April - May 2009

On My Mind...   Woe is us. --Pablo

All I have been and keep hearing is what Barack Oh Bummer, (I refuse to call him my president: the thought of doing so stirs the bile in my stomach), is going to do, for example: forcing tax payers to pay for abortion programs here and abroad with our tax dollars; un-sign legislation removing protections from late-term abortions; rescind protections for pro-life doctors, and put in an abortion advocate as Health Secretary; sign the Freedom of Choice Act, in one form or another, on and on… ad infinitum.

The question is what are we going to do while this loose cannon fulfills the promises he made to his supporters? There is no question as to how he won: by promising change, throwing huge amounts of dollars at his campaign, and spinning the truth.  Just what will change remains to be seen. He promoted his agenda of death quietly to the people who could best make it happen, while publicly promising to "balance abortion". Organizations like Planned Parenthood International, NARAL, and poor misguided citizens desperate for a change from the Bush ranch cow-patty way of doing things that has been bringing this country to it's knees. Simple people who did not understand, or were ignorant as to the complex ramifications of Oh Bummer's agenda. 

For instance, he won the black vote because most black Americans were unaware of the over 13 million black babies murdered in and out of the womb since Roe v Wade. And least we forget, he sweetened the pot for money-hungry politicians full of self-interest, special interest, and personal ladder-climbing agendas with a pork-filled "stimulus package" that is destined to further cripple our economy. I won't even begin to address his promises to illegal immigrants. So far, so bad. America was and is ready to accept the idea of a black President... it just elected the wrong candidate.

I am ashamed to be an American, in an America that is so desperate for good change. I will continue to pray for Oh Bummer. 

May God help us all.

Pablo

From The Mail Box... an update from Shawn Carney, National Director of the Spring 2009 40 Days for Life campaign. --Pablo

Dear Pablo,

Many families have been blessed by the mission of 40 Days for Life—and sometimes in the most surprising ways.

Here’s a story about last fall’s campaign that I just learned about this week.

A young man’s mother insisted on two occasions that he drive her to the vigil outside the abortion center as she had signed up for hours in the middle of the night, but did not want to go alone.

When they arrived, the mom went to pray, but the young man refused to get out of the car...

...But the experience still had an impact.

The mother didn’t know it at the time, but her son’s girlfriend was pregnant, and planned to have an abortion—at the very facility where the 40 Days for Life vigil was in progress.

But the young man was so touched by what his mother was doing he called his girlfriend shortly afterward.  Fortunately, she answered the phone—she was at the abortion center for her appointment.

He urged her to get out of that place. And she did.

The baby will be born in July. Praise God!

A family in Kalamazoo, Michigan heard some unexpected wisdom from their 10-year-old daughter, who was at the vigil with them. She was singing and praying, but then stopped and noticed the shoveled pile of old, grimy snow next to the fence at Planned Parenthood.

“I’m glad that God didn’t give them nice, clean, white snow,” she said, “because what they do is like this—not nice.” She added that she really hoped God would hear her prayers, because she wishes that “this place would shut down and a beautiful garden would grow here instead.”

Now THAT is an inspiring prayer request!

Finally, Ed told me about two families who drove up to the vigil in Olympia, Washington. In each car, there was a baby in the back seat.

“The drivers thanked us profusely for being there, as their children had been slated for abortion,” he said.  “What a blessing! It is an example of the result of prayer, presence and fasting. We will never know the full extent of our activities. We pray that more people may experience our joy.”

Yours In Christ,

Shawn Carney

Spring Campaign Director

40 Days for Life

God, forgive us when we try to explain away the obligation we have to help others who need help. Enable us to not devalue them because they are in the circumstance that they are in, but to see them for what they are, those, who like us, were formed by your hand in their mother's womb. Amen.

From The Mail Box... A reader chimes in from the local Prescott Arizona area against the proposed new Planned Parenthood center. Your voice must be heard to stop this atrocity from ever coming to fruition. join us in this area-wide protest! --Pablo

     Dear Pablo,

I live in the Prescott, Arizona area.  Planned Parenthood is to build a Regional and Medical Educational Center in Prescott Valley, AZ.  I would expect a regional center to be big and preform many abortions!  This information is in the Planned Parenthood Arizona Newsletter for Fall 2008, found at: Keeping Our Doors Opened Planned Parenthood 2008.  We must do all we can to keep this out of our area!  It is highly recommend that anyone living in the Tri-City area write a letter to the editor about their objections to this Regional and Medical Education Center!

http://www.plannedparenthood.org/ppaz/images/CentralandNorthernArizona/Noticias_Newsletter.pdf

From The Mail Box... an update from our friend, Shawn Carney, National Director of the first 2009 40 Days For Life Campaign. --Pablo

Dear Pablo,

Abortion is sold on lies:

 "It's a choice."  "It really isn't a person."  "It's only been six weeks; nothing's there yet." "It's a fetus, not a child.:

A funny thing happens once you start to lie -- it's hard to keep your story straight!  

The 40 Days for Life team in Abilene, Texas found that out right as the campaign began. The local newspaper interviewed Paula, the campaign director. She told the reporter that the Planned Parenthood center in Abilene did "medical abortions" (usually that means the RU-486 pill) as advertised on their web site.

A defensive spokeswoman for the clinic then told the reporter that no abortions were done in Abilene. But either way, Planned Parenthood trapped itself. Either the web site is wrong or the spokeswoman is wrong.  

The good news, though, is that thanks to the questioning of the local 40 Days for Life team, the newspaper did a follow-up story and discovered that the Abilene facility is indeed licensed to do abortions!

Now one entire community is wondering if Planned Parenthood can be trusted.

Still, some people are taken in by the abortion deception. As this testimony from a 40 Days for Life volunteer shows, that deception has an extreme price. Because of that, we must speak out:

"I am a grandmother of two aborted children that I know I will see someday in heaven. My heart cries for these two children that I never got to hold, but I am thankful that God has them in the palm of his hand and is caring for them until I can be there. Praise God!

"More than anything my heart cries out for my son and stepson that believed the lies of Satan. Years later, not even understanding the aftereffects of what has kept them from having a deep relationship with God, or anyone else, they have buried themselves in work in trying to find their self worth, and created walls that allow no one to penetrate.

"Yes, I miss my grandchildren, but more than that I miss my son whom I see frequently. He speaks of sleeplessness, panic attacks, nightmares, self imposed isolation, and does not even realize why. I know why and this is why I can be silent no more.

"The band aid or quick fix that abortion supposedly promises for misguided uninformed victims robs them of their self esteem, their ability to protect their family, their ability to have deep relationships with others and the guilt and shame that prevent them from

having a relationship with their Father God.

"Praise God, there is something we can do. Through our prayers and fasting, God has moved mountains. It is not what I do but what God can do thru my prayers and fasting. I believe I am called to speak up for those who can not speak up for themselves; I can be silent no more."

Today's devotional was prepared for you by Rev. John Brown, the director of United Friends for Life (United Church of Christ)...  

Yours In Christ,

Shawn Carney

Spring Campaign Director

40 Days for Life

O Father, forgive us for our lack of courage and our want of compassion for the unborn and for those lost and hurt by abortion. Fill us anew with your Spirit.

Renew our minds, strengthen us in righteousness, and help us be people of salt and light within our nation.

May every human being, from conception to natural death, be treated with the respect due those made in your image. We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

On My Mind... Where is our country headed?

The moment that pro-life supporters have feared has finally come to pass. We have known for some time now that Obama’s planned agenda was not and is not pro-life friendly. His actions on the Mexico Policy were a sure indication of how he plans to force changes upon us that, without our direct involvement, are imminent. With the Planned Parenthood Federation and other “choice” supporters waiting on the front lines with their greedy hooks ready dive into Obama’s pocket, we do not know which way the winds will blow. His “Economic Stimulus Package” is another sign of what is to come. It remains to be seen how this package will stimulate the economy, as it throws us some $787 Billion further into a debt that is already overwhelming this Nation. Currently this debt figure, as of February 18^th, 2009, is
ten trillion, seven hundred eighty-nine billion, nine hundred twenty-nine million, seven hundred seventy-five thousand, and one hundred ninety-six dollars and seventy-six cents! (That is: $10,789,929,775,196.76)
(Source: TreasuryDirect.gov)
I do not know if this number sounds overwhelming to you, but it does to me. We, collectively, and only we, can force change in Washington. Ours is a country “by the people, for the people.” Let us put this to the test.

--Pablo

From The Wire... John Jalsevac, from LifeSiteNews.Com chimes in on our ability and seeming willingness to live lives based on lies. --Pablo

  On the Tragic Self-Deceit of the Human Race

February 13, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A while back Cardinal Egan wrote an uncharacteristically scathing column, which is one of the best I have ever read on the abortion issue, certainly by a bishop. In it he included these few lines: "If you can convince yourself that these beings (unborn children) are something other than living and innocent human beings, something, for example, such as 'mere clusters of tissues,' you have a problem far more basic than merely not appreciating the wrongness of abortion. And that problem is - forgive me - self-deceit in a most extreme form."

Human beings are extraordinarily adept at self-deceit, which is witnessed to by the fact that whole generations have periodically convinced themselves of things that are laughably (but often tragically) false, even when all the evidence points otherwise. Usually this is accomplished because the prevalent lie of the age happens to be a convenient one, and to think contrary to what is fashionable would spoil one's groove.

For instance, I often meditate upon the fact that not a few highly intelligent men and women (not to mention a lot of the rabble) convinced themselves not so very long ago that members of other less-developed civilizations were "sub-human," and could, therefore, be treated according to one's whims. Hence the institution of slavery, which was thought to be an extremely groovy institution by people who made bundles of cash off of it, and even by those who didn't profit at all, but were simply taken in by the propaganda.

I often idly wonder if I would have been one of those working alongside William Wilberforce. Would I have been fighting against all the odds to abolish the slave trade, or would I have been one of the complacent, or even (God forbid) one of the complicit? It is not so straight-forward a speculation as I would like to think. We like to forget (because of what it might say about us) that William Wilberforce was an anomaly, an almost solitary voice of contradiction, a single bolt of lightning in the midst of a seething black sky.  In the end he may indeed have lighted the whole world, but it was only after he nearly killed himself in the effort to galvanize his compatriots into action.

There is a scene in the movie "The Mission," in which the Jesuit priests working amongst the South American natives present to a visiting Cardinal and his retinue a native child, who sings for them a convincing rendition of Ave Maria. The priests arranged this performance to demonstrate that the natives could perform well and with feeling the most elevated of art, and were, therefore, just as spiritual and human as anybody else.

Of course, the wily slave traders denounce the whole performance as a sham, observing that a beast could be trained to do the same, which was only the first of their many lies. But it is well to remember that this very same tragic scene was going on all over the world at that time, in many of the colonies. And the slave traders were considered the popular ones, while the puritanical objectors mere gnats buzzing in the face of progress and profit.

Vision is 20/20 in retrospect, and now we all rightly wonder at this monstrous blind spot in the collective conscience of the colonial West. But it is mere fantasy to suppose that some of us wouldn't have been taken in by the lie, if we had lived then. And the same goes for every other great lie in history.

Now, I happen to have a wife, and she happens to be pregnant. (But, before I explain my reasons for bringing her up, I feel I must dispense with an objection. Paul Johnson proclaims as law in his essay, "the art of writing a column," which I just read last night, that a columnist ought never to mention his wife in print. However, I observe that Johnson also lays out a scad of other rules, and, as far as I can tell he violates every single one of them, often. For instance, he wrote that a columnist should never talk down to his readers, but if anyone talks down it is Johnson, which is perhaps the very reason he is so popular. He also strongly proscribed against name-dropping, but after I read the essay in which he nonchalantly spoke of the time he kissed Margaret Thatcher, I began to suspect something of the humbug in him. Hence, I have thought it admissible to forego his advice.)

And so, back to my wife. As I say, she is pregnant, just recently into the third trimester, and therefore exceedingly uncomfortable. Now, I have never had a wife before, let alone one that is pregnant. Like most men, prior to discovering my own fatherhood, I never paid much attention to pregnant women, whom I thought strange and mysterious creatures that I could not hope to understand. And so now I am learning very many things, not the least of which is that they are much more strange and mysterious than I could have imagined.

One thing that I have been most astonished by, however, is just how present the baby has been. We began to be able to feel its movements quite strongly only 17 weeks into the pregnancy. And in recent weeks he seems to be positively in training for the Golden Gloves boxing match. I can even see when he or she (we have decided against finding out the sex) moves now, which I did not expect and is an odd experience. 

The baby reacts to all sorts of things, including voices and light. Once I turned on the stereo and it came on unexpectedly loud, and the baby jumped all of a sudden, startled by the sudden noice. You can feel the baby's head, and feet and hands, and sometimes when you push against its hands or feet, he pushes back as if to say, "Please give me some peace in here. It is the only nine months of peace I am likely ever to have."

It is at such moments as these, when I feel this tiny fist resisting my own intruding finger, that I think soberly of the many women with children, or married men, including many politicians and journalists and other important and intelligent and influential people, who vociferously defend, not simply abortion, but late-term and partial-birth abortion, under the pretense that the fetus is a "blob of tissue," or "sub-human" in some other way. And at such times I can only think of that South American child beautifully singing the Ave Maria, oblivious to the fact that he was singing for the very existence of his race.

The President of the United States is a married man with two children. He has also been one of the most outspoken defenders of all abortions, including partial-birth abortions. I wonder then, did he ever take the time while his wife was pregnant to notice what pregnancy was like? Surely Barack has sat on the sofa with Michelle, as I have done with my wife, and watched as his child's fists imprinted themselves on his wife's belly in a sudden flurry of punches. Was he not moved? Did he not, even for a moment, question himself? And somehow we have convinced ourselves that Obama is the great, indeed, the model family man.

Ay, we humans are very adept at self-deception. 

(John may be reached at jjalsevac@lifesite.net)

On The Wire... From The Westchester Institute For Ethics And The Human Person. Must read. --Pablo

   Has the Pro-Life Movement Failed? Ask an Abortion Doctor

By Cathy Ruse and Austin Ruse
 
Imagine yourself a typical abortion doctor, working anywhere in the country.  You’re a late middle-aged man who never gets to know your patients and doesn’t care to.  In the beginning you saw yourself as a hero in the fight for women’s rights, but now years later as you travel a circuit of clinics, your unknown patients lying prone on table after table, the luster of your work has faded.  

Every day you walk through a phalanx of protesters praying for you to stop your work and trying to persuade your patients to walk away.  A few doors away or across the street sits a pregnancy help center that has a new sonogram machine which is opening a door to your secret world and turning women against you.  

And now there is a new threat, that among the young women in the waiting rooms are undercover pro-lifers with hidden microphones recording clinic staffers saying things that will be aired later on the O’Reilly Factor.

Your landlord doesn’t want you as a tenant.  Your state legislature passes new laws every year that hurt your business.  Your home phone is unlisted and your medical colleagues shun you.
 
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. On the day the Supreme Court handed down the decisions Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the New York Times and the Court itself said the abortion issued had been settled. Of course, nothing in our public life is as unsettled as the abortion issue.
 
Every year tens of thousands of Americans march in protest on the anniversary of Roe.  The Catholic scholar Michael Novak has said that more people have marched in this march for this cause than any other in American history.

Roe established by judicial fiat a national rule of virtually unlimited legal abortion, and the fight against this monolith is not unlike an insurgency against an authoritarian regime:
Roe brooks no dissent and admits no compromise; it will not be moved from power; there is little opponents can do to topple the regime.  Yet the rule of insurgencies is that if they do not wither away they will eventually win. The insurgency of the pro-life movement has done much more than stay alive. It has thrived.

The result of this iron rule of Roe is that a thousand pro-life flowers have bloomed. It seems pro-life initiatives spring up almost spontaneously at kitchen tables and dorm rooms all across the country. A woman who suffered from abortion decided to tell her story in public and a movement was born and now thousands more speak out.  A young man got an idea about prayer and fasting and cooked up 40 Days for Life, a movement that is sweeping the country.  Pro-life messages are emerging in the least likely of places, like popular radio and even Hollywood.  And yes, hearts and minds are changing.  

The result of this is that in poll after poll Americans say they want significantly more limitations on abortion than the Roe regime allows.  Notably, that opinion is shared by women.  In an extensive survey of women conducted by the Center for Gender Equality, a group run by former Planned Parenthood President Faye Wattleton, a majority of women stated that abortion should either never be permitted or should be permitted only for cases of rape, incest, or where the woman’s life is endangered.  When asked to rank 12 issues in order of importance for the women’s movement, the women ranked “Keeping abortion legal” next to last, less important than any other goal but “More girls in sports.”

Roe was never based on law, but on the opinion of elite policy makers including those on the Supreme Court. The broadness and deepness of the pro-life movement is changing all that and Roe will eventually be reheard and will be overturned. Both sides know that.
 
Go listen to an abortion proponent speak. They are beleaguered. They are surrounded. They are defeated. The pro-life movement is coming at them from every direction.

Is the pro-life movement defeated? Not by the longest of shots.



Cathy Ruse is Senior Fellow for Legal Studies at the Family Research Council.

Austin Ruse is president of the New York and Washington DC-based C-FAM (Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute), a research institute on international social policy.