by Kelli

I Am Second features amazing videos of people who have experienced powerful life transformations.

Today, on the 12th anniversary of 9/11, we feature the story of Sujo John, a survivor from the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. From the I Am Second website:

When terrorists hijacked planes and rammed them into the World Trade Center towers on 9/11/2001, his life story was altered. As the walls of the towers came crashing down around him, his wife’s whereabouts unknown, and thousands dying around him, Sujo could only rely upon God’s plan for his life. A plan which became real amidst the death and debris of Ground Zero.

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

I want to have another child, just because I want Milo to have a sibling and have someone to grow with…. My brother and I are so close, and I can’t imagine not giving my son that kind of relationship.

~ Actress Alyssa Milano (pictured with son Milo), People, September 9

[HT: Laura Loo]

by Kelli

We welcome your suggestions for additions to our Top Blogs (see tab on right side of home page)! Email Susie@jillstanek.com.

• 40 Days for Life announces yet another abortion center closing, this time in Midland, Texas which means “[t]hese latest closures bring the number of closed abortion facilities — where 40 Days for Life prayer vigils have been held — to 40!” The campaign begins on September 25. Be sure to look for a prayer vigil location near you.
• American Life League’s Judie Brown highlights the political and moral disconnect in people’s thinking when it comes to killing children in a war and killing children via abortion:
  

  The act of aborting a child in America has been sanitized, politicized, and neutered of all meaning. As American Life League tweeted, “Media has no problem showing dead Syrian children, but won’t show images of aborted preborn children.”

Exactly. And yet there is no difference in the horror of it, the sadness of it, or the cruelty that causes it. But rather than face this ugly act, America turns a blind eye….

Frankly, whether the child resides in war-torn Syria or is a preborn individual growing in America, he is a human being who should be protected by society, defended by the government, and respected as a member of the human family.

• At Americans United for Life, Mailee Smith gives an update on the large amount of cases being brought against Obamacare’s HHS Mandate on contraception:
  

  To date, there are at least 67 cases and over 200 defendants challenging the HHS Mandate. Of those cases, 37 involve for-profit businesses. There have been rulings touching on the merits in 32 of those 37 cases—and courts have ruled in favor of the private businesses 26 times. While the cases, including Armstrong, are far from over, the momentum is clearly in favor of freedom of conscience.

• Bound4Life reposts a Live Action News story about the adoption of a supposedly “unwanted” little boy named Adam, who was born in India with severe physical defects:
  

  When doctors told Adam’s family that they could not just abandon their child, their response was quite frank. His family said they would kill him. His village said they would poison him. So Adam stayed in the hospital and waited for his true family. He didn’t have to wait long….

  Jessica and Raja [Paulraj] are ordinary people who followed God’s calling for them. They saw a child in need of love, of a home, of a family and they provided for him. In this act, the couple is the perfect example of a truly pro-life spirit. A spirit that holds all life as precious and worthy and beautiful.

  Everyone is wanted by someone.

• At Kevin Burke’s Priests for Life blog, a Florida inmate named TJ says he found healing as a post-abortive father through Rachel’s Vineyard:
  

  … I was involved in two abortions because I lived as an irresponsible, arrogant, prideful, selfish, self-centered human being. Those abortions lead me down a road of drugs, alcohol, irresponsible sex, crime and so many other destructive things.How could abortion lead to all that? Because it produces guilt, whether the person realizes it or not, which turns to bad decisions, self-hatred, anger towards others, violence and all kinds of other messed up emotions. While these are taking place the person is in denial, refusing to recognize there is a problem. Or, if he or she does admit to a problem, they don’t know that it is rooted in an abortion that may have taken place years ago. At the time of my abortion experiences I knew none of this.

by Hans Johnson

A typically unbalanced discussion on NOW with Alex Wagner seeks to assure viewers that babies feel no pain until well after 20 weeks’ gestation. So says panel “expert,” abortionist Anne Davis (pictured right), from Physicians for Reproductive Health, who conveniently happens to perform abortions late into pregnancy. According to host Alex Wagner:

We know that this isn’t really of course about fetal pain. It isn’t really even about, I mean, I would say, the protection of life. It’s about a concerted effort to roll back reproductive rights and make it harder and harder and harder for women to exercise control over their own bodies.

Not that it matters anyway, as another MSNBC host believes: “I don’t want to get bogged down [with the issue of fetal pain]. I think a great deal of people would agree that science and that public opinion is on your side,” Craig Melvin told pro-life Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN).

One wonders by what mechanism babies move from the very start of their existence, if it isn’t by an intact nervous system? Perhaps it’s the same magical one that translates them to personhood at birth.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/vRYT0yWzG1g[/youtube]

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

[HT: Kelli; photo via PRH.org]

Birth control is not a woman’s responsibility. Unfortunately, at this point in time, the pill version of birth control — and, according to many rabbis, one of the only halachically acceptable versions of contraceptive — is available for women only. But that doesn’t make fertility a woman’s-only issue. I would be the one who would get pregnant, but it would be our child. Ultimately I’m the one swallowing the pill, but he can and should be just as responsible for reminding me to take it.

Unfortunately, the fact that the contraceptive is usually taken by the woman — at least when it’s not a condom, which for Modern Orthodox women it usually can’t be — means that the entire responsibility of birth control often falls to the woman. That might make sense when the woman is not in a committed relationship, when she might actually end up being solely responsible for raising any resultant child, but in a marriage, birth control should be equally shared by both spouses, as much as that’s possible. The child belongs to both, why not the responsibility for birth control?

~ Simi Lichtman (pictured above, with husband Jeremy), seemingly concerned that Orthodox Jewish women use “lawful” birth control but not so worried about “unlawful” sex outside of marriage, The Jewish Daily Forward, September 7

The Orthodox Jewish beliefs on observing personal sexual purity as laid out by the halakha are listed here.

[Photo via forward.com]

by Kelli

YouTube user entropyofmind (Melissa) recently asked a question directed to pro-life Christians: If we believe that abortion is the tragic taking of a human life and yet believe that children are innocent and go directly to heaven when they die, how can abortion be bad? Doesn’t it spare those aborted children pain?

[youtube]http://youtu.be/yhn3kD7v8WM[/youtube]

While Melissa makes some particularly bad assumptions (pro-lifers don’t help women, etc.), her question is a good one for discussion.

How would you answer her?

Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.

I have been dreading this announcement…. I needed some time before being able to say it.

All we can do is trust in God and know he has a plan for our lives.

~ Lisa Osbourne (pictured with husband Jack Osbourne) announcing the miscarriage of their preborn son via her blog Raddest Mom, as reported by People, September 5

[HT: Laura Loo]

Here were my top five eight (there were so many to choose from!) favorite political cartoons this week. Be sure to vote for your fav in the poll at the bottom of the post!

by Toby Toons…

 a twofer by Henry Payne at Townhall.com…

 by Ben Sargent at GoComics.com…

 by Steve Kelley at Townhall.com…

 by Chip Bok at Townhall.com…

 by Jerry Holbert at Townhall.com…

 by Lisa Benson at Townhall.com…