Responding to the US bishops’ lawsuit against the Trump administration over refugee resettlement funding, a federal judge has declined to issue a temporary restraining order that would have immediately restored the funding. Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, described his ruling as “very tentative” and scheduled a hearing for February 28. The Hill reported that the bishops’ conference maintains that “the State Department owes the USCCB $13 million in outstanding payments, and since its funding was frozen, more than $11 million has been accrued due to the conference’s ‘moral obligation’ to continue providing support” to refugees.

Reacting to President Donald Trump’s executive order promising support for IVF, the chairmen of the US bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities and Committee for Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth warned that IVF destroys human life. “As pastors, we see the suffering of so many couples experiencing infertility and know their deep desire to have children is both good and admirable; yet the Administration’s push for IVF, which ends countless human lives and treats persons like property, cannot be the answer,” said Bishop Danield Thomas and Bishop Robert Barron. “The IVF industry treats human beings like products and freezes or kills millions of children who are not selected for transfer to a womb or do not survive,” they continued, as they called for support for alternative “restorative reproductive medicine that can help ethically treat often-overlooked root causes of infertility. However, we will strongly oppose any policy that ex