Pro-life blog buzz 6-4-13
by Susie Allen, host of the blog, Pro-Life in TN, and Kelli
We welcome your suggestions for additions to our Top Blogs (see tab on right side of home page)! Email Susie@jillstanek.com.
- Big Blue Wave discusses Canada’s attempt to curb sex selection abortions by requiring that women obtaining ultrasounds have a doctor’s requisition and be at least 20 weeks gestation. Undercover operations have shown ultrasound facilities willing to ignore the law.
- Clinic Quotes points out a perfect example of the extreme pro-abortion view by quoting attorney Eve Gartner, who argues for Medicaid coverage for abortions:
My impression is that people don’t really understand the fact that they will save more money by funding all Medicaid abortions than just paying for life-threatening cases. Twenty-five percent of those people who might have Medicaid-funded abortions have children instead… and then people are paying for pre-natal care, childbirth and probably public assistance for the child.
- New Wave Feminists has a guest post by Melaina Lausen (pictured left), who was born to a drug-addicted mother and lived on public assistance as a child. Lausen responds to the false argument used by abortion proponents that states, “I would rather pay for someone’s abortion than to pay to raise their child for eighteen years”:
After 18 years of living on welfare and having an abusive childhood I am a contributing member of society today. I vote, pay taxes, volunteer in the community, and try to spread a message of hope and change to others.
- At Coming Home, Dr. Gerard Nadal wonders if the Catholic Church has decided to surrender in the culture wars on the issues of abortion, contraception, and homosexuality. Recent revelations about the Archdiocese of New York’s willingness to pay for union employees’ contraceptives and abortions, along with silence on other issues, have been disheartening:
In this Year of Faith, as our churches continue to empty, an unsolicited thought for our leaders. If fundamental moral truths and goods are not worth fighting for, then don’t be surprised when many find that there isn’t much worth staying for.
- American Life League’s Judie Brown believes the Catholic Church’s lack of “moral clarity” in social issues may lead to acquiescence on the HHS Mandate:
These [court] decisions and the guarded acquiescence of the Catholic Church in both cases set the stage for what will undoubtedly be a USCCB cave-in on the Obama mandate. This is the most likely scenario in view of the fact that the USCCB historically filed amicus briefs, dubbed religious liberty briefs on the website, but offered no further opposition once the courts ruled in these cases.
- At The Public Discourse, Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association explains what abstinence education (or Sexual Risk Avoidance education) really is and how it is making great strides in affecting the sexual decisions of teens and young adults, despite the removal of nearly all federal funding:
According to CDC data from the National Survey of Family Growth, the proportion of teenagers ages fifteen to seventeen who have never had sex has risen from 62 percent in 1995 to 73 percent in 2006-2010 among females, and from 56.9 percent to 72 percent for males. These are very substantial gains during the period in which SRA programs have been widely implemented.
- Down on the Pharm says that while worrying about its citizens ingesting too much sugar, New York City has no problem with teenagers having abortions without parental consent. The health department has designed an app that tells children where to get birth control and abortions on their own:
The App links a video of New York girl, “Samantha”, who talks about boinking with her boyfriend, and wishing that she were also doing it with her [“hot”] girlfriend too.
- In a recent blog roundup, Real Choice says abortion proponents are up in arms over Mexico’s effort to prosecute women who obtain chemical abortions, fearing that if something goes wrong, women will be too afraid to seek treatment:
[I]nternational abortion proponents want to distribute Misoprostol to pregnant women in countries that lack the medical facilities to treat the bleeding they fear will kill women in Mexico. Which is it? Is Misoprostol safe to hand out to women who won’t get treatment for hemorrhage, or is it dangerous?
- At Bound4Life, Ellie Saul encourages pro-lifers to pray the “Prayer of Jabez” for the preborn:
Oh that You would bless the unborn in the womb indeed. Enlarge their borders and preserve their lives beyond the womb, in the name of Jesus. May Your hand be with the babies in the womb, and that You would protect them from evil abortion and deliver them from the pain they would have had to endure so that it would not hurt them!
- Live Action presents the story of Kristi Hofferber, an adoptee who didn’t learn until age 30 that her birth mother had been the victim of incest at the hands of her father – and that she was born as a result. Her amazing story demonstrates why the life of the child should not be sacrificed for the crimes of the father:
[youtube]http://youtu.be/1_CT5O2VBsA[/youtube]
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
I’m afraid you have some misinformation there. There is no law in Canada against sex-selective abortions. There is no law in Canada at all regarding abortion.
Thanks, Melissa. Changed the wording.
After reading the article and not living in Canada, I was confused as to the laws and searched it and found conflicting info. Most of the searches indicated that up to 20 weeks-no pbl. but restrictions after 20 weeks.
http://www.prochoice.org/canada/regional.html
http://www.canadiansforchoice.ca/optionsabortion.html
“After 18 years of living on welfare and having an abusive childhood I am a contributing member of society today. I vote, pay taxes, volunteer in the community, and try to spread a message of hope and change to others.”
This is good, and I get why she would try to counteract the message that children born into bad families just end up draining the system, but I think it misses the point. Even if a person is going to grow up and cost society a lot of money, either through welfare or drug addiction services or counseling because of the trauma of abuse, that doesn’t mean it’s suddenly okay to kill the child in utero because of that. I get why she would want to point out how well she is doing, but I fear it just leaves the pro-choicers an “in” to say “well that’s rare, most of these kids end up costing money and causing problems”. It is true, children growing up in poverty and abuse are statistically far more likely to be criminals, addicts, in poverty, and even become abusers themselves. We can’t deny that.
But what we can deny is that it’s okay to give these kids a preemptive death sentence rather than try to find solutions to help them become functioning members of society. Because of my childhood I am far less of a functioning member of society than I probably could have been, and my addictions and mental issues cost the state plenty of money. But that never justified my death, before birth or otherwise. I don’t have to earn my right to be alive by doing better.
I get what’s she is trying to say, and I do applaud her for doing so well. I know that she isn’t trying to imply that abortion is okay if the kid isn’t going to end up doing as well as her. But I wish people would focus more on the fact that it doesn’t matter if the kids in these situations are going to turn out poorly, that still never justifies their deaths, and as a society we need to find real solutions for it.
Susie Allen, abortion is legal throughout all nine months for any reason. But provinces vary with respect to how it’s funded and whether a doctor is willing to do it.
The catholic church doesn’t have to be ‘surrendering’ anything. Each and every member of the catholic church is perfectly entitled to not have an abortion, to not use contraceptives and to not act on whatever their sexuality may be.
If the churches are empty maybe its because people don’t want to do so.
No matter the conception all children have a right to life.
I’m grateful to no longer be a Catholic, but I ache for the Catholic Church. I hate to see it going down the same road that the Episcopal organization did. Such a crying shame.
I read Melaina’s post too, Jack.
It was hard, very hard to read.
I didn’t arrive at the same conclusion you did, but it is stunning how people in that situation even get out of bed in the mornings.
” It was hard, very hard to read.
I didn’t arrive at the same conclusion you did, but it is stunning how people in that situation even get out of bed in the mornings.”
Oh, I couldn’t read most of it, just like the first couple paragraphs and skipped to the last few. I wasn’t really trying to criticize her, I just think that sometimes people (pro-choicers) need to be reminded that even if people don’t do as well as her after living through terrible circumstances they still are worth protecting. Sadly, she’s an outlier, most aren’t doing quite as well. By all accounts she seems pretty amazing.
Has this bunch become so enlightened that now we are starting to talk about “legitimate incest”?
Denise how in the world do you go from a story about incestuous rape (what was linked in this blog post) to talking about consenting incest? That’s… really an offensive tangent. I don’t have stats but I would guess 90+ percent of incest happens in abusive situations, it’s taboo and unnatural for a reason, most healthy humans don’t engage in such activities.
“I would rather pay for someone’s abortion than to pay to raise their child for eighteen years After 18 years of living on welfare and having an abusive childhood I am a contributing member of society today. I vote, pay taxes, volunteer in the community, and try to spread a message of hope and change to others.”
Hope=Kill your baby. Nice.
After 18 years of public assistance she is a contributing member of society, so now she wants to pay it forward, right? Wrong. Now she’s a narcissistic beast with a cold, ungrateful heart, who would rather see babies slaughtered than to extend to them the same graciousness the taxpayers extended to her.
Having grown up poor, I’ve seen breathtaking generosity from people who gave all that they had (which wasn’t much) to help people who had even less. Poverty reveals character, sadly so for Ms. Lausen.
Gerard Nadal, you read that wrong. She is responding to OTHERS that say they’d rather pay for an abortion than support someone raising their child for 18 years.
After 18 years of public assistance she is a contributing member of society, so now she wants to pay it forward, right? Wrong. Now she’s a narcissistic beast with a cold, ungrateful heart, who would rather see babies slaughtered than to extend to them the same graciousness the taxpayers extended to her.
Dr. Nadal, you completely misread her. She is PRO-LIFE and believes no one should decide that someone isn’t worth living just because they’re on welfare.
What a stark contrast between the quotes by Eve Gardner and the false argument quoted by Melaina Lawson, and Prayer of Jabez for the Preborn and the Live Action story. The contrast between death and life.
I have saved that Prayer of Jabez for the Preborn. Ya’ll may be seeing a post from me on the prayer of Jabez as it relates to the preborn soon. :)
Many years ago, prior to Roe v. Wade, I read an article about illegal abortions. A woman who had had an illegal abortion said, “I had the abortion because I couldn’t marry the father because he was my brother.”
I was startled by the incest. However, I also thought that even if she couldn’t marry the man who impregnated her, she might have been able to marry SOMEONE. IMO, throughout history, families have often started because pregnant women misled men into believing they were the impregnators. Men benefit a great deal from the stability of marriage and the baby is raised in a two-parent family. The mother-child bond isn’t broken as it would be through adoption. Since fathers don’t carry and give birth, a non-biological father who is a “social father” from birth wouldn’t necessarily be inferior to a bio father. If a bio father isn’t possible, then a bio mom and social father might be best.
Why didn’t this woman just carry to term and then place for adoption? It’s possible that this might have something to do with the big belly. People around a big-bellied woman tend to expect her to have a baby after she gives birth rather than have placed a baby for adoption. Of course, I’m just speculating and the big belly may be irrelevant.
Denise, seriously. Enough with the “consensual incest” obsession. Most incest is rape and coercion, not consensual, and your little anecdotes are just weird. Are you trying to be offensive or do you really think there’s some huge underground of people getting pregnant by consenting relationships with their dads and brothers?
Oh, and Denise? From what I’ve read on the subject, “consensual” incestuous relationships a lot of times began when the younger person was a young child. So what people seem to think is “consent” when they are an older teenager or adult is really just PTSD, learned helplessness and a form of Stockholm Syndrome. It’s not really fair to accuse people of consenting to those type of relationships when they were basically trained into it.
@ Jack: Someone writing on abortion stated that the “rape or incest” exception is actually just the rape exception. “Or incest” means teen girls raped by Dad no 40-year-old Moms impregnated by their sons or consensual adult brother-sister incest.
Perhaps we should just say “the rape exception” because that includes cases of incestuous rape.
Did you catch that, Dr. Nadal? Like Kel said, Lausen is actually refuting the pro-choice position. Read her whole post. Gut-wrenching. She really is a fightin’ survivor.