How a Formerly Pro-Choice Nursing Instructor Discusses Abortion with her Students 

http://thetorchblog.net/?p=996

August 12, 2016 by Cynthia Isabell

 I have been a labor and delivery nurse since 1980. During my thirty-six year nursing career, I have also worked in medical units and for hospice. Being a nurse has allowed me to be present with people through their early beginnings of intrauterine life, and with others through their last breaths. It has been an amazing and rewarding journey. Life is precious and life is fleeting, and life should be respected. I am pro-life. I am also a nursing instructor and have taught obstetrics to hundreds of young men and women, our future nurses. My students often ask me what my opinion is regarding abortion. “Are you pro-life or pro-choice?” they ask me. I do not ask them the same, as I don’t want them to fear that their position might affect how I grade them. When I answer that I am pro-life, the students often assume that my position is based on my religious beliefs, and so they respond that “you can’t force your religious beliefs on everyone else.” I explain that my argument against abortion is based on the anatomy and physiology of pregnancy, and on logical reasoning... Cynthia, DNP, ACNS-BC, is a registered nurse with twenty-eight years experience working in low and high risk obstetrics, and eight years working medical surgical and hospice nursing. Cynthia has also been a nursing instructor for seventeen years. She holds a masters degree in adult health nursing and Doctor of Nursing Practice with a certificate in nursing education.

Report: Coerced Abortion by Feminists for Nonviolent Choices

From:  Introduction

Report: Coerced Abortion

http://www.ffnvc.org/#!reports/cv2u

"In my heart, I was like…‘I can’t lie there and have them kill my baby. I can’t do it.’ And I called [my boyfriend] and I told him, and with choice words he said, ‘No, you’re going to do this. You don’t have a choice. This is what’s going to happen.’ He drove me to the abortion clinic."

–Ashley1
The situation Ashley faced is more common than many people realize. Although 64% of women presenting for post-abortive treatment report feeling coercion to abort2, the topic remains under-researched. This report examines the prevalence of coerced abortion and the situations that contribute to its existence, as well as examining what legal measures are in place to protect women from coercion and/or abuse.

Feminists for Nonviolent Choices is a pro-life, pro-woman organization that seeks to open minds to its philosophy of pro-life feminism: the belief that all people, by virtue of their human dignity, have a right to live without violence from conception to natural death. Coercing women to abort through violence, the threat of violence, or exercising other forms of control over women to coerce them to abort is a clear violation of a woman’s right to live free from compulsion or fear.

http://www.ffnvc.org/#!reports/cv2u

Letter to the President on his inaugural speech

Mr. President,

"'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.' Today we continue a never ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing. That while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by his people here on earth."

The first right mentioned is the right to life. The government and this administration is denying the right to life to millions through the sanction of abortion. By a rough calculation I estimate that 20-25% of a projected population under 40 (without abortion) has died due to abortion. This is using the 2010 census figures for a total of the population under 40, adding in the 55,000,000 aborted and taking a percentage of those 55,000,000 from that total.

"Together we resolve that a great nation must care for the vulnerable and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune." This administration has continued to pledge its support to destroy the most vulnerable, the unborn, instead of supporting those organizations which would nurture both the unborn and their parents through whatever problems they may be facing. They are out there. See my blog http://tochooselife.blogspot.com/ assembled from a week of book and internet searches.

"Thank you, God Bless you, and may He forever bless these United States of America." Why should God bless a country which blatantly ignores one of His basic commandments, "Thou Shall NOT Kill"?

A politician, who says that he is Christian, must act on his beliefs in the policies he proposes, and the fruit of his beliefs is seen in the policies he proposes. The fruit of your policies is abortion anytime, anywhere, for whatever reason. I see nothing Christian, or remotely ethical, in that.

Our Bodies, Our Consciences, By Kathryn Jean Lopez

February 4, 2013 12:00 A.M.

We are not alone. We can’t afford to pretend we are.

 

 

On the morning of the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s infamous Roe v. Wade ruling, I felt a chill. And it wasn’t brought on by the appropriate bitterly cold weather that particular January morning. After Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, some 500 or so New Yorkers walked through the streets of midtown Manhattan, in front of God, man, and Grand Central Station, praying the Rosary. Our prayers were for life and love and mercy. Our prayers were not in judgment of others but that we may do better, that women and men may see better options than abortion, that the hurt may be healed, that God may forgive us for letting anyone think she is alone and has no choice but the death of her child.

 

The chill was brought on by the knowledge that some of the commuters streaming into Grand Central knew the pain of abortion all too well. By the certainty that someone, on her morning commute, was thinking that was her only option. By the sharing in a community’s pain and guilt and sorrow.

We tend to live our lives masked in a veil of the imperial self. We pretend that we live alone. But as alone as we might sometimes feel, we make decisions that affect others. We need one another.
We do realize this, on some level. We’re decades into a welfare state premised on the idea that the government is our safety net. But the government cannot be a brother. The government cannot be a mother and a father. Where love thrives is in a flourishing civil society. That is where we flourish. Where our dreams are. Where we get the support that allows us to believe they can be fulfilled.

Our problems today run so deep. Now is the time to take a few steps back. Not to turn back the clock. But to reflect. To talk about some of the most contentious issues now that we are past the frenzy of a presidential election campaign.

Our problems won’t all be solved through legislative action. And legislative action, while it may sometimes be crucial, can’t be maximized without a fuller context. Congress may vote to defund Planned Parenthood, but we can’t assume that the political message that vote sends will cause the culture to change — that people will suddenly remember the poisonous eugenics upon which that organization was founded, that we will celebrate and protect human dignity, live chastely, and see adoption as a brilliant and generous option. A congressional vote is not a magic wand. There are so many steps that need to precede and follow it.

In a new book, Fill These Hearts, author Christopher West works on helping us with the backstory of our lives, a starting point for changing the terms of our debates and untangling our confusions. “Consider,” he writes, “the idea that our bodies tell a story that reveals, as we learn how to read it, the very meaning of existence and the path to the ultimate satisfaction of our deepest desire.”

“To call God ‘Father’ with a sincere heart is to recognize him as the ultimate origin of every good gift and to rest in his benevolent providence, trusting unflinchingly — despite life’s many sorrows and sufferings — that God does indeed have a perfect plan for our satisfaction. To call God ‘Father’ is to believe wholeheartedly that, in due time, he will provide precisely that for which we ache.” West quotes Psalm 145: “You give them their food at the proper time. You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing.”

West makes the point that our bodies and our souls are not separate things, and that our very physical design speaks to our creation and destination. “In the biblical understanding, there exists a profound unity between that which is physical and that which is spiritual. This means that our bodies are not mere shells in which our true ‘spiritual selves’ live. We are a profound unity of body and soul, matter and spirit. In a very real way, we are our bodies.”
West writes as a Christian, but perceiving a person as an integrated whole does not depend on being a Christian, or a believer of any sort. Nor does understanding that men and women are different and complementary, and that that is a good thing. However, we can no longer take for granted that everyone understands that, let alone accepts, embraces, even celebrates it. Not when our federal health-care policy treats a woman’s fertility as a disease, a condition that she is expected to medicate away in order to achieve freedom and equality. Not when we are sending women into combat.

The world-famous former mayor of New York Ed Koch, who died just last week, was good friends with John Cardinal O’Connor. In 1989 they collaborated on a book, His Eminence and Hizzoner, in which Mayor Koch wrote: “The future of our nation depends on our ability to inculcate a strong sense of morality in our young people. That moral sense should be based on philosophical, ethical and religious teachings, which are the underpinnings of conscience. The way to oppose abortion is by challenging the conscience of those who advocate it. If the battle cannot be won at the level of conscience, it cannot be won.”

But what is conscience? What is right and wrong, and who are we and why are we? If we do not agree that there are answers to these questions — even if we don’t agree on what those answers are — we will never have a constructive debate about abortion, whether in terms of policy or of culture. That is the foundational work we need to return to. No election campaign is ever going to be better without it. Our culture is never going to be renewed without it. No lives are going to be truly redeemed without it. We won’t start making sense again without it. The dark bitter cold of winter will be warmed by the renewal that comes with embracing life, living life lovingly, supporting life, letting someone know she is not alone.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online. This column is available exclusively through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association. She is a director of Catholic Voices USA.