It’s been a confusing couple of weeks for the pro-life movement. On January 6, President Donald Trump reportedly told Republican lawmakers they’d need to “be a little flexible” on the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits taxpayer money from funding abortions. They weren’t—House Speaker Mike Johnson said he was “just not going to allow that to happen.” The next day, Trump’s press secretary said the president’s policy supporting Hyde hadn’t changed. A week later, the American Civil Liberties Union dropped a lawsuit against the government after the latter released about $65 million in unpaid Title X funds to Planned Parenthood. The funds had been withheld most of 2025 for “possible violations.” To be clear—this wasn’t the same money withdrawn from Planned Parenthood in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. That law blocked Medicaid money from any nonprofit abortion clinics, and went into effect in September. All told, it should deprive Planned Parenthood of about $700 million. But there’s a catch: The One Big Beautiful Bill only cut off Medicaid funding for a year. Unless more legislation is passed, the spigot of funding will turn back on for Planned Parenthood in September 2026. It’s a lot to keep track of. And if you ask someone involved in pro-life advocacy which one to worry about most, they’ll tell you something else entirely. Courtesy of the Guttmacher Institute “The abortion numbers are going up,” said Herbie Newell, president and executive director of Lifeline Children’s Services. More than a million pregnancies were aborted in 2024—up 20 percent from 2017, when abortions hit an all-time low of about 860,000. So far, overturning Roe hasn’t dropped abortion numbers nationwide. It’s possible that defunding Planned Parenthood won’t either. That’s because this problem isn’t unique to the American political landscape. Abortion numbers are rising in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Europe too. “Romans 3:23 says all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. We need laws restricting abortions, and we should always advocate for them. But they’re not going to change the hearts and the minds of people,” Newell said. “That’s why we need the church, because it’s the gospel that’s going to actually change the heart. It’s the gospel that makes it safer for babies in the womb.” Why Are There More Abortions Now? After around 30 straight years of decline, abortions in America began to rise in 2018. It’s hard to find a good political reason—it wasn’t a presidential election year. It was four years before the Dobbs decision. The biggest political pro-life news that year was either Trump speaking at the March for Life or the Supreme Court decision that California couldn’t require pregnancy centers to provide information about nearby abortion clinics. Neither was the rise in abortion rates caused by a rash of unwanted pregnancies. The number of pregnancies (and indeed, of people having sex) had been decreasing for years. “The number of abortions is going up because it’s easier than it ever has been for a woman to get access to the pills,” Newell said. He’s referring to mifepristone, which was invented in France in 1980 and approved by the FDA for use in America in 2000. (You may remember its earlier name, RU-486.) The drug, which blocks the body’s natural production of progesterone, is commonly combined with a second pill called misoprostol, which contracts the uterus. By 2018, the pills—often referred to as medication abortion—accounted for around 40 percent of all American abortions. Five years later, that number was up to 63 percent. The same trend can be observed in places like Scotland, Switzerland, Canada, England, and Wales. After decades of abortion decline, the adoption of telehealth and mifepristone in those countries was corresponding with a surge in abortion numbers. Number of terminated pregnancies in Germany from 1996 to 2023 / Courtesy of Statista For example, Germany has some of Europe’s strictest abortion laws—a pregnant woman must see a counselor, wait three days, and be less than 12 weeks pregnant to be eligible for an abortion. Abortion numbers there have been dropping fairly steadily since the early 2000s. But in 2022, they popped up again. That year, a third of abortions were induced by mifepristone—up from 3 percent when it was first approved for use in Germany around 2000. In New Zealand, abortions also began to rise in 2022, the same year that medication abortions became as popular as surgical abortions. In the three years since, medication abortions have become twice as popular as surgery, and the number of abortions in New Zealand is at its highest rate since 2008. And in Canada, abortions began drifting back up in 2021. By 2023, more than 40 percent of abortions were caused by medication. Telehealth consultations and prescriptions were also rising rapidly. “This is a wild change in the landscape,” one Canadian researcher told reporters. Newell puts it like this: “The advances we thought we made in 2022, with the overturning of Roe? We didn’t make any advances. The game changed.” Let’s nuance that: Dobbs did make some things better. But it also made other things worse. And while everyone was looking at Washington, the technological advances of mifepristone and telehealth were doing an end run. Better and Worse The Dobbs decision was the right one, and it did make some things better. “There are babies that are being born today in the state of Texas because abortion is not accessible here,” said Mary Whitehurst, chief executive officer of the Source, a network of pregnancy support clinics in Houston and Austin, Texas. She’s right. Studies show that states with strong pro-life laws are seeing thousands more births than expected. Mary Whitehurst / Courtesy of the Source “But I also believe there are any number of abortions happening that we have no idea about,” she said. Whitehurst can see hints of them in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists journal, which reports how many women from Texas are traveling to states such as New Mexico and Kansas for abortions. And she knows pills are coming in through the mail, because some of those women end up in her clinics for postabortive care. Sometimes those women are hiding their abortion from their regular doctor, she said. They’re also hiding from ER doctors. “Women are being told, ‘If you have adverse side effects, go to the ER and tell them you’re miscarrying,’” she said. “But if a medical professional doesn’t know a woman has taken this pill, they won’t be able to provide the best health care.” These are unintended consequences of a good law. Whitehurst has seen this before, when Texas passed the Heartbeat Bill in 2021. “When the Heartbeat bill passed, we didn’t anticipate that women who were too early in their pregnancy to detect a heartbeat might see that as a green light to get an abortion as soon as possible,” she said. “Before, if she came in at five weeks, we knew she had until 20 weeks to make a decision. It was easy to say, ‘You don’t have to rush this. Come back next week. Let’s do another ultrasound. We’ll see if the pregnancy is even viable. And then let’s talk about your options.’” The Source team serving at a community fair / Courtesy of Mary Whitehurst But after the bill was passed, “if we couldn’t detect a heartbeat, her next stop was the abortion clinic,” Whitehurst said. That fallout didn’t make the law bad, she said. If there was a heartbeat, “more women were able to have those deeper conversations,” she said. “They were willing to explore other ways to move forward, because they felt like they didn’t have a choice about having the baby. Back then, there wasn’t a push to get women out of state or send them abortion pills in the mail. All of that was triggered by Dobbs.” It was also triggered by COVID-19, which normalized telehealth and allowed the FDA to authorize sending mifepristone through the mail. From 2022 to 2024, the percentage of abortions prescribed virtually rose from 5 percent to 25 percent. Neither of those factors is going to change anytime soon. In October, the FDA authorized a second generic version of mifepristone. This will increase the supply and competition, dropping the cost of an abortion even further. Currently, the median price of a medication abortion offered in person is $600, the same as the average cost of a surgical abortion from Planned Parenthood in the first trimester. But if you’re ordering pills online from a virtual clinic? The median price is just $150, down from about $240 in 2021. Now What? Heartbeat International, which has a network of 3,600 pregnancy help affiliates, projects that the pills will account for virtually 100 percent of abortions by the year 2030. So it makes sense that mifepristone is the most important target for pro-life legislation. One avenue could be recalling doctors to the Hippocratic oath, Newell said. The original form includes this sentence: “I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.” However, most medical schools have significantly reworked the vow, which now includes sentences such as “I will respect the autonomy and dignity of my patient” instead. Other strategies could include these: Require an in-person diagnosis and prescription. At a Senate hearing last week, Republican lawmakers again called on the Trump administration to roll back virtual visits for abortion pills and ban the practice of delivering them by mail. Ask the FDA to withdraw its approval of mifepristone. In mid-September, Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy told Republican state attorneys general that the FDA was reviewing the safety of the drug. By the end of the month, however, the FDA had approved the generic form. Focus on state-level restrictions, similar to the work being done before Dobbs. Already, 18 states require an in-person doctor’s visit to obtain abortion pills. In Texas, private citizens are allowed to sue anyone involved in providing abortion pills to Texans. And Louisiana’s attorney general is attempting to extradite out-of-state doctors who were prescribing and mailing drugs to Louisiana residents, perhaps setting up a Supreme Court case. Fighting abortion medication with legal restrictions is “probably going to be a decades-long battle,” Care Net chief outreach officer Vincent DiCaro said. “In the meantime, there’s a lot of things we could be doing outside of the political realm.” Beyond Politics “If you define pro-life as a political framework, then there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that we’re doing pretty poorly,” DiCaro said. “But if you reframe it around things that we would call ‘pro-abundant-life,’ then there’s a lot of really positive things happening.” One is the Abortion Pill Rescue Network, expanded dramatically by Heartbeat International in 2018. The top situation the helpline sees is a scared woman who recently took the first dose of mifepristone and wants to save her pregnancy. The next most common situations are a woman whose boyfriend made her take the abortion pill and a woman whose abortion facility is telling her she must take the second pill to finish the procedure. Since 2012, the Abortion Pill Rescue Network has successfully saved 7,000 lives. Another bright spot is First Baptist Orlando, a congregation that started a pregnancy center in their church in 1986. Over the years, they have connected holistically with hundreds of men, women, and children. Pregnancy center clients receive resources from First Baptist Orlando before a Sunday morning service. / Courtesy of Care Net “We want people to become disciples of Christ,” senior executive pastor Danny de Armas said. “The first step for us is to help them make a decision to keep this child. And then that becomes a connection point with that family to help them come to faith in Jesus Christ.” From there, he wants the family to be discipled, join the church community, and begin to serve. As clients of the pregnancy center become volunteers, “it just keeps looping over and over again,” he said. “It’s a beautiful thing.” To date, 428 new families have joined First Orlando through the pregnancy center. Not every church needs to start a pregnancy center, DiCaro said, but pastors should spend more time thinking about how they might support women and men at risk for choosing abortion, both outside and inside the church. “We did two national surveys of women who had abortions and men who participated in abortions, and we found about 40 percent of women were regularly attending church when they had their first abortion,” he said. “And a little more than half of men in the survey were regularly attending church at the time of the first abortion that they were involved in.” Abortion in the Church Abortion’s prevalence in the church is both heartbreaking and confusing. A 2025 study found that about 20 percent of regular churchgoers had “paid for, encouraged, or chosen to have an abortion.” “Interestingly, there was no significant correlation between being born again, how often one attends church, or how frequently one reads the Bible and the likelihood of having had an abortion,” the study authors wrote. “Christians understand that it’s a human life and that abortion is probably wrong,” DiCaro said. “But that doesn’t change the conditions that are causing them to consider abortion in the first place. They might feel as though they don’t have the finances, they’re not set in their education, they’ll have to drop out of school, or they don’t have support from the father of the baby. All that stuff hits like a ton of bricks, whether you’re going to church or not.” Care Net president and CEO Roland Warren and Vincent DiCaro discussing the life issue on Care Net’s CareCast podcast / Courtesy of Care Net It doesn’t help that Christians are increasingly unclear about abortion. In 2025, less than half of churchgoers described themselves as pro-life (43 percent), down from 63 percent in 2023. They meant it—just 26 percent in 2025 said abortion is never acceptable, down from 35 percent in 2023. And only 51 percent said the Bible is clear and decisive about the morality of aborting an unborn child, down from 65 percent two years ago. “We have to move the pro-life argument away from politics and recapture the imago Dei argument in the pulpit,” Newell said. “The whole reason Christ Jesus came is because life is sacred. If our lives didn’t matter, Jesus never would have had to come. . . . The imago Dei, the sanctity of life, is not complementary to the gospel. It is part of the gospel advancement—God made life in his image, redeems life in his image, so that life in his image will flourish and make disciples.” Good theology is the thing sturdy enough to stand up against a cheap, readily available, private abortion experience, Whitehurst said. “Ultimately, abortion is a heart issue,” she said. “How we see God, and then how we see our situations and his hand in our lives, even with those unplanned things, plays a big role.” A First Baptist Orlando volunteer finds supplies for a young mother before a church service. / Courtesy of Care Net She remembers a new father weeping as he saw his child on an ultrasound for the first time. The ultrasound tech was able to lead both parents to the Lord that day. “They realized this was bigger than them—a life was there,” Whitehurst said. “It was a miraculous thing that they were experiencing.” That’s why she keeps going to work, in a state where abortion is outlawed and yet unplanned pregnancies haven’t stopped. It’s why DiCaro keeps laying out a vision of churches that want not just a living baby but whole-life discipleship for the entire family. It’s why Newell isn’t discouraged by the changing stance of politicians or parties. “Because ultimately I know who the Author of life is,” he said. “In this world, we’re always going to have trouble. But the Word says, ‘Take heart, because Christ Jesus has overcome the world.’ God also tells us to give this world a taste of what heaven will feel like, so that those that are perishing may taste it. And in the end, our God—the Creator, Author, and Sustainer of life—wins.”

Ella Cook, a native of Mountain Brook, Alabama, died tragically as a result of the senseless violence at Brown University on December 13, 2025. I was privileged to know Ella. She grew up in a youth ministry where I served as leader, and when reflecting on this precious young woman’s life, I’ve said repeatedly, “Ella is a model of the kind of young Christian we parents and church leaders are trying to form in today’s world.” What qualities do I have in mind that have encouraged me to repeat this refrain? What attributes that marked God’s work in Ella will also mark other young Christians poised for influence in today’s culture? Here are four. Tethered to the Local Church In an age of individualism and anti-institutionalism, Ella loved her local church, the Cathedral Church of the Advent. She grew up attending every Sunday. In summers when she participated in programs abroad, she found a church to attend while away. When she went to college, she sought a gospel-preaching church and attended religiously. What attributes that marked God’s work in Ella will also mark other young Christians poised for influence in today’s culture? Not only did she attend church regularly, but Ella was also integrated into the church body in a cross-generational way. Ella faithfully served in the children’s ministry at the Advent, where both the kids and parents knew her. And at age 18, she signed up for her church’s women’s retreat and was intentional about making friends with people from different generations. On a hike at that retreat, a woman in her 40s became friends with Ella, and the two routinely corresponded afterward. Studies show that one dangerous trend among young Christians today is a low regard for the local church. A young person may identify as a follower of Jesus, have a personal devotional life, and espouse biblical beliefs, but too often she lives divorced from a body of believers. The Bible says Christians are defined by communion with God and others (1 Cor. 12; 1 Pet. 2:1–12). This is countercultural in our Western world of secular individualism. One of the most important values to instill in young Christians is commitment to and regular participation in the local church. Ella modeled this as well as any young person I’ve known. Humble with Godly Character In today’s world, it can feel like the people who receive the most airtime and attention are the most obnoxious. This is true even among Christians. There’s a genre of social media videos that highlights abrasive street evangelists who yell at crowds but then act like martyrs when they receive a negative response. Too many secular people think of believers like the caricatures, as abrasive and self-righteous, as lacking godly character and seemingly more intent on winning arguments or promoting an unbiblical political ideology than on encouraging people to trust Christ. Ella, by contrast, gained her peers’ respect, regardless of their worldview, because of her quiet selflessness. You’d never hear from her about her accomplishments or accolades (though there were many). But everyone noticed her modest spirit and moral integrity. To those close to her, she wasn’t reticent to confess her faults and sins. Her notable humility was a by-product of internalizing the gospel. Few qualities win credibility like humility. People respect and admire it. No one criticizes it. Yet it’s hard to find humility in our culture. It comes from knowing our place as creatures before the Creator and from seeing the grace we’ve received through Christ’s blood despite our sins. Humility is perhaps the most significant attribute parents and church leaders want young Christians to possess. You don’t grow in this virtue by effort but by faith in what the Bible teaches about God, humanity, and salvation. Committed to Gentle Evangelism I’ve never had a student in my ministry as committed to evangelism as Ella. Wherever she went, she shared Christ with her peers. She did so relationally, listening to others and conveying respect for them while boldly sharing her faith without any dilution. By God’s grace, I want to equip young people with conviction and passion for sharing the gospel, young people who do so both without compromise and in a way that honors others. This is needed in any day and age, but especially in our time when public discourse both online and in the media is so uncharitable and ineffective. The apostle Peter calls believers to share their faith with “gentleness and respect” (1 Pet. 3:15). We cultivate this posture when we recognize that while we have the message of salvation to share, we aren’t the Savior. We cultivate this posture when we, like Ella, respect those with whom we’re sharing truth and treat them kindly—as people with dignity, not as objects to fix. We cultivate this posture by learning humility and by recognizing that the only righteousness we have came as a gift of grace. Well-Educated in Doctrinal Truth Ella attended an Ivy League school. She had her choice of some of the world’s most prestigious institutions. She was exceedingly intelligent. But in addition to her educational excellence at school, she used her brain to study God’s Word. Ella combined genuine personal faith with a robust Christian intellect. And she never used her intellect as a weapon to win arguments but as a way to compellingly communicate the hope of the resurrection. Many young people in the West today don’t have a coherent worldview they live by. As a result, they struggle to find meaning in life, and they can’t think through suffering and evil in a way that yields hope. Sadly, they lack resilience and purpose. I want to raise up young people with conviction and passion for sharing the gospel, who do so both without compromise and in a way that honors others. If we train our kids to live in light of Scripture’s narrative of redemption, they’ll be pillars of hope for the world. They’ll be able to make sense of the chaos around them with stability, in a way that models the peace for which those around them yearn. When we teach doctrine to the next generation, we’re not merely giving them the right Sunday school answers. We’re grounding them in a steady foundation that will hold them amid life’s turbulence. Such stability may be the most appealing quality a Christian can offer the world today. I’m grateful to have known Ella Cook. God used her character, humility, and meekness to challenge me. Her courage as a light for Christ in difficult environments has emboldened me. Through his Word and by the grace of his Spirit, may God use us to form more and more young people with the same character.

Courtney Doctor talks with Colleen Chao about how her faith has grown and flourished through living with a terminal cancer diagnosis. They discuss the difficulty of knowing she may not live to see her son grow up, what keeps her clinging to Jesus, and what excites her about the life to come. Colleen expounds a rich theology of suffering accompanied by contagious joy in the Lord. Resource Mentioned: She Laughs at the Time to Come (Colleen’s story) Related Resources: The Secret to Living Hope in the Face of Death How to Help When Cancer Strikes Your Church Experiencing God in Your Affliction Review: “Out of the Shadow World” by Colleen Chao Discussion Questions: 1. How do you practice “setting your mind on things above” amid ordinary life or in seasons of suffering? 2. What circumstances or experiences have made you more aware of your limitations? 3. How have you experienced the closeness of your Shepherd in dark or fearful seasons? In what specific ways has his nearness been your good? 4. What does it mean to think of suffering as something you’re “entrusted with”? How does that perspective shape the way you steward hard experiences? 5. As you think about eternity with God, what excites or comforts you most about the life to come? 6. What does it look like to entrust those we love most to God when the future feels uncertain? 7. What truths from God’s Word have most strengthened or steadied you in seasons of suffering?

Conservatives want to be left alone. They have families, jobs, churches, hobbies. They love their country, but they stay busy and comfortable. Politics feels like something for other people — activists, ideologues, the perpetually aggrieved. The left may dream of tearing the system down in a fiery Marxist revolution, but one solid vote every couple of years or so should keep the crazies in check. Then it’s back to work, back to Little League, back to the barbecue.That belief sustained many on the right for decades. It has become a liability.A vote followed by retreat no longer suffices. Saving the country requires engagement, sacrifice, and the willingness to place political reality over personal comfort.The sunshine conservative lives under the assumption that the American system more or less runs itself, that excesses can be corrected with minimal effort, and that power remains constrained by shared norms. Those assumptions no longer hold. The times that try men’s souls have returned, and the sunshine conservative is about to discover that comfort carries a cost.For years, a bipartisan consensus reshaped the country through mass immigration. Call it conspiracy if you like, but incentives explain it better.Democrats saw a reliable path to permanent power. Immigrants arrive without wealth, social capital, or political leverage. They gravitate toward the party that promises redistribution and protection. Every program — health care, housing, loans, benefits — tilts toward newcomers. Open borders grow government, entrench dependency, and expand the progressive patronage machine.Republican incentives looked different but proved just as corrosive. Conservative voters opposed mass immigration, legal and illegal alike, but party leadership feared one thing above all else: being called racist.Progressive programming successfully framed the idea of America as a homeland — run for the benefit of its people — as morally suspect. Any attempt to articulate national interest became “nativism.” Chamber of Commerce Republicans exploited that fear, importing millions of workers willing to accept suppressed wages while silencing critics through ritual denunciation.While the country changed, conservatives largely stood aside. The transformation unsettled them, but lawn care got cheaper and food delivery faster. The sunshine conservative preferred comfort to confrontation. Political activism felt vulgar. Winners, after all, make money and buy boats.Now the bill has come due.Human trafficking. Drug flows. Violent crime. Overcrowded hospitals. Stagnant wages. Exploding housing costs. The social fabric frays under the weight of policies designed to benefit elites while disciplining everyone else.RELATED: Aristotle’s ancient guide to tyranny reads like a modern manual Blaze Media IllustrationThe Trump administration’s effort to remove the worst offenders collides with a system addicted to inflow. Obvious solutions exist — employer enforcement, E-Verify, ending the H-1B visa scam, taxing remittances heavily — but those measures threaten donor interests. Instead, enforcement proceeds piecemeal, state by state, criminal by criminal.Each attempt to exercise authority triggers panic among mainstream conservatives. They fret about optics. They warn about norms. They clutch abstractions while the left shoots at or runs over federal agents, storms churches, and treats public order as optional. Establishment voices agonize over power even as their opponents wield it without hesitation.A friend of mine returned from the Global War on Terror with what doctors labeled post-traumatic stress disorder. The diagnosis missed the point. His trauma didn’t come from violence alone. It came from clarity. He had lived in a world where stakes mattered, where power operated openly, where failure carried consequences. Returning to a culture submerged in therapeutic language, pronouns, and safe spaces proved disorienting. Everyone else lived inside a fantasy and demanded that he play along.Eventually, he learned to stay quiet. He still regards much of what surrounds him as childish and unmoored from reality.That reaction mirrors what many feel toward sunshine conservatives. They cling to a story about politics that bears no resemblance to how power functions. When confronted with evidence, they demand that reality conform to their narrative. It never does. That narrative existed to pacify them, to make them manageable. They defend it with the same fervor with which the left defends its own delusions.Each crisis cracks the façade. An assassination. A church invasion. A city surrendered to disorder. Every time, a few more conservatives wake up — only to be swarmed by those demanding a return to small talk about tax rates and process. The problem never lay with those who saw the danger. It lay with those insisting everyone else look away.RELATED: The left’s ‘fascism’ routine is a permission slip for violence Blaze Media IllustrationThe question no longer concerns policy tweaks. It concerns survival. One side believes the country deserves preservation and repair. The other treats it as illegitimate and disposable. That divide cannot be bridged by nostalgia or proceduralism.The sunshine conservative era has ended. Saving the country requires engagement, sacrifice, and the willingness to place political reality over personal comfort. It requires choosing the future of one’s children over quarterly returns. It requires the disciplined use of power to defend the nation’s institutions, borders, and communities — even when that makes polite society uncomfortable.A vote followed by retreat no longer suffices. The fantasy that it does belongs with other comforting lies. The right can either shed it or be ruled by those who never believed it in the first place.

Top O' the BriefingHappy Thursday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. (In preparation for a whirlwind book tour, the Sine Qua Non Sequitur is earning an advanced certificate in Whiskey-Inspired Lederhosen…

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“At lunchtime, the teens in my California suburban high school would gather outside in ‘the quad’ around the tree or bench where their friend/identity group would cluster.” – Cammie Toloui     Cammie graduated from Ygnacio Valley High School in Concord, California in 1986. A first-generation Iranian-American artist born and raised in California. She holds a degree in photojournalism from San Francisco State University, where she also taught photography. In the mid-1980s, she took these pictures of her classmates, and reminds us what life was like back then: “Are you looking for the goths? It’s that tree over there. The jocks who like to chew tobacco and talk about the game? Those guys are down there adjacent to the heavy metal stoners. The closeted lesbian volleyball players? Nerds? Cholos/Cholas? Punks and weirdos? Cheerleaders? There were so many groups and sub-groups and for the most part everyone stayed in one place. As ever let’s imagine the stories between the pictures. And if you see yourself or someone you knew back then, please get in touch. We’d love to hear your story.     “There was a lot of smoking and ducking from the seagulls who would either shit on you or steal your lunch. If you were particularly unlucky they would eat your lunch and then shit it on you after” – Camille Toloui     “In the four years of high school, I didn’t really stay with one group – which was a bit unusual but it meant I was able to wander between the punks, the stoners, the heavy metal dudes, the volleyball players and whoever else.” Partly this was because I was such an awkward hippy radical weirdo that I didn’t fit neatly into any one group, but also because I started an underground newspaper and took art and writing submissions from anyone who had something to say. This enabled me to break through the barriers of identity groupings that were so much a part of the California high school experience. – Camille Toloui       “My teenage years were about protest. I had already gone through an intense period of satanic heavy metal drug-filled rebellion in my 12-14 ages and came out the other side as an angry anti-nuclear, anti-Reagan, anti-apartheid birkenstock-wearing hippy girl. I liked going to Berkeley and San Francisco on the weekends for protests and taking pictures.” – Camille Toloui     “In high school I was learning how to develop film and make prints in the darkroom. I was very heavily under the influence of Diane Arbus at the time and I think that’s what inspired me to bring my camera to the quad at lunch time. I remember one day bringing a borrowed long lens that had a focus problem and that’s what set me going doing close-up portraits, even after I switched to a wider, fixed lens.” – Camille Toloui     “I’ve always loved these portraits, but I love them even more now that they’ve aged – and I’ve aged – and I’ve changed from cynical to sentimental about that time and place.” – Camille Toloui     All images and text ©2026 Cammie Toloui. You can se more of Cammie’s work at her website cammiet.com  The post Portraits Of Ygnacio Valley High School Students in Concord, California 1984 appeared first on Flashbak.