen Peyankov’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s “Seagull” will mark the official opening of the new center’s Round Theater.
Courtesy Steppenwolf TheatreThis combination photo shows Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble members and playwrights Tracy Letts (from left), Tarell Alvin McCraney, Tina Landau, Rajiv Joseph and Yasen Peyankov.
Here’s a look at the virtual streams announced Wednesday:
• Three Short Plays by ensemble member Tracy Letts (streaming in September):
1) ”The Old Country,” an animated short, directed by Patrick Zakem and featuring William Petersen, Karen Rodriguez and Mike Nussbaum: “Two men in a diner drain the last drops of their coffees and think about ordering dessert. In the denouement of their (physical, intellectual, and sexual) lives, they wax nostalgic and try to communicate across a wide divide.”
2) “Night Safari,” a monologue directed by Patrick Zakem, starring Rainn Wilson. “The nocturnal habits of the Panamanian Night Monkey, the life cycle of the Paradoxical Frog and the mating rituals of middle-aged male homo sapiens. This wry monologue poses the question: Are we so distant from the whims of our biology?”
3) “The Stretch,” a monologue directed by Anna D. Shapiro: “And they’re off, for the 108th running of the El Dorado Stakes! But this race is long distance … and maybe not what it first seems.”
• A New Play (a filmed play, title to be announced at later date, streaming in October) written by ensemble member Tarell Alvin McCraney and directed by Amy Morton, “a one-act told through a series of confessional monologues.”
• “The Light Remains” (a filmed play streaming in November) written and directed by Tina Landau: “Six solo short stories culminate in one shared, explosive act in a tale about what’s been lost and the myriad ways in which we grieve — including celebration and laughter.”
Here’s the on-stage lineup:
• “Bug,” (Nov. 11-Dec. 12 in the Downstairs Theater), written byTracy Letts and directed by David Cromer
• “King James” (Feb. 24-April 3, 2022, in the Downstairs Theater), a world premiere written by Rajiv Joseph and directed by Anna D. Shapiro
• “Seagull” (April 28-June 12, 2022, in the Round Theater), translated, adapted and directed by Yasen Peyankov
• “Choir Boy” (June 16-July 24, 2022), written by Tarell Alvin McCraney and directed by Kent Gash
For complete information on the season’s productions, including the Steppenwolf for Young Adults’ series, andtickets/memberships, visit steppenwolf.org. Single tickets for the fall virtual offerings will be made available closer to the streaming dates.
Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence is considered to be the top prospect in this year’s draft class. | Chris Graythen/Getty Images
The draft starts Thursday night with the first round and wraps up Saturday with the final four rounds.
All eyes in the football world will be focused on Cleveland the next few days for the 2021 NFL Draft, which kicks off Thursday night with the first round of selections. The three-day event will continue Friday evening with Rounds 2-3 before the final four rounds are held Saturday afternoon.
Unlike a year ago, when the NFL was forced hold the draft virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s draft extravaganza will include on-site coverage at several locations in downtown Cleveland, including FirstEnergy Stadium, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Great Lakes Science Center.
Some of the top prospects available will take the stage in Cleveland after their selections, while others will participate remotely similar to last year’s proceedings.
The intrigue over this year’s draft really starts with the No. 2 overall pick given the expectation that the Jaguars will take Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence first overall. Several other quarterbacks, including BYU’s Zach Wilson, Ohio State’s Justin Fields and North Dakota State’s Trey Lance, are also expected to go off the board early in the first round.
2021 NFL Draft schedule
All seven rounds will be broadcast live on ABC, ESPN and NFL Network. You can also stream the draft via the ESPN app and the NFL app.
Khalil Ferebee, the son of Andrew Brown Jr., and his mother Mia Ferebee stand together during a press conference about the killing of his father on April 27, 2021 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. | Getty
Judge Jeffery Foster said he believed the videos contained information that could harm the ongoing investigation or threaten the safety of people seen in the footage. He said the video must remain out of public view for at least 30 days.
ELIZABETH CITY, N.C. — A judge on Wednesday denied requests to release body camera video in the case of a Black man who was shot to death by North Carolina deputies as they tried to arrest him on drug-related warrants.
Judge Jeffery Foster said he believed the videos contained information that could harm the ongoing investigation or threaten the safety of people seen in the footage. He said the video must remain out of public view for at least 30 days.
“The release at this time would create a serious threat to the fair, impartial and orderly administration of justice,” Foster said.
However, he said, videos from multiple body cameras and one dashboard camera must be shown to Brown’s family within 10 days. He said some portions of the video may be blurred or redacted, including conversations between officers. The family previously saw only a 20-second portion of one body camera video.
The decision came shortly after a North Carolina prosecutor said that Andrew Brown Jr. had hit law enforcement officers with his car before they opened fire.
District Attorney Andrew Womble told the judge that he viewed the body camera video and disagreed with a characterization by attorneys for Brown’s family that his car was stationary when the shooting started. Womble said the video shows that Brown’s car made contact with law enforcement twice before shots could be heard on the video.
Calling the family attorney’s description “patently false,” Womble said the video shows that Brown’s car made contact with law enforcement twice before shots could be heard on the video.
“As it backs up, it does make contact with law enforcement officers,” he said, adding that the car stops again. “The next movement of the car is forward. It is in the direction of law enforcement and makes contact with law enforcement. It is then and only then that you hear shots.”
Womble said that officers shouted commands and tried to open the car before any shots were fired.
The Pasquotank County sheriff, Tommy Wooten II, has previously indicated that none of the deputies were injured. At a news conference hours after the shooting, he said, “They’re fine,” when asked about the deputies.
Womble argued that body camera video from the shooting, a portion of which was shown to the family on Monday, should be kept from the public for another month so that state investigators can make progress on their probe of the shooting.
The hearing comes amid pressure on authorities to release the video and calls for a special prosecutor to take the state’s case over from Womble. The judge said he planned to issue a decision Wednesday after a short recess.
On Tuesday, Brown’s family released an independent autopsy showing he was shot five times, including in the back of the head.
The FBI’s Charlotte field office, which opened the civil rights investigation into Brown’s death, said in a statement Tuesday that its agents planned to work closely with the Department of Justice “to determine whether federal laws were violated.”
The independent autopsy was performed Sunday by a pathologist hired by Brown’s family. The exam noted four wounds to the right arm and one to the head. The state’s autopsy has not been released yet.
The family’s lawyers also released a copy of the death certificate, which lists the cause of death as a “penetrating gunshot wound of the head.” The certificate, signed by a paramedic services instructor who serves as a local medical examiner, describes the death as a homicide.
Brown was shot last Wednesday by deputies serving drug-related search and arrest warrants at his house in the North Carolina town of Elizabeth City, about 160 miles northeast of Raleigh.
The autopsy results come a day after Brown’s relatives were shown the 20-second clip of footage.
One of the Brown family lawyers, Chantel Cherry-Lassiter, who viewed the video, said Monday that shots were heard from the instant the clip started with Brown’s car in his driveway and his hands on the steering wheel. She said the video showed Brown trying to drive away but posing no threat to officers after they ran up to his car and began shooting.
“He finally decides to try to get away and he backs out, not toward officers at all,” she told reporters Monday.
The State Bureau of Investigation began a probe of the shooting shortly after it happened. It initially said that it would turn its findings over to the local district attorney, as is standard under state laws and procedures.
But the governor, a Democrat, urged the appointment of a special prosecutor to handle the state’s case.
“This would help assure the community and Mr. Brown’s family that a decision on pursuing criminal charges is conducted without bias,” Cooper said in a statement.
State Attorney General Josh Stein said state law puts control of criminal prosecutions in the hands of the local district attorney, so his office cannot intervene unless asked. He said he has offered assistance to the local prosecutor, but has only received an acknowledgment.
Womble, who oversees Pasquotank County, issued a statement Tuesday noting that state law gives him the power to decide on prosecuting crimes in his district and he stands “ready willing and able to fulfill my statutory obligations.”
Bloom’s Martice Mitchell (2) throws down a shot against Marian Catholic. | Allen Cunningham/For the Sun-Times
Updates on where all the former local stars are heading.
The movement among college basketball players is endless. Whether it’s first-year freshmen or graduating seniors granted an extra year of eligibility, a high percentage of players are on the move.
The list of former Illinois high school players in the NCAA transfer portal alone is close to three dozen.
The top two prep players from last year’s Class of 2021 in Illinois won’t be back at their schools as both DJ Steward of Young and Adam Miller of Morgan Park left Duke and Illinois, respectively.
Steward declared for the NBA Draft after putting up 13 points, 3.9 rebounds and 2.4 assists as a freshman at Duke this past season. Currently, Steward is not projected in anyone’s NBA first-round mock draft.
Miller started for an Illinois team that earned a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament and is now in the transfer portal. The 6-3 guard who averaged 8.3 points a game as a freshman while shooting 34 percent from three announced he is making his decision this Saturday.
NIU’s Rashon Burno has been busy
Northern Illinois officially named Rashon Burno as its next head basketball coach Mar. 6.
While he hasn’t officially added anyone to his coaching staff just yet, Burno has not wasted any time in assembling a roster. Burno has added six new pieces to his program, including a pair of high-major big men transfers.
Former Chicago area prep stars Keshawn Williams and Martice Mitchell are returning home. Williams, an athletic guard who played his freshman year this past season at Tulsa, and the long, wiry 6-9 Mitchell, who is transferring in from Minnesota, played together at Bloom.
Chris Osten has transferred in from Arizona State where Burno was coach Bobby Hurley’s associate head coach. The 6-9 Osten played in 24 games for the Sun Devils this past season and started six games.
Burno also landed Darweshi Hunter from Weber State. The 6-5 guard was a Division II star as a freshman two years ago. Hunter’s 20.7 points a game were the second most among all Division II freshmen in the country in 2019-20. He transferred to Weber State last year and is now headed to DeKalb with three years of eligibility remaining.
In addition to the incoming transfers, NIU will welcome three freshmen next season.
Burno signed Houston Christian’s Noah Kon, a 5-11 point guard who is the all-time leading scorer in his high school program’s history. The Class of 2021 also includes Montavious Myrick, a 6-8 forward from Atlanta, and 6-0 point guard Zion Russell from Maryland.
Red-hot Joseph Yesufu makes jump from Drake to Kansas
Following a monster finish to the season, which included averaging 23.2 points in the final nine games of the season, former Bolingbrook star Joseph Yesufu is transferring from Drake to Kansas.
The explosive 6-0 sophomore guard scored 12, 21 and 26 points in three NCAA Tournament games this past March for the Bulldogs. He finished the season averaging 12.8 points a game.
Elyjah Williams back in Evanston
After putting up some significant numbers over the course of his career at Fairleigh Dickinson, Evanston product Elyjah Williams will return home for his final year of college basketball and play at Northwestern.
In his four seasons at FDU, the 6-6 Williams scored 1,050 career points. This past season he averaged 13.9 points, 7.6 rebounds, 3.1 assists and 1.5 blocks a game.
DaJuan Gordon in at Mizzou, Xavier Pinson out and off to LSU
After two productive years at Kansas State, former Sun-Times Player of the Year DaJuan Gordon of Curie has transferred to Missouri. Gordon averaged 6.3 points as a freshman and 9.1 points and 5.5 rebounds a game this past season as a sophomore.
Meanwhile, former Simeon point guard Xavier Pinson left the Missouri program after averaging 13.6 points and 2.9 assists for a NCAA Tournament team.
The 6-2 Pinson stayed in the SEC and is headed to LSU.
Other former Illinois prep players on the move
▪︎ Charlie Moore will attend his fourth school in his six-year college career. After stops at California, Kansas and DePaul, the former Morgan Park all-stater is off to Miami-Florida. The 5-11 guard has already scored 1,243 career points after averaging 15.5 and 14.4 points a game the past two seasons at DePaul.
▪︎ Former Young star point guard Xavier Castaneda left South Florida and will play at Akron for former Illinois head coach John Groce. Castaneda averaged 8.5 points and 2.6 assists a game this past season.
▪︎ After averaging 8.6 points a game as a sophomore at Boise State, 6-2 guard Ray J Dennis of Oswego East is transferring to Toledo.
▪︎ UIC will welcome the addition of Damaria Franklin, the former Niles North star who averaged 13.3 points and five rebounds a game as a junior this past season at Tennessee Tech.
▪︎ Lemont’s PJ Pipes, who scored 1,103 career points in four seasons at Wisconsin-Green Bay, will take advantage of the NCAA granting an extra year of eligibility and head west. Pipes will play his final college season at Santa Clara.
▪︎ Proviso East’s Quinlan Bennett, who played two seasons at Triton Junior College before averaging 9.6 points a game this past season at Lamar, is transferring to Western Illinois.
▪︎ The Ivy League didn’t have a season this past year due to COVID-19. West Chicago product Tai Bibbs was able to earn his Ivy League degree and is headed to Howard University. Bibbs started all 30 games as a junior two years ago at Columbia, averaging 6.5 points a game.
The ChicagoBears are a losing organization. They have absolutely no idea what to do when it comes to having sustained success. However, that could all change if they ever figured out a way to get that franchise quarterback that this city has always wanted to have. There are plenty of options there to consider […]
The Bears appear to be poised to take Davis Mills, Kyle Trask, or Kellen Mond in the NFL Draft this weekend. Each of these second-tier prospects comes with their own risk.
This September 2017 photo provided by researcher Brian Menounos shows the Klinaklini glacier in British Columbia, Canada. The glacier and the adjacent icefield has lost nearly 16 billion tons of snow and ice since 2000, with 10.7 billion tons of that of that since 2010, Menounos says. And the rate of loss accelerated over the last five years of the study. | AP
Scientists blame human-caused climate change.
Glaciers are melting faster, losing 31% more snow and ice per year than they did 15 years earlier, according to three-dimensional satellite measurements of all the world’s mountain glaciers.
Scientists blame human-caused climate change.
Using 20 years of recently declassified satellite data, scientists calculated that the world’s 220,000 mountain glaciers are losing more than 328 billion tons of ice and snow per year since 2015, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature. That’s enough melt flowing into the world’s rising oceans to put Switzerland under almost 24 feet of water each year.
The annual melt rate from 2015 to 2019 is 78 billion more tons a year than it was from 2000 to 2004. Global thinning rates, different than volume of water lost, doubled in the last 20 years and “that’s enormous,” said Romain Hugonnet, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse in France who led the study.
Half the world’s glacial loss is coming from the United States and Canada.
Alaska’s melt rates are “among the highest on the planet,” with the Columbia glacier retreating about 115 feet a year, Hugonnet said.
Almost all the world’s glaciers are melting, even ones in Tibet that used to be stable, the study found. Except for a few in Iceland and Scandinavia that are fed by increased precipitation, the melt rates are accelerating around the world.
The near-uniform melting “mirrors the global increase in temperature” and is from the burning of coal, oil and gas, Hugonnet said. Some smaller glaciers are disappearing entirely. Two years ago, scientists, activists and government officials in Iceland held a funeral for a small glacier.
“Ten years ago, we were saying that the glaciers are the indicator of climate change, but now actually they’ve become a memorial of the climate crisis,” said World Glacier Monitoring Service Director Michael Zemp, who wasn’t part of the study.
The study is the first to use this 3D satellite imagery to examine all of Earth’s glaciers not connected to ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic. Past studies either only used a fraction of the glaciers or estimated the loss of Earth’s glaciers using gravity measurements from orbit. Those gravity readings have large margins of error and aren’t as useful, Zemp said.
Ohio State University’s Lonnie Thompson said the new study painted an “alarming picture.”
Shrinking glaciers are a problem for millions of people who rely on seasonal glacial melt for daily water and rapid melting can cause deadly outbursts from glacial lakes in places like India, Hugonnet said.
But the largest threat is sea level rise. The world’s oceans are already rising because warm water expands and because of melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, but glaciers are responsible for 21% of sea level rise, more than the ice sheets, the study said. The ice sheets are larger longer term threats for sea level rise.
“It’s becoming increasingly clear that sea level rise is going to be a bigger and bigger problem as we move through the 21st century,” said National Snow and Ice Data Center Director Mark Serreze.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
In this Feb. 14, 2012, file photo, Janet Folger Porter, president and founder of Faith 2 Action, posts signs during a news conference at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. | AP
The notion that abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy “stops a beating heart” was arguably the stroke of political genius that eventually helped the measures rise above persistent constitutional concerns in the states that have backed them.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Dr. Michael Cackovic has treated his share of pregnant women. So when Republican lawmakers across the U.S. began passing bans on abortion at what they term “the first detectable fetal heartbeat,” he was exasperated.
That’s because at the point where advanced technology can detect that first flutter, as early as six weeks, the embryo isn’t yet a fetus and it doesn’t have a heart.
“You cannot hear this ’flutter,’ it is only seen on ultrasound,” said Cackovic, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center, where some 5,300 babies are born each year.
Yet bans pegged to the “fetal heartbeat” concept have been signed into law in 13 states, including Cackovic’s home state of Ohio. None has taken effect, with all but the most recently enacted being struck down or temporarily blocked by the courts. Now, one of the most restrictive, signed by Tennessee’s Republican Gov. Bill Lee last year, goes before the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday.
Proponents of these so-called “heartbeat bills” are hoping for a legal challenge to eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court, where they look for the conservative coalition assembled under President Donald Trump to end the constitutional right to abortion protected under the high court’s landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.
The notion that abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy “stops a beating heart” was arguably the stroke of political genius that eventually helped the measures rise above persistent constitutional concerns in the states that have backed them.
The concept’s originator, Ohio anti-abortion activist Janet Folger Porter, spoke openly about her strategy in an email to supporters last year — deftly side-stepping whether the packaging of the bill was medically true.
“The slogan, ‘Abortion stops a beating heart,’ has long been an effective way to highlight the injustice and inhumanity of abortion,” Porter wrote of the state’s law, the Ohio Heartbeat Protection Act.
And, she found, hearts were easy to market.
During the decade-long battle to pass Ohio’s law, Porter punctuated her lobbying efforts with heart-shaped balloons and teddy bears. She urged supporters to “take heart” when faced with obstacles — and beseeched lawmakers to “have a heart” and vote “yes” despite their constitutional concerns.
Then Republican Gov. John Kasich twice vetoed the Ohio “heartbeat bill,” citing constitutional issues. His GOP successor, Gov. Mike DeWine, signed it in 2019 amid a flurry of similar bills that year.
For now, abortion remains legal in all 50 states, though 43 have some form of restriction on the procedure after a fetus becomes viable outside the womb, generally between 24 and 28 weeks.
John Culhane, a law professor at Widener University who co-directs its Family Health Law and Policy Institute, said the anti-abortion lobby’s marketing of “heartbeat bill” legislation is “all an attempt to make a fetus into a person.”
“The ‘heartbeat,’ it literally tugs at the heartstrings, it makes you feel like, ‘Why would you do this?’ Never mind that there’s not a heart” yet in the embryo, he said.
However, attorneys are quick to point out that medical inaccuracy is not a legal argument.
“Legislatures are free to define things any way they want and give it the force of law,” said Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern University. “The reality of medical science is not a constraint on what a legislature can do. What is a constraint on what a legislature can do are the constitutional rights of women.”
In the war of words over abortion, however, battles have erupted before over politically charged, inaccurate or vague terminology used in abortion laws.
“Dismemberment abortion” is a term abortion opponents use to describe dilation and evacuation, a common second trimester abortion method. They use “partial-birth abortion” to describe what is medically called intact dilation and extraction.
Abortion rights groups dub heartbeat laws “six-week abortion bans,” though the bills don’t mention such a duration.
“It is very common to use non-medical language to publicly talk about a medical procedure,” said David Cohen, professor of law at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law.
“The law needs precision in order to know exactly what is being regulated,” Cohen said. “So in medicine it would be by using medical terminology.”
Cackovic, the fetal medicine specialist, said the current “heartbeat laws,” are based only on “our amazing technological advances” that allow detection of the earliest signs of embryonic cardiac activity, “and nothing else.”
A pioneering 2013 University of Leeds study, for example, found that while four clearly defined chambers appear in the human heart from the eighth week of pregnancy, they remain “a disorganized jumble of tissue” until around the 20th week, much later than previously expected.
Abortion opponents don’t see it that way, viewing the use of antiseptic medical terms to describe what happens in pregnancy as a political tactic of its own.
The hosts of CareCast, a podcast sponsored by the anti-abortion nonprofit Care Net, called out news outlets last year for using terms such as “pulsing” or “fetal cardiac activity” rather than “heartbeat,” accusing them of employing “euphemisms” and “verbal gymnastics” in order to dehumanize the unborn.
“They are literally inventing new ways of talking about a heartbeat so that they can try to avoid giving any sort of human attributes to the fetus,” said Vincent DiCaro, the group’s chief outreach officer. President and CEO Roland Warren asserted that abortion rights groups use medical terms so they can “maximize the atrocity” against human life. He equated it to the Nazis’ dehumanization of the Jews.
Culhane said vague or imprecise language could be a powerful argument against “heartbeat laws” in the courts — should the battle ever advance beyond the laws’ impacts on a woman’s constitutional right to abortion.
“These days, courts are really vigilant about looking at statutes to make sure that they provide notice about what conduct exactly is prohibited,” the Widener University law professor said.
“Because we don’t want people to have to guess and then find that they’re on the wrong side of the law.”
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