"The issue of human life and its preservation and development is one that begins with conception and ends only when God calls a person back to himself in death. If we are consistent, then, we must be concerned about life from beginning to end. It is like a seamless garment; either it all holds together or eventually it all falls apart." Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, 1975
This is a resource page and blog on life issues and the impact on both individuals and society. It is meant to be comprehensive for all who are concerned with life issues. Therefore, a web site listed may not be in agreement with the Catholic teaching on a particular life issue.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Ex-Planned Parenthood Staffer: Stop Killing Babies, Hurting Women in Abortion

Ex-Planned Parenthood Staffer: Stop Killing Babies, Hurting Women in Abortion

by Caterine Adair | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 5/28/13 7:09 PM

Dear Clinic Escort,

Today I saw you, with your bright orange vest emblazoned with ESCORT on the front and back. You refused to make eye contact with me. I saw your gritty determination as you grabbed arms with that young woman and whispered in her ear, “Ignore them,” you said, “Don’t look at them, they are here to intimidate you, to scare you. I’ll keep you safe, don’t worry.” You walked quickly, head up, steel in your eyes, never letting up your grip on her arm. Her head was down, following your lead, mutely keeping up with your fast trot to the abortionist.
You ushered her in through the doors and soon emerged, alone, smiling at us triumphantly, a glimmer of malice in your eye, a smirk of arrogance and joy at having bested us – another woman you saved from the anti-choice fanatics. You rejoin the other escorts, laughing and joking, until the next car pulls up, and your face resumes the mask of the militant soldier, ready to do battle for women’s reproductive rights.

As I watched you I wondered, have you ever been inside the clinic? Have you ever been in the waiting room, filled with the silence of trepidation and fear? Have you listened to the stifled tears?

Have you ever been in the counseling room? This place, where instead of asking questions and listening, the worker masks the truth, or outright lies about the third life in the room, the life growing inside the woman’s womb? Have you seen her sad and scared eyes? Have you asked her why she is there? Do you know if she is being pressured or forced into this abortion, if she is safe at home…all the questions she won’t be asked inside the clinic? Does she know about all of the help available to her if she keeps the baby? Does she know how many couples would love to adopt her baby?

My dear Clinic Escort, have you been there for the ultrasound, where you can see the fully formed baby kicking its arms and legs? Have you heard the worker tell her it is just a bunch of cells? A blob? A product of conception? Have you been with her, holding her hand as she screams in pain, ignored by a doctor who doesn’t even know her name? Have you heard the suction machine, watch as the blood, tissue, and body parts flow from her body into a cold jar? Have you heard the sound of the currette scraping her uterus? Have you seen the body parts – an arm, a leg, a piece of a rib cage, poured into a baggie as though it were scraps of meat?

Have you sat with her in the recovery room as she stares off into space, desperate to get away from this place so she never has to think of it again? Have you been with her through the depression and the anxiety that plague her after the abortion? The breakup of her relationship? Have you helped her through her drug addiction, her binge drinking? Have you been there when she is unable to bond with her children? When her marriage falls apart? Will you be there when she attempts suicide? Will you be at her funeral when she succeeds?

Dear Clinic Escort, look into my eyes. They have seen things you could never imagine. Things that have made me scream in the middle of the night. Things that are never discussed in the intellectualized, feminist world of abortion rights. Because while you see a job well done when you usher her through those doors, her nightmare is just beginning.

LifeNews Note: Catherine Adair is a former staffer for Planned Parenthood, who is now pro-life. She says, “I used to be prochoice and worked for Planned Parenthood. Now I speak about the horror of working in an abortion clinic,and my personal experience with abortion. I hope to be able to bring more people to the truth.”



Thursday, May 9, 2013

Existence

“There are no words to excuse the killing of innocents.”  Barak Obama to the United Nations 2012-10

A  strange quote to come from a person who fully supports unlimited abortion.  One could argue that he was speaking of the loss of civilian life in the civil was in Syria.  But those words ought to be able to stand alone.  One could argue that the unborn do not qualify as people and therefore do not belong in the category of ‘innocents”.  When one is conceived, one begins to exist.  At that point no one else has the right to determine whether one is entitled to exist, unless one empowers another with that right (i.e. living, DNR, etc.).  One’s existence begins at conception and at death, physically ends, but continues on with God.  He, as the source of our existence, is the only One entitled to the power of life or death.

Pro-Life Without God, by Kelsey Hazzard

Pro-Life Without God  
May 1, 2013 at 8:30 am 

As the president of Secular Pro-Life, I have been asked to present the non-religious case against abortion.  But actually, you’ve probably heard it already.  Many people who hear the secular arguments against abortion simply fail to recognize them as secular, because they expect pro-life apologetics to have a religious source.  Expectations powerfully color the way we see reality.  Discard these expectations, however, and you will soon find that most arguments against abortion do not require the existence of a god.
Call Me An Extremist

We start from a premise that is shared by many religions and by secular humanism: the lives of human individuals are exceedingly valuable.  A religious person might express this concept as the “sanctity” of life, while a secular person might refer to the possession of fundamental human rights.  The core value judgment is the same.

We also make a factual assertion that human individuals begin their lives inside the womb, when sperm meets egg.  I began my life as a single-celled zygote; so did you.  The scientific consensus on this point is overwhelming.  Frankly, denying that life begins at conception is on par with denying the theory of natural selection; the evidence is that strong.  And what’s more, the leaders of the abortion rights movement know it.  While some rank-and-file abortion advocates will insist that the unborn aren’t alive, or are mere “blobs of tissue,” you will not hear such ignorance from the heads of abortion advocacy groups.  Nor will you hear it from abortion doctors.  Intellectually honest people on both sides agree that abortion kills a living human individual.

The question raised by abortion is whether the living unborn human being is part of the human community, deserving of rights like older humans; or whether living unborn human beings should be treated differently, as objects rather than as persons.

Abortion supporters have suggested various justifications for the latter approach.  None are convincing.  In every case, a consistent application of the justification would allow the killing of some human beings outside the womb.

Consciousness
The most common justification for abortion is that unborn children are unconscious, at least in the early stages of pregnancy when most abortions are done.  Of course, you are unconscious every night when you go to sleep.  People who use this argument do not actually believe that the right to life depends on consciousness.  Probe more carefully, and they will clarify that they feel the right to life depends on an inherent capacity for consciousness.  But don’t unborn children have that capacity?  Consider a woman in a coma, who is expected to come out of the coma in a few months.  Is the unborn child’s situation appreciably different?  In both cases, consciousness is not present in the moment—there is only a potential for consciousness.  If that is a good enough justification for killing a child in the womb, and we’re going to be consistent, then the comatose woman is also a non-person who can be killed “on demand and without apology.”  That can’t be right.

Bodily autonomy
Another common abortion argument is the appeal to bodily autonomy; we’ve all heard the saying “my body, my choice.”  This is sometimes articulated as a belief that in order to have rights, you must not be dependent upon another body for survival.  But as with the consciousness argument, a consistent application of this rule would threaten rights of some born persons.

Other times, the bodily autonomy argument is expressed in terms of consent; you cannot use another person’s body without their permission, and if a woman does not want to be pregnant, the fetus does not have that permission.  If the only way to stop the fetus’ use of its mother’s body is to kill it, so be it.

That argument misses an important point: except in rape situations, the mother had a role in causing the unborn baby’s dependence in the first place.  In that light, it seems unfair to revoke consent—especially when doing so will kill someone!

When pro-lifers make this point, we are usually accused of being anti-sex and using pregnancy as a “punishment.”  That’s untrue.  It’s like saying that if you oppose drunk driving, you’re anti-beer!  Have your fun—just don’t put the lives of others at risk.

Women’s Health
Next, we have the argument that abortion is necessary to promote women’s health.  If abortion is not available on request, they say, women would rather risk harm themselves than allow their child to live.  In support of this theory, they point to the “bad old days of back-alley abortion,” when tens of thousands of women died annually.  This argument is powerful because it appeals to the same value that the pro-life movement does: a desire to save human lives.  The problem is that the women’s health argument has no basis in fact.

In the late 1960s, Dr. Bernard Nathanson co-founded the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Law, which now goes by the name NARAL Pro-Choice America.  Nathanson was an abortionist.  An atheist, he became pro-life when improved ultrasound technology convinced him of the humanity of the unborn child.  (He converted to Catholicism in his old age, and died in 2011.)  During his years as a pro-life atheist, he shared his insights into the early abortion movement—in particular, the messaging it used to shape the abortion debate.  One key tactic was to conjure abortion statistics out of thin air.  In Aborting America, Nathanson wrote:
It was always “5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year.” I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the “morality” of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?
So what are the actual numbers?  According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 39 women died from illegal abortions in 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade.  Maternal deaths from abortion haven’t been in the thousands since the 1930s, before the advent of antibiotics!  For perspective, the CDC reports that 12 women died in legal abortions in 2009; that number is almost certainly low, because many states (notably California) do not report to the CDC.

Gender equality
Finally, abortion advocates resort to an argument of brute force.  Yes, unborn children are human beings.  Yes, abortion kills them.  But abortion is necessary for gender equality: the lives of the unborn are “worth sacrificing,” and we must “be prepared to kill” for the cause.
The fact that this horrific view is being entertained at all actually encourages me.  I believe that these are the dying gasps of a pro-abortion movement that simply has no good arguments left.

As a woman, I do not want my worth to be based on my power to destroy the life of a defenseless child.  And I’m convinced that as long as abortion is accepted, society will never address the true causes of gender inequality.

Conclusion
This article has reviewed just a few of the secular arguments against abortion.  In contrast, purely religious arguments are fairly limited in number; you can argue that abortion violates a divine commandment, or displeases God in some way, or interferes with an act of divine creation.  In my experience, even devoutly religious pro-lifers view these purely religious arguments as secondary.  The secular case for life is the dominant case for life!

Let us again turn to Dr. Nathanson.  His testimony makes it clear that abortion was very deliberately framed as a “religious issue” from the beginning, in order to silence important pro-life voices:So why does this violate our expectations?  Where does the expectation come from, that a belief in God is necessary to oppose abortion?
We fed the media such lies as “we all know that opposition to abortion comes from the hierarchy and not from most Catholics” and “Polls prove time and again that most Catholics want abortion law reform.” And the media drum-fired all this into the American people, persuading them that anyone opposing permissive abortion must be under the influence of the Catholic hierarchy and that Catholics in favor of abortion are enlightened and forward-looking. An inference of this tactic was that there were no non-Catholic groups opposing abortion. The fact that other Christian as well as non-Christian religions were (and still are) monolithically opposed to abortion was constantly suppressed, along with pro-life atheists’ opinions.
It worked then, but it won’t work for much longer.  Pro-abortion leaders are worried that the Millennial generation is rejecting abortion.  Polling confirms their fears.  And nearly a quarter of Millennials have no religion.
In short, the most pro-life and least religious generation is poised to take over the country.  The “religious issue” framework will be completely untenable in such a climate.

Secular Pro-Life is leading the way into a new era of pro-life advocacy.  If you like what we’re doing, please join us and support the cause of life.

Kelsey Hazzard is the founder and president of Secular Pro-Life.  She received her J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.