Concerned for Life

Santorum versus Obama

2012-02-20T12:42:00.001-04:00

"It's not about you. It's not about your quality of life. It's not about your jobs," Santorum said. "It's about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology."

Rick Santorum has taken criticism for his recent statements about Obama's worldview. And you know, he's right. It's about time someone called the President out on his so-called Christian beliefs, which don't correspond with those taught in the Bible.

Remember Obama's reply to the question "when do you think life begins?" and he responded that it was above his pay grade. Then went on to state that he wouldn't want either of his daughters to be "punished with a baby".

I don't know if Rick Santorum will win the GOP nomination or not, but I am glad that he is raising the important moral questions. Because this election should not just be about economics; as Senator Bachman said so clearly the morals of a nation cannot be separated from its economics.

Earlier in the day on Saturday, Santorum had also said that health insurance plans shouldn't be required to cover prenatal testing, because that testing results in more abortions.

- Huffington Post

One thing I am sure of: President Obama would never have had a child like Trig. And a man who decides which life has value is one that should not be holding office.

Obama and US Catholics - Duped Again

2012-02-18T10:35:00.002-04:00

President Obama has allies in important places and they are garnering more support for him for this next election. I suspected that recent statements by Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the US Congregation of Catholic Bishops, were next to useless and this article confirms those suspicions.

As it has been widely reported, Obama conferred with Sister Keehan before his announcement last Friday. Then, lo and behold, she praised his revision as an inspiring resolution to the thorny issue of "religious freedom" soon after the sham event concluded.

So let's get down to brass tacks. How much is Sister Keehan worth for such political interventions? The checkered Catholic hospitals Keehan represents as chief executive officer of the Catholic Health Association stand to receive gobs and gobs of cash from the federal government if Obamacare holds up past 2012. Consequently, the members of the association are more than happy to pony up huge salaries to executives skilled at manipulating the Catholic electorate for Obama.

According to the form, base compensation for "Daughters of Charity for Sr. Keehan" was $682,982. "Bonus and incentive compensation" was $136,000. "Other reportable compensation" -- which is the (B)(iii) to which the caveat refers -- was $131,888. Nontaxable benefits were $11,597. All this adds up to salary and benefits totaling $962,467.
Presumably, her 2011 salary and benefits will exceed $1 million, if the past is any measure. (Her 2009 salary and benefits fell in the $850,000 range.)

She spun Obama's "compromise" effortlessly, while the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) was caught flatfooted. In his tiresomely inane and people-pleasing way, USCCB president Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan initially praised Obama's con job as a first "step in the right direction." This gave the White House nearly a day of good publicity with which to confuse Catholics.

And while Sister Keehan is once again rallying Catholics to re-elect the most pro-abortion president in history, the Congregation of Bishops are issuing statements, that are too late and too weak.

Later that Friday, the USCCB issued a new statement pronouncing Obama's revision "unacceptable." But the damage was already done.

Keehan must chuckle at the cluelessness and doctrinal timidity of the bishops. The USCCB still can't decide if "Catholic" pols whipping the Church in America on issues like abortion and gay marriage should be denied Communion. This is too tough a call for the USCCB, so no uniform policy exists. (In a typical comment from the USCCB crowd, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C. has said that he won't withhold Communion from Nancy Pelosi, as that "style" of confrontation makes him uncomfortable.)

Catholics simply do not get it. I think the bumper stickers on one person's car sum it all up: one sticker "You can't be Catholic and pro-choice" and on the other sticker: "Obama for President". Unfortunately that confusion is not limited to your ordinary everyday Catholics; the bishops too seem to think in the same confused manner.

In 2008, many bishops, priests, and nuns voted for Obama and they probably will again. At the end of the day, they are Democrats first and Catholics second. Besides, they agree with Obama on issues like birth control. They, too, view the Church's teachings as passé.

"Obama is not a pro-abortion president," Giovanni Maria Vian, editor of L'Osservatore Romano, said a while back, while former papal household theologian Cardinal Georges Cottier congratulated Obama for his "humble realism."

No doubt Obama will reassemble his "Catholic advisory committee" and continue to generate donations from Catholic colleges and universities. Last time around, the faculty at Jesuit Georgetown led all college faculties, religious and non-religious, in donations to Obama.

Several Jesuit schools joined Keehan in praising Obama for his HHS "compromise," which was awfully big of them since they never needed it in the first place, given that they already hand out condoms and contraceptives to their students.

- The Little Sisters of Limousine Liberalism, by George Neumayr

I have heard it said that whoever gets the majority of the Catholic vote wins the election. And Obama has more than 50% of the Catholic vote, according to recent polls. With continued weak leadership in the church, that isn't going to change. Bishops such as Dolan and Weurl need to step up and definitively put their beliefs on the line. No more trying to have it both ways, currying favour with politicians and guiding their flocks. You just can't have it both ways.

Immigrants are not the solution

2012-02-13T15:52:00.000-04:00

“While it is true Canadians are living longer and having fewer babies, research shows that immigration has almost no impact on offsetting the costs of an aging population. Immigrants themselves grow old and draw on social support services while on average they have families as small as those of other Canadians,” says the CIPR.

“For immigrants to make a net contribution to the support of social services, they would have to pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. In recent years this has not been the case as newcomers have usually earned substantially less than native-born Canadians and have drawn significantly more in social services than they have paid in taxes.”
Peter Baklinski on LifeSiteNews

When politicians try to entice immigrants to their provinces to bolster the sagging workforce, they are deluded since they don't understand this is really no solution in the long run.

Obama and Catholics Yet Again

2012-02-06T13:21:00.001-04:00

From Boston.com

But not all employees of Catholic institutions are Catholics. Why should their employers impose their religious beliefs on them and deny coverage for birth control and other medical care? As long as those Catholic institutions are getting taxpayer money, they should follow secular rules. That’s the Obama administration’s argument, and it makes sense.

This shows yet again why the Catholic Church should voluntarily give up its charitable tax status. "He who pays the piper calls the tune."

If we were free from the state via the tax loophole, then Obama and his likes would have little power over the Church.

h/t Where the Rubber Hits the Road

Susan G. Komen with a black and blue ribbon

2012-02-04T09:38:00.001-04:00

What we can usually expect from Mark Steyn, this time on the Susan G. Komen turnaround with Planned Parenthood. As Mark says:

Indeed. If you strike at the King, you must kill him. If you merely announce that, following a review of grant-eligibility procedures you're no longer in a position to make your small voluntary donation to the King, your head will be on a pikestaff outside the palace gates...
Congratulations! Planned Parenthood certainly raised Nancy's awareness. I wonder what color ribbon that comes with? Black and blue?

Read the full article here
Mark Steyn: Komen has its awareness raised

And this attack on the Susan G. Komen foundation is all for a contribution that is less than Cecile Richard's annual salary. The grants to Planned Parenthood are in the range of $580,000 annually, while the president of PP (Cecile Richards) receives over $600,000 in salary and benefits.

And the picture of Cecile Richards with Obama is there for a reason. The two are hand-in-glove.

More on Catholics and Obama

2012-02-03T20:25:00.002-04:00

The latest Obama threat against the Catholic church - forcing Catholic organizations to pay for contraception and abortion with health plans - may be a political ruse on Obama's part.

Remember that he told Archbishop Timothy Dolan that the Catholics would have one year's reprieve before they would be forced to comply. Gosh, doesn't that coincide with the election?

So, the year passes or almost passes, and guess what? Obama will relent, just in time to catch all those Catholic votes to give him a second term.

This guy is politically devious and will stoop to anything to get votes. Just watch.

Graphic Images

2012-02-03T08:44:00.001-04:00

I remember talking to someone who brought the GAP to Canada. She had been all over the place with the nasty pictures and heard every. single. complaint ...

She thought she'd heard it all until the day, at some university campus in Arkansas I think, when they got a call from the local pro-life pregnancy care volunteer centre ...

She was told that the GAPpers were causing them all manner of trouble and would they please knock it off with those pictures, for heaven sake?!

They were getting too many calls you see. All those university kids who had seen the pictures had changed their minds about abortion and, instead of calling the local abortion mill, were calling them and they just weren't used to such a high volume of work and didn't have the manpower for it...

Orwell's Picnic

As Angelina Steenstra (http://www.silentnomoreawareness.org) said to me the other day "abortion is THE problem on university campuses today."

Old Age Pensions and Children

2012-02-02T20:22:00.000-04:00

Every time I turn on the radio or television, I hear someone discussing the pension problem that has been raised as a major issue in Canadian politics this week. Everyone agrees that the current system of old age pensions is unsustainable. And they all state the known facts: an aging population, longer life expectancy, the choice of 65 as the retirement age in a prior generation when people didn't live as long or as healthily as now. On and on they go, I keep waiting to hear someone state the bleeding obvious, but no one does.

People are not having sufficient kids to keep the number of tax payers that are required to maintain a society that depends upon social benefits. The old age pension is just one of those benefits, universal health care is another, unemployment insurance is another, disability insurance is another. Why can't they see this? And if they do, why does no one say it?

Are they afraid of stating that we simply aren't having enough children to have a healthy population demographic? Is there anyone out there willing to state what is politically incorrect? That this generation and the one before it has been so concerned with its own comfort that it has chosen to have one child or none. We have become so selfish that we think only of our own lives, and no longer give any thought to the future of our culture.

Someone please say it, someone please be willing to take the flack for saying what people need to know. Have children, people, have kids - if not for yourselves, have them for the future generations.

Calgary Mayor Denies Religious Freedom

2012-01-31T20:20:00.000-04:00

Mayor Naheed Nenshi, mayor of Calgary, has repeatedly ordered the arrest of Pastor Artur Pawlowski who dares to pray in public in the atrium of City Hall. Nenshi had stated that the atrium of City Hall is the "living room of the city"; however Christians are not allowed to do anything Christian in that "living room".

Pawlowski was even removed for singing Christmas carols in the atrium a month ago. Today, he was arrested yet again for praying in the atrium. The pastor is doing this intentionally now, precisely to draw attention to the fact that Muslims get freedom to practise their religion wherever; the only ones who are not free are Christians.

Nenshi is the first Muslim mayor in a Canadian city. He was a colleague of Ezra Levant when they were in university; in fact, they used to debate each other on campus.

So watch out, Nenshi, Levant has got your number and is calling you out on this double standard. And, true to Ezra, he will not stop until the problem is resolved.

You have got to want this Ezra in your court. Talk about tenacious!

What about Catholics in Canada?

2012-01-31T20:05:00.000-04:00

Given the present situation in the US, with President Obama mandating health insurance coverage of birth control methods, including those that are abortifacient, I wondered about my own country.

Here, in Canada, we have universal health care but that does not include drug coverage. Most people have some sort of plan, provided by their employer, that helps with the price of drugs. I am assuming that coverage will include the price of artificial birth control, either pill or otherwise. So, most people will find they get reimbursed for part, if not all, of the cost of contraception.

Did the Catholic Church make any statement about this? I don't recall ever hearing anything on this issue. We Canadian Catholics all know (or should) that all abortions are paid for by our taxes, but I would guess that most of us don't even think about the coverage of birth control.

Which makes me wonder if our bishops here are so backed into the corner, that they have no voice whatsoever to raise against government policy. Anyone have some insights on this?

Obama and Catholics

2012-01-31T08:17:00.000-04:00

It is not news to any Catholic who reads up on American politics, that the Obama administration has been in conflict with Catholic teaching several times. There was the Notre Dame scandal, when Obama was given an honorary degree despite protests and a lengthy list of signatures of American bishops who opposed this move. The reason: Obama is pro-abortion.

The latest move, however, has pushed the Catholic bishops into a position where they really do have to take a firm stand, or else lose their credibility in the American church.

In November, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, held what he describes as an "extraordinarily friendly" meeting with Obama at the White House.

The president assured the archbishop of his respect for the Church, and the archbishop came away persuaded Obama would never force the Church to adopt any policy that would violate her principles.

Ten days ago, Obama sandbagged the archbishop.

He informed Cardinal-designate Dolan by phone that, with the sole concession of the Church being given an extra year, to August 2013, to comply, the new policy, as set down by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, will be imposed. All social and educational institutions of the Catholic church will offer health insurance covering birth control, or face fines.

Where do Obama and Sebelius get the power to do this?

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed into law on March 23, 2010, the colloquial name for which is "Obamacare."
- Obama Sandbags the Archbishop, by Pat Buchanan

The American Bill of Rights states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Many people think that the majority of Catholics use artificial birth control, and therefore this teaching of the Catholic Church is irrelevant. But whether a doctrine is followed or not is not the issue; it is Catholic teaching, a teaching so difficult that 95% of Catholics don't follow it. That does not prove the teaching is false or that it should not be upheld. It does show how far and how easy it is to fall from obedience to what we know is right.

President Obama is in direct violation of the American Constitution by interfering with the freedom of religion of the Catholic Church. It is becoming clear who his arch enemy is; if he can override Catholic teaching, he will be the demagogue he wants to be.

51% of Catholics voted for Obama in the last election. It is time those Catholics realised this President does not have their interests at heart; he has set out to control the entire society, and what better way to do that than through providing for health care. But it is being bought at the price of our integrity. Wake up Catholics! You have the power to get rid of this man, who wants to remake America into a socialist European-style state.

Margaret Somerville on Abortion

2012-01-30T21:09:00.001-04:00

Sex-selection abortion also shifts the analytic, ethical and legal spotlight from the pregnant woman (who is the basis of the pro-choice case), to the unwanted fetus (which is normally ignored in the pro-choice analysis). This is because in sex selection, unlike probably most other abortions, the woman wants a baby -- just not a girl. As a result of this focus on the fetus, we see abortion in a different ethical and legal light.

Moreover, testing unborn children for sex is the tip of the prenatal testing iceberg. Tests for many other conditions are already available and more are coming fast. The issues are how may these be used and how should they not be used - and what law governing abortion should be put in place to ensure that the Canadian values we want to enshrine regarding these tests are respected? Much as some politicians, including the Prime Minister, protest against doing so, they must start discussing abortion in Parliament. It is an issue that affects some of the most important values on which we base our Canadian society. And it is not going away.

When Choice Becomes an Issue, MercatorNet

Only Humans

2012-01-27T14:25:00.004-04:00

h/t Discover Happiness

The Madness of Abortion

2012-01-26T13:50:00.000-04:00

An unborn child has been killed, probably, while you were reading this. Another will die, almost certainly, before you’re done. We are slaughtering by the seconds, and the relentless motion of that murderous clock—tick, tock, tick, tock—can drive you mad, if you start listening to it.

A man I used to see in New York, call him Jimmy, slipped into the madness while I knew him. He would look at his watch, again and again, whenever we met—and sometimes he would say out loud but always he was thinking: Another one. Another one. Every thirty seconds, another one. Abortion dominated his life, which is a measure of his moral commitment. Abortion dominated his mind, as well—the evil of it, the stain he could feel laid over this nation—and that, too is a measure of moral commitment. And a measure of madness. His Catholicism was centered on opposition to abortion. His faith was shaped by his pain at the death of the little ones. His prayers were cries for vengeance. For God to come, now, and burn this wicked world to the ground rather than allow another child to die—another one and another one, with the tick of every minute on his watch.

I don’t know. Maybe I have this whole analysis wrong. Jimmy is a strong man, in many ways, of unswerving commitment to the pro-life cause, but he is also weak, in many ways: fragile and easily broken. He went to Washington for the March for Life this year, as he does every year, but it did not inspire him. He wrote me to say that it had crushed him—caused him to realize, as it always does, that another year has gone by and still this scourge rakes the nation. Still the innocent are slaughtered. Still we are knee-deep in blood.
- The Madness of Abortion, by Joseph Bottum

It seems to me that, it is only as people like Jimmy hold to this cause in such a way that the battle will come to an end. People like Jimmy, people like Linda Gibbons, people like Lila Rose, who give their hearts and souls and entire lives over to this cause. People who are willing to be denounced as mad, as so single-minded and one-issued that they will risk all to bring an end to abortion.

Samuel Then And Now

2012-01-26T06:17:00.004-04:00

Samuel now 12 with Michael Clancy

Photographer Michael Clancy had a rare opportunity: he took a photo of a surgery in which a fetus of 21 weeks was being operated on for spinal bifida correction. Clancy caught on film the "fetus" grasping the surgeon's finger with his hand. The picture was historic, since 21 weeks was the youngest ever to have this surgery performed. At the same time, Life magazine was getting ready to publish a photo of a baby 24 weeks in utero, doing the same thing, but the photo was posed.

Clancy hurried to get his photo published before Life could scoop him and publish their "posed" photo. He managed to do that, and Life buried their story deep within the magazine, rather than putting it on the front cover.

The controversy cost Clancy his job in the news industry, and he has worked free-lance ever since. The surgeon who performed the surgery claims that he "posed" with Samuel's finger for the photo. However, Clancy took a series of photos and did not even know what he had captured on film until it was developed.

The episode changed Clancy's life. He has become a strong pro-life advocate and one has to wonder if the incident was glossed over by the surgeon and the mainstream media because of the storm it would unleash around the issue of abortion. Read more of Clancy's story on his website

Michael Clancy

An interesting aspect to this story is the involvement of Matt Drudge of The Drudge Report:

In 1999 Matt Drudge hosted a Saturday night television show called Drudge on the Fox News Channel. In Nov 1999 he attempted to show Samuel's picture on his Fox News program, but was not allowed to by the network. This led to his leaving of the show for what he claimed to be the network's censorship. Fox News directors didn't want to use the picture because they feared Drudge would use it to support a pro-life argument. They viewed this would be misleading because the tabloid photo dealt not with abortion, but with an emergency operation on the baby for spina bifida.

- Wikipedia

Clancy has written a book about it all and I just ordered a copy. You can order directly from his website or from Amazon: Hand of Hope The Story Behind the Picture

h/t Jill Stanek

Their Last Wails

2012-01-24T13:18:00.002-04:00

Pro-choicers interrupt a youth conference at the Hyatt Hotel in Washington during this year's March for Life.

"Pro-life, that's a lie; you don't care if women die."

How many times have I heard this chant from people who come out to protest pro-life events? Chants such as this reveal a basic ignorance of the issue. Abortion does not save women's lives. This statement shows that people think having an abortion will prevent a woman from dying in pregnancy. But the abortions they are advocating are done in the first trimester, when it is very rare that one can know if pregnancy will threaten a woman's life. So the abortion performed then is not done to save a life, but to simply terminate the pregnancy.

What will save women's lives is good maternal care. The kind that Matercare gives in third world countries. However, this organization was denied money by the Canadian government, whereas International Planned Parenthood was given money. The one organization, MaterCare, provides women with health care during their pregnancy and also provides medical help during delivery and after birth; Planned Parenthood only provides contraception and abortion, and in the third world, they are not there with any follow-up. So what happens to women who take abortion pills and go home to hemorrhage alone? Is that not the truly risky situation?

As for legal abortion being safe, you only have to read the stories on Operation Rescue to see that legal does not mean safe. Here in Canada, the tales of women suffering from botched abortions are carefully hidden as women would be admitted to emergency rooms of hospital and the case would be written up as something other than an abortion gone wrong.

There is such a need for information to be provided to those who remain ignorant of the real facts. But how do you get information across to people who simply shout and chant while others are waiting for a real discussion?
Perhaps they don't want information; what is going on is just the wails of those who know that something is crumbling and they are powerless to stop it.

h/t Run with Life for information on Matercare and IPPF

The Demographic Problem of abortion

2012-01-23T09:41:00.002-04:00

According to provincial estimates, we are the oldest and most rapidly aging population in the country. In 2010, seniors made up 16 per cent of the population but in the next 20 years, seniors will make up 30 per cent of Nova Scotians.

Seniors take the largest chunk from the health-care budget — about half of all hospital budgets. At the premier’s conference in Victoria, B.C., last week, British Columbia Premier Christy Clark said a senior citizen costs the health-care system about $22,000 per year, while someone in their 20s costs about $2,000 per year.

Here in Nova Scotia, we have the added burden of the highest rates of chronic disease in Canada and highest expenditures on drugs per capita.

Our population growth is stagnant and we suffer outmigration of our working-aged youth. We don’t do enough to attract immigrants to take the place of retiring boomers and when we get them here, we have a hard time keeping them.
- Gail Lethbridge in the Chronicle Herald

The above excerpts from an article entitled The future is here; Aging crisis hits home, by Gail Lethbridge omits the statistics on abortion. 1700+ new citizens are eliminated annually in Nova Scotia; surely this number affects the demographics of this small province.

Not to mention the fact that every one of those terminations is paid for by our taxes; therefore we are paying to create our own demographic crisis.

Abortion is a politically incorrect subject to bring up, because then we have to question the presumed "right to choose" of women. Abortion has never been legislated as a "right" in Canada; it is feminist speech that has made everyone think it is.

Now, that "right" is affecting us all, especially those of us reaching that age where we cost the health care system more. And of course, it would be much more convenient to simply start reducing those at the other end of life, who are imposing such a burden on the rest of society.

Our politicians have to start connecting the dots: and they have to summon up the courage to state the facts; abortion is decimating the population at a rate that is unsustainable. Should women have the right to choose something that the rest of us have to pay for, both in tax-payer funded abortions, and in the resultant effect upon the rest of the health care system?

Ending abortion will not be pretty

2012-01-21T14:30:00.002-04:00

No, what I mean is, like the emancipation of slaves, the end to abortion will be something that law will have to force on the unwilling half of the country. It may not be physically bloody, but it will be uncomfortable.
Kristen Walker, in LifeSiteNews

I guess this is true. Since polls show that pro-choice and pro-life are pretty much evenly divided (51% pro-life latest poll), the ending of abortion will not go down without a fight.

Just as ending slavery involved a civil war in the US, and getting women the vote involved jail times for suffragettes, so too abortion may bring a crisis in society. How can it not since those who want the status quo to remain are often violently oppposed to those who want in-utero life protected?

Now, before anyone comments that pro-lifers are the violent ones, let me refer you to this site

Pro-Abortion Violence

Detailed documentation shows that pro-abortionists have murdered an incredible 1,306 people since 1966. Since they prefer to attack the weak, 92 percent of their victims have been women and children. And it staggers the imagination to realize that no pro-abortion group has ever denounced this kind of sickening violence.

The most pitiful deaths of all are the murders of pregnant mothers. As the documentation on Human Life International's Abortion Violence website shows, pro-abortionists have raped, tortured, beaten, strangled, poisoned, stabbed, burned, murdered, and even buried alive pregnant women, many of them in their last trimester, because they refused to have abortions.

Abortionists and pro-abortion activists have violently attacked those who oppose them in literally hundreds of incidents. They have attacked pro-lifers with guns, cars, acid, hypodermic syringes, and baseball bats, and other pro-abortionists have applauded and supported these actions.

Pro-abortionists have raped, forcibly aborted, and killed their patients. They have gleefully tortured and murdered their girlfriends and wives. They have botched third-trimester abortions and callously walked away to leave their victims to die -- and then have tried to justify their actions with whining and empty excuses.

Laws and Morality

2012-01-21T13:49:00.003-04:00

If sex-selective abortion is as big a problem in Canada as Kale believes, Arthur says the solution is education and outreach. - Joyce Arthur in the Toronto Sun

Our Prime Minster, Stephen Harper, also believes that education, "changing hearts and minds", is the solution to the problem of abortion. That is certainly true; however doesn't history show that it is laws that teach people what is right and wrong?

While it would be wonderful if people could be convinced of the right thing to do, it is really not pragmatic. Legislation is what keeps most people from committing crimes, but then eliminating our own young isn't seen as anything criminal. If abortion was made illegal, we might have a chance of convincing some people that it is immoral.

h/t Run with Life

Conscience Rights to be denied

2012-01-20T22:18:00.003-04:00

Dear CV Friend,

Get ready to pay.

This morning President Obama called New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan to break the news.

Secretary of Health and Human Services and pro-abortion Catholic Kathleen Sebelius just announced that the proposed mandate requiring all insurance plans to pay for contraception, sterilization and some abortion drugs is official -- and Catholics cannot escape.

...and the fig-leaf exemption for religious groups will not be modified, apart from allowing some groups an additional year to comply.

Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan responded minutes ago, saying: “In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences.”

Beginning August 1, 2012 (less than eight months from today), the insurance premiums we pay, including the insurance premiums paid by Catholics for employees of churches and schools -- will be used to cover drugs and procedures that are in direct conflict with the teachings of our Church.

That's right. Our government will now force us to pay for insurance coverage for birth control, sterilization and even some abortion drugs.

President Obama ignored the organized efforts of Catholics across the country, including bold statements from the Bishops, university presidents (including Notre Dame's Rev. Jenkins), and even his Catholic allies like Sr. Carol Keehan.

Instead, President Obama stood with his real friends -- Planned Parenthood.

Make no mistake, this decision is a direct attack on you, our Church, and the religious liberty of all Americans.

Just yesterday, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the bishops from the United States who were completing their "Ad Limina" visit in Rome. The Holy Father specifically cited the "grave threats" to the freedom of the Church in America, and urged the Catholic community to respond, especially with "an engaged, articulate and well-formed Catholic laity."

He's talking to you and me. The Holy Father's brief address is a must read (link below).

Finally, today marks exactly one year from Inauguration Day. In exactly 12 months, America will welcome a new president, or usher in four more years of Barack Obama and his assault on our liberties. This irony is not lost on us.

We built CatholicVote into a movement to advance the cause of life, family, and freedom. Today's decision is an assault on all three. And it MUST be defeated.

You have our pledge that we will do everything possible to educate and mobilize the Catholic vote in 2012.

For on a day such as this, we realize that elections indeed have consequences.

The Catholic vote must rise up like never before.

Sincerely,

Brian Burch, President
CatholicVote.org

U.S. Bishops Vow to Fight HHS Edict
http://www.usccb.org/news/2012/12-012.cfm

Read the Holy Father's Address to the US Bishops:
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2012/january/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20120119_bishops-usa_en.html

Read the text of the HHS Announcement:
http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2012pres/01/20120120a.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Church Music

2012-01-19T09:55:00.002-04:00

Reading a post on an acquaintance's blog yesterday, I noticed this line -

Last night I went to a sewing group meeting (a member is married to a local pastor so we meet in the church basement, hence the drums in the background - and mainstream churches are wondering why they are losing congregations).

I had to click away quickly, otherwise I might be tempted to post a comment, not a good idea on a blog that is chit-chatty and would not welcome any serious thought on the subject of church attendance.

But it bothered me for quite a while. Several things bothered me. It always seems to be people who no longer attend church who feel free to utter such criticisms. Do they not realise that they are actually out of touch with what is going on inside of Christian churches?

The next thing that bothered me was the assumption that people are leaving mainstream churches and switching to smaller congregations because of the music? I know this is simply not true. Most people switch congregations because they meet someone in the new congregation and are invited to attend. Face-to-face contact is the most effective way of evangelizing.

But what this woman doesn't know, and what most people don't know, is that the migration out of mainstream denominations coincides exactly with the type of music she thought was drawing them in. It was when the Catholic Church changed from the Latin Mass to the vernacular, when rich organ music and choirs gave way to guitars, drums, and tambourines, that the numbers began to drop. But it wasn't the music that caused the migration.

So why did people begin to leave? It is the infiltration of modern culture into the Christian churches and the churches' failure to preach the Gospel that works together to cause defection. When Christians begin to behave like the role models on television and the screen (bed-hopping, drug-taking, indulging oneself with materialism) and the Church does not speak of the true reason for being on this earth, then the congregation drifts away. Precisely because what is being preached no longer is relevant to their lives. They are not being challenged by the Christian life, instead they are being told that everything is okay, God loves them all regardless of their lifestyle, I'm okay, you're okay crap rather than Jesus came as our Saviour - which means we might actually need one.

It is not a change in music or a modernisation of worship that will draw people into a church; it is hearing the Gospel preached unadulterated that will bring them in, because they have a thirst inside that needs to be met with real living waters.

If modern church music is used along with good preaching, the effect may indeed be very positive. But if music alone and trendy worship is all that a church offers, you might as well go to a bar and have a beer along with your preferred music.

Spreading the Gospel through commercials

2012-01-18T15:43:00.001-04:00

The spot, which aired during the second quarter of Saturday night's game between the Denver Broncos and the New England Patriots, was seen by an estimated 30-million viewers. This time around the commercial was all about John 3:16 -- and featured children reciting the well-known verse.

Gary Schneeberger, VP of communications for Focus on the Family, tells OneNewsNow the idea for the commercial came up after Tim Tebow -- the star quarterback for the Broncos and unashamed Christ-follower -- threw for 316 yards in his team's previous playoff victory against the Pittsburgh Steelers, setting off a flurry of Internet comments comparing it to John 3:16.

"What happened after that interestingly though was almost 100-million people, I understand, went to Google to look up what John 3:16 meant," explains Schneeberger. "We saw that as a great opportunity, given the interest, to save them the trouble if you will of having to go to the computer and look it up.

"So we just presented it right there on the screen -- out of the mouths of babes, as it were; the cute kids in the commercial. We've really been astounded by the impact that that's had."

According to the ministry spokesman, comments coming in included one that validated the entire effort.

"[They included] one gentleman who on his Twitter page wrote that his two sons had seen the ad and accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior," says Schneeberger. "And that's it -- because John 3:16 is the essence of the gospel, the heart of the gospel."

All the ads for the Super Bowl are already sold out, so the spot will not show up there. But Schneeberger says there is a good chance it will air again somewhere else. - One News Now

Sustainable Health Care

2012-01-17T20:44:00.002-04:00

Living in Canada where state medicine has been provided since 1967, I have become completely accustomed to free medical care. Well, almost free. At one point, while living in Ontario, my husband and I had to contribute $66 per month to OHIP (Ontario Health Insurance Plan) to have medical care, but for that price you could get free doctors' visits, free surgery, almost everything free except for medications. Those have to be covered by a private insurance plan, unless you are a senior where they are substantially covered by a government plan if you cannot afford your drugs.

But the system is showing lots of cracks. It has become a standard joke that the wait times in Canada are looo...nnnn..gggg. In fact, I myself have been waiting for a hip replacement for 15 months now. The average wait in my province of Nova Scotia for hip replacement is 85 weeks, I heard. So it shouldn't be too much longer now.

But how is a national health care system provided? It should come as no surprise: it is paid for by our taxes.

So, it stands to reason that the health care is dependent upon a good taxation system, but it also depends upon a good base of tax-payers. And that is what is beginning to crumble.

As I wrote in a blog post yesterday, a caller on Talk Radio was alarmed because our health care system is being threatened by cut-backs, which means that our children and grandchildren will not enjoy the same quality of care that we now enjoy. That just did not sound right to me. How can we expect things to carry on as usual if other factors have changed? And one change is simply not being talked about: the changing population demographic and that affects the reality of taxation and tax-payers.

A couple of searches today on Nova Scotia statistics revealed some rather alarming facts.

- Between 1971 and 1991, NS population grew 14.9% compared to 27.5% for the country as a whole

- Nova Scotia birth rate in 1995 was 11.8 per 1000 persons, compared to 12.9 births per 1000 persons in Canada

- Nova Scotia's birth rate is the second lowest in the country (after Quebec)

- However, Nova Scotia's death rate in 1995 was 8.7 per 1000 compared to the national rate of 7.2. Nova Scotia has the highest death rate in the country.

- The rate of natural increase in population in NS is 3.1 per 1000 compared to 5.7 in the country as a whole (lowest in the country)

- Foreign migration to Canada was 3.8%, but in NS migration was only 1.6%

- Average age in NS is higher than the national average; the number of people over 75 is 5.8% compared to 5% nationally, making this an "old" province

- Nova Scotia has the highest reported disability rate in the country: 21.3% compared to 15.5% nationally (actually both these figures were shocking to me)

- In 1996, 2.5% of NS population were receiving CPP disability benefits compared to 1.0% for the country as a whole

- Labour force participation in NS weighs in at 59.8% compared to 64.8% for the nation

- Death rate exceeds birth rate in NS: in 2011, there were 9000 births (average of 9.3 per 1000) and deaths were 9,800 (average of 10.1 per 1000) - this is a negative difference of 800

These are not happy statistics. A healthy society is one that is growing, not one that is declining. The healthy profile of a nation resembles a pyramid with the base being wide and full of youngsters; the pyramid gets narrower at the top, where the elderly form the minority of the population. Our pyramid is getting heavier in the middle and it is swelling at the top, while the base is shrinking. That simply does not bode well for the future.

Other interesting statistics that I read were that the decline in births were traced to birth control. In 1981, births were 60% of the births twenty years earlier. And abortions increased from 643 in 1961 to 1700 in 1981. They remain at around that number to the present date. The result of both use of birth control and abortion is that the actual numbers of births are down, but also the number of women who come into age-bearing years has decreased, thereby further decreasing the number of births.

The fertility rate of females in the age category of 15 to 49 (child-bearing years) has dropped from 4.2 per woman in 1961 to 1.6 per woman in 1981. To keep a population from declining, a minimum fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman is required. We are far below that and have been for a number of years. Once we reach a rate of 1.2, the trend is irreversible.

All of these factors have dramatic effects on education, on the work force, on health programs, on care of the elderly. Is it any wonder that we are seeing trouble in our health care system?

Without a solid base of tax-payers (which comes from children maturing into working adults), we simply don't have the people to pay the taxes that are required to pay these bills. What is the solution? higher taxes? Can we even begin to realise how high taxes would have to be to cover the kind of health care we are demanding? Apparently, Norway has a good government health care system, which requires a tax rate of 60%. Are we Canadians willing to have 60% of our income diverted into taxes?

So why do we think we are entitled to the same quality of health care that we have come to expect? Not only is Nova Scotia going to be known as a "have-not" province, but it will become known as a "gimme, gimme" province too. The entitlement mentality has got to change. We simply cannot keep getting all the benefits we think we deserve, given the fact that we don't want to produce the people necessary to provide them.

So, when people say that having children is a private affair, are they right? It seems to me that these private decisions are having a very public impact on everyone.

In discussions on health care, I wish that someone would bring up the issue of birth rate and the declining demographic. Someone needs to start connecting the dots.

Stats taken from Population Growth - Nova Scotia and Canada
Nova Scotia Demographic Trends into the 21st Century

Sex Selection Abortion in Canada

2012-01-16T22:34:00.001-04:00

Speaking of talk radio, I also heard the morning host Jordi Morgan saying that tomorrow he will talk about doctors' considering not telling pregnant women their baby's gender: being a girl could mean a death sentence.

Apparently abortion of a baby is becoming a problem amongst Asian immigrants, who prefer to have boys.

Canada is haven for parents seeking sex-selective abortions

It cites U.S. census data from 2000 that shows male-biased sex ratios among U.S.-born children of Asian parents, and a study of 65 Indian women in the United States from 2004-2009 that showed 89% of them terminated pregnancies with female fetuses.
Dr. Kale said in an interview he believes that several hundred sex-selective abortions take place in Canada each year.

One might expect that this would raise the ire of feminists, but unfortunately not.

According to Jessica Arons of the left-wing Washington think-tank the Center for American Progress, the issue raises difficult questions for women’s advocates.
“Any types of restrictions on abortion are met with skepticism by the pro-choice community generally,” she said.

As with the human rights violations of women in Muslim countries, feminists remain silent on this issue too. So which rights do they actually advocate?

On a positive note, have you noticed how the issue of abortion is raising its head in all sorts of places? This was simply not the case a few years ago. I believe that this is the fruit of prayer, because prayer exposes the works of darkness, as it brings God's light into the world. Thank you 40 Days for Life and other pro-life vigils!

Facing Demographic Decline

2012-01-16T19:59:00.002-04:00

On talk radio in Halifax today, I heard a caller talking about the health care system in Nova Scotia and the federal government's proposed cuts to this province's health care funds. He was saying that it is unfair that Nova Scotia should suffer such cuts, since it is the fastest aging province in the country; this means, he said, that our children and grandchildren in this province will not enjoy the same health care that we now do.

But what he overlooked was the result of the very fact he stated: if we are the fastest aging population in Canada, this is because we must have one of the lowest birth rates (that and we are losing our working citizens to Alberta). So Nova Scotians leave for the west to get paid work, but also they are simply not having enough children to be the future tax-payers that are required to support universal health care.

But it is politically incorrect to talk about low birth rates, since you are making a judgment on those who choose not to have children, or just to have one "designer" baby. Tough, someone has to state the truth and our politicians need to start connecting the dots.

Sovereign debt, like any other kind, presupposes there will be someone around to pay it off. In much of Europe, there won’t be. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren – in a land where far too many retire in their fifties and spend their final third of a century living at public expense. Is it remotely likely that the debts run up by 100 Mediterranean deadbeats will be repaid by 42 Mediterranean deadbeats? You follow Continental affairs as closely as anyone here, and you know the answer to that.
The More the Merrier, by Mark Steyn

Tim Tebow

2012-01-15T08:55:00.000-04:00

Whether or not you are a football fan, this fellow is making big news. At the young age of 24, when most guys that age are swinging from studying/working to partying, this young man is focused and determined. Publicly on television, he declared his resolve to remain a virgin until marriage -

view YouTube video here

and he regularly claims that his Christian faith is the most important thing in his life.

But he is not just words; he lives out his Christian belief. To every game in which he plays, he brings a family of a disabled child to watch the game, putting them up in a hotel and having dinner with them, providing them with prime seats at the game and all expenses are paid by none other than Tebow himself. Stories of his interaction with disabled kids are beginning to spread. This guy is for real.

He elicits great scorn from many people, begin satirized on TV, with perhaps the worst being pro-aborts organizing a fund-raiser for Planned Parenthood - every time Tebow bends his knee on the field and prays, you can donate $10 to an abortion clinic. How perverse is that?

While many of us would find his actions a little too "out there", but I have to admit that when I see this guy on the field with Scripture written under his eyes, and see him acknowledging Jesus Christ in full view of thousands of people, I am full of respect for him. And the Scripture line comes to mind

"Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. - Matthew 10:32

Given the coincidence of Tebow's Scripture passage and his pass of 316 yards, John 3:16 was the most "googled" item on Monday Jan 9, 2012, the day after the game. 90 million searches for that passage is proof that Tebow has certainly given his witness to his Saviour.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. - John 3:16

Even the CBC is Talking about Abortion

2012-01-13T09:51:00.000-04:00

In a recent interview with Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada and Don Hutchison of Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, even the CBC has to admit that the abortion debate is being re-opened, despite Prime Minister Harper's statements to the contrary.

Watch the interview here

Arthur states that these efforts on the part of pro-life Conservative MPs are an attempt to see abortion re-criminalized, and that a poll indicates that 92% of Canadians do not want to see that. Hutchison responded that Arthur's statement is false since two polls show that 80% of Canadians did not know that Canada has no laws to protect the unborn, and that when they learn that, 62% expressed their opinion that we should have some legislation to protect the child in the womb.

As Hutchison states, Canada and the Netherlands are the only countries in the developed world that have no protection for the unborn; this puts us in the same group as China, North Korea, and Vietnam.

As I continue to read the biography of Bonhoeffer, I can`t get this thought out of my head

Years from now, when we look back, will we be ashamed to have been on the wrong side of history?

h/t Run with Life

Protestants and Contraception

2012-01-11T20:05:00.001-04:00

Check out this article

American Evangelicals beginning to rethink birth control

A new book "Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973" by Dr. Allan Carlson questions the acceptance of artificial birth control. It is a well-known fact, or should be, that Martin Luther and Calvin both condemned birth control.

Catholic theology has always linked contraception to abortion, but this has been eschewed by most Protestant churches.

In his new book, Carlson examines historic Christian teaching regarding birth control and discovers the origins for such teaching in the early church, according to the publishers. He looks at a shift in the arguments behind this teaching made by the Reformers of the sixteenth century and traces the effects of that shift all the way up the late 20th century.

“Opposition to birth control is widely perceived as a ‘Catholic issue.’ Historian Allan Carlson demonstrates that as a matter of historical fact, the Christian churches were united in their opposition to contraception until 1930,” said Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D., Founder and President of the Ruth Institute.

“Carlson deftly shows how the change occurred, through a combination of ‘divide and conquer’ tactics by the population control lobby, intellectual exhaustion among the Mainline Protestants, and anti-Catholicism among the Evangelicals. Highly recommended.”

Russell D. Moore, Dean, School of Theology, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary said that Carlson’s “hard-hitting and unrelenting” arguments suggest that “perhaps American Evangelicalism unwittingly traded the Blessed Virgin Mary for Margaret Sanger.”

In reading Randy Alcorn's book Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments, Alcorn states that he came to the point where he could no longer advise couples to use artificial birth control once he realised that most forms (the pill, the IUD) act as abortifacients. He concluded that he could only advise couples to use barrier methods of birth control, since the others actually destroyed nascent life.

And a couple of months ago David Jeremiah, a Christian evangelist, surprised me when he prefaced a radio show by saying that he was going to disturb some people, but he felt that he had to talk about this issue. He then proceeded to talk about couples who choose not to have children and he quoted the Bible passages that show children are actually a blessing from the Lord. Not only that, but the primary purpose of marriage is not companionship for the man and woman but the birthing and parenting of the next generation. This, he said, was God's purpose in marriage and couples should really examine whether they understood that.

So there seems to be a shift occurring in some Christian circles. It will not come about easily, because changing people's sexual practices is probably the hardest area in which to provide mentoring.

But given the increasing secularisation of the world, it would be a good thing if Christians had more children because if we can't beat them at their game, we might be able to outnumber them.

The Example of Bonhoeffer

2012-01-10T10:23:00.000-04:00

Prior to Hitler's taking over supreme power in Germany, Bonhoeffer had written about the church's role in the state. He outlined "three possible ways in which the church can act towards the state."

The first way was to question the state regarding its actions and their legitimacy - to help the state be the state as God has ordained. The second way - and here he took a bold leap - was "to aid the victims of state action." He said that the church "has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society." And before that sentence was over, he took another leap, far bolder than the first - in fact, some ministers walked out - by declaring that the church "has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community." Everyone knew that Bonhoeffer was talking about the Jews, including Jews who were not baptized Christians...
The third way the church can act toward the state, he said,"is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself." The translation is awkward, bu he meant that a stick must be jammed into the spokes of the wheel to stop the vehicle. It is sometimes not enough to help those crushed by the evil actions of a state, at some point the church must directly take action against the state to stop it from perpetrating evil. This, he said, is permitted only when the church sees its very existence threatened by the state, and when the state ceases to be the state as defined by God.
In the spring of 1933, Bonhoeffer was declaring it the duty of the church to stand up for the Jews. This would have seemed radical to even staunch allies, espeically since the Jews had not begun to suffer the horrors they would suffer in a few years. Bonhoeffer's three conclusions - that the church must question the state, help the state's victims, and work against the state, if necessary - were too much for almost everyone. But for him they were inescapable. In time, he would do all three.

- Bonhoeffer, Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy - by Eric Metaxas

Bonhoeffer was preaching in this way in German churches before and after Hitler and the Nazis came to power. He was considered radical and very few pastors supported him. Most honestly thought that Hitler would re-build the German Christian church, allying church and state, in a way that would benefit the church. Bonhoeffer saw clearly that Hitler meant to usurp the authority that rightly belonged to God alone.

Today we consider pastors and priests too radical if they speak about abortion clearly from the pulpit, if they address the issue of sexual sin, if they pronounce the Biblical commandments of "thou shalt no kill" and "thou shalt not commit adultery". Tolerance and political correctness rule our churches, just as they did in the Germany of the 1930's.

But in retrospect, whose writings do we read today that inspire us? I don't know of a single pastor who toed the Nazi line whose writings are held in respect now; but Bonhoeffer remains like a light in the darkness. Surely he is an example to our pastors now, an example of how one should preach the Christian message when the state is undermining those very principles.

2012-01-07T21:58:00.003-04:00

Mark Steyn should be mandatory reading these days. This guy has an ability to see the "big picture" in so many situations, and the gift to voice it with cunning wit.

Politics trumps Left's empathy

The short life of Gabriel Santorum would seem a curious priority for political discourse at a time when the Brokest Nation in History is hurtling toward its rendezvous with destiny. But needs must, and victory by any means necessary. In 2008, the Left gleefully mocked Sarah Palin's live baby. It was only a matter of time before they moved on to a dead one.

The Left's much-vaunted powers of empathy routinely fail when confronted by those who do not agree with them politically. Rick Santorum's conservatism is not particularly to my taste (alas, for us genuine right-wing crazies, it's that kind of year), and I can well see why fair-minded people would have differences with him on a host of issues from spending to homosexuality. But you could have said the same thing four years ago about Sarah Palin – and instead the Left, especially the so-called feminist Left, found it easier to mock her gleefully for the soi-disant retard kid and her fecundity in general... Rick Santorum lives his values, and that seems to bother the Left even more.

Never mind the dead kid, he has six living kids. How crazy freaky weird is that?

This crazy freaky weird: all those self-evidently ludicrous risible surplus members of the Santorum litter are going to be paying the Social Security and Medicare of all you normal well-adjusted Boomer yuppies who had one designer kid at 39. So, if it helps make it easier to "empathize," look on them as sacrificial virgins to hurl into the bottomless pit of Big Government debt.

Articles like this always bring to mind an acquaintance of mine, a very witty fun woman who unfortunately became a liberal leftie through working for the New Democratic party. I recall, in a conversation at StarBucks, her calling Palin a "fraud". I remember feeling surprised by the venom in her voice and face.

That, to me, has become the significant moment that encapsulated what people like Steyn and Coulter call the intolerance of the liberal left. It was a surprise, because this woman had always been an example of kindness and consideration to me. What had made her change so radically?

Hanging out with people who think as social liberals do, and avoiding anyone on the other side of issues, will make anyone become like that. And I can only think "what a shame". But obviously, there is more at stake than just one person's change in personality. The future of western civilization is hanging upon just such changes.

I do not look forward to a society where those who mock Palin and Santorum are in charge. Because ultimately, what they are mocking are the very values that built the free western world.

Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia in Canada

2012-01-06T20:54:00.002-04:00

Great new national ad from Campaign Life Coalition

Lahey to be released

2012-01-04T12:41:00.001-04:00

I just heard on the car radio that Archbishop Raymond Lahey was in court this morning to receive his sentencing. He was given 15 months in jail, but the judge said that he had already served this while waiting for trial so basically the man is free.

It simply does not feel just. That a man in whom so many had placed trust (particularly those in Antigonish diocese involved in the sex-abuse case that Lahey settled) should go free is simply not right. I don't know what could be accomplished by having him in jail, but this feels like just a slap on the wrist.

God have mercy on this twisted individual. For the lives he has damaged, for the people he has deceived, for the scandal he has given to the Church. How many people have had their faith disturbed by this man who betrayed the calling he was meant to follow? There is no justice done for them.

More on this story in the National Post
National Post article

Abortion Debate in Canada

2012-01-04T10:00:00.001-04:00

As all Canadians know, Prime Minister Harper has said repeatedly that he will not re-open the abortion issue. But with calls for debate on this coming from several directions, he may not be able to avoid it.

The latest is this

Evangelical leaders call Parliament to open abortion debate

“Medicine recognizes a point of viability for a child in the womb. Science is prepared to experiment using pre-natal human tissue from conception onward. Yet, Canada’s Criminal Code states that a child in the womb is not human,” explained Sonier. “The Criminal Code provisions on this point are dumbfounding.”

“Parliament needs to examine these provisions; consider their historical roots; and, debate whether they make sense in twenty-first century Canada,” urged Sonier. “As Canadians become more aware of what the laws stipulate, they will be astounded.”

“The wording of these laws is very confusing,” states Sonier. “The meaning is from a distant and less medically advanced society. The language of a now ancient time is far from obvious in the current century. As a nation, we need to ask ourselves if these convoluted laws and archaic concepts reflect our values, modern medicine and our understanding of human rights and human life. If they don’t, our political representatives need to take action.”

And with several Members of Parliament (Stephen Woodworth, Kitchener Center and Jeff Watson, Essex) calling for this as well, the issue may be asserting itself, despite Harper's refusal to open it in Parliament.

Canadian MP calls for abortion debate in Parliament

“I support this discussion in Parliament of all places. I mean, where else should it be happening? Around the water cooler?” Tory MP Jeff Watson (Essex) told LifeSiteNews on Tuesday.

Watson is at least the fifth MP since September to call for a debate on abortion in the wake of the Conservative government’s controversial decision to award a grant to the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the world’s largest abortion provider.

On Tuesday, Watson told LifeSiteNews that he does not have a “definitive position” on when human rights ought to apply to children in the womb, but hopes for a debate involving testimony from bioethicists, scientists, and human rights professionals around that question.

I would like to hear from the Canadian Conference of Bishops echo the sentiments of the Evangelical leaders, but aside from Archbishop Prendergast and Cardinal Ouellette, their silence is deafening.

Personhood Recognized

2011-12-31T14:25:00.000-04:00

While the law may not recognize the unborn as persons, the general population does.

Eleven names on the memorial at the World Trade Center read "and her unborn child." - First Things, January 2012

Inspirational

2011-12-26T11:10:00.001-04:00

Virtues such as self-sacrifice, duty and stoicism — the quiet, unassuming heroism of ordinary women coping with separation and the fear of being bereaved on the battlefield. For it is not just soldiers making a sacrifice for their country but their wives and families, too.

And we were touched also because, in an age which has made a fetish of emotional incontinence and tells us that the worst thing we can do is repress our emotions, what these women showed us was the dignity and nobility of emotional restraint.

They minimise their fears and their privations in order to keep the spirits of their fighting menfolk up. In other words, this restraint is itself an act of selfless love.

Singing in the choir helps them channel and release some of that emotion. So it moves us very greatly, because only then do we see the value of such restraint — and what it has cost them. - www.melaniephillips.com

To Kneel or Not to Kneel

2011-12-25T22:19:00.000-04:00

The archdiocese of Halifax/Yarmouth in Nova Scotia has a new direction from the archbishop. We are to remain standing from a few moments after the Consecration until everyone has received Communion and is back in their seats. And then wait until the ciborium is placed in the Tabernacle. Then we may kneel to pray after having received the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.

The Eucharist is the consummate sacrament of the Catholic Church. It is the fundamental tenet that divides us from all other Christian denominations. We truly believe that this piece of bread and this cup of wine is changed - trans-substantiated - into the body and blood, soul and divinity of Our Saviour.

Standing is not the attitude of reverence. Standing may signify some unity amongst the congregation, but at this point in the Mass, I would expect us to be showing reverence rather than unity.

If this is the type of new evangelisation that is being promulgated across the diocese, and I fear that it is, then the new evangelisation will be as empty of content as this new directive is.

Evangelisation is nothing unless it gives witness to the saving power of Christ on the cross. This is the only point of evangelisation: to bring someone to the point where they realise they need a Saviour, not that they need to be part of a church or a body of believers. First and foremost, they need to recognize that they need to be saved and that Someone has done that for them - at a tremendous price.

Someone said to me today that this is not a big deal, that we should just be obedient and continue to pray as we stand. But if standing or kneeling is not such a big deal, then why is the Archbishop making such a big deal of it?

As Cardinal Arinze says, "if you believe that this is Christ, why don't you kneel, why don't you crawl?"

His final word, leave people in freedom, they are not soldiers. Amen

Merry Christmas

2011-12-25T08:46:00.000-04:00

The Ever Salient Mark Steyn

2011-12-24T11:00:00.000-04:00

We now live in Elisabeth’s world — not just because technology has caught up with the Deity and enabled women in their 50s and 60s to become mothers, but in a more basic sense. The problem with the advanced West is not that it’s broke but that it’s old and barren. Which explains why it’s broke.

Ontario School Board

2011-12-23T13:18:00.000-04:00

Fortunately we have people like Michael Coren and Sun News to make public what is going on behind the scenes in Ontario education. Parents really need to rally together because it is in numbers, that they will have strength to oppose what is coming at them.

Those who want tolerance of gays are being the bullies in this situation.
Isn't this precisely the way anti-Semitism was rammed through in Germany? Now it is Christians who are being marginalized by a small section of the population who are radical activists. And they want to take over children and indoctrinate them into their agenda.

Push back parents!

Trust Bishops? hmmm....

2011-12-21T15:16:00.005-04:00

At the recent CCCB conference, Archbishop Richard Smith made the statement that Canadian Catholics should not be too worried about Development and Peace and that we should trust the bishops to move forward on this.

In his comments to Gyapong, Archbishop Smith said the bishops want to call people “back to a fundamental trust in our process, trust in our structures and trust in our bishops.” - LifeSiteNews

So On December 19, Bishop Raymond Lahey was in court to receive sentencing for his crime of downloading child pornography onto his computer. He was caught by an immigration official upon re-entering Canada from a trip to Thailand.

In a sexual history inventory, Lahey revealed to Bradford that he had engaged in “a number of one-night stands” before settling into a “longstanding relationship that has lasted 10 years.” Lahey said he hopes to continue the relationship when he leaves prison.
Dr. John Bradford, the psychiatrist who assessed Lahey for both the Crown and the defence, confirmed Lahey told him he would still be a bishop if he had not been caught.
- Deborah Gyapong

There have been many reports of people knowing about Lahey's conduct while in Newfoundland and yet no one said a thing. I am sure that fellow clergy would have known about this; even if it was the stuff of "inside jokes".

Why did no one say anything? If Lahey was carrying on a homosexual relationship for ten years while being an active bishop in the Canadian Catholic Church, someone knew about this and there was a conspiracy of silence.

So now, we are supposed to "trust our bishops"? I think that is a bit of a stretch. Canadian Catholics have been deeply betrayed by the bishops, not by all but more than by just a few. Unless we see transparency and honesty on the part of bishops, it will be extremely hard to trust them again. On any issue.

The Tide is Turning

2011-12-20T20:12:00.002-04:00

From a post on National Catholic Reporter, Jennifer Fulwiler writes:

Wait a sec…nobody is denying that this is a baby!

I have been reading sites like this since I first got online. I have been following this kind of subject for years, both when I was pro-choice and now that I’m pro-life. And I can say with certainty: This would not have been the tenor of the conversation 10 years ago—or even five. Even as recently as 2006, there would have been a flood of “it’s just a fetus, who cares?” remarks, and the debate would have centered around whether the child was even worthy of a funeral.

Thanks to the Duggars for publicly recognizing their miscarried baby.

Read the entire article here Pro-Lifers, the Tide Just Turned

Christmas Cards to Linda Gibbons

2011-12-19T15:20:00.000-04:00

Linda has been arrested again on Friday, Dec 17 and will spend Christmas in jail. I am sure that she would appreciate cards. The address is below. Please be sure not to include anything with your card, do not use mailing labels, both Linda's address and your return address must be written out. Do not ask questions about what jail is like or what goes on in jail. This only has the effect of making life harder for Linda, as all correspondence is opened and read.

With that in mind, your tone of encouragement and support may have an effect upon prison administration, so be aware of that. We don't want to make this harder for Linda. Bless all those involved in this situation.

Linda Gibbons
c/o Vanier Center for Women
655 Martin Street, Box 1040
Milton, Ontario L9T 5E6, Canada

Abortion jeopardizes everyone's freedom

2011-12-17T11:29:00.000-04:00

Two years ago, I signed up to receive Human Life Review, a compilation of lengthy articles on pro-life issues. The articles are in-depth and I have to admit that I often find it difficult to wade through them (I think I suffer from mild ADD or I'm just fidgety as my husband would say).

The summer issue just arrived, I know it's no longer summer, but the articles are not written to be timely; they are meant to be enduring treatises.

One that I recommend is Abortion "Rights" and the Duty Not to Know by Edmund C. Hurlbutt.

To sum up, I think it would be fair to say that Hurlbutt's thesis is that the legalization of abortion sacrifices the underlying principle of the American Constitution on the "right to life" of every individual. And with legal abortion, we are now dealing with a society that is trying to function on the principle that everyone can determine their own truth to live by, and that we can somehow live peaceably with the inconsistencies that entails.

Some good quotes:

... the "right" to an abortion includes an implicit "duty not to know" the truth about abortion, and how the interaction between this duty and the disputed abortion right destroys the very coherence of our society.

The right to "privacy" within which the Roe Court discovered the right to abortion is itself an implicit act of enforced ignorance on those who might object. It obligates opponents, in effect, to agree that they have no intellectual right to know that abortion takes a human life, nor any moral right to know it is heinously wrong. Abortion is a private matter and thus requires ignorance from you in order to preserve the social peace.

The duty not to know came primarily as enforced biological and medical ignorance on women seeking abortions. Planned Parenthood and similar groups have thus vehemently opposed informed-consent laws, ... they also oppose parental-notification and consent laws that require parental participation in a minor girl's decision to abort.
Pro-life centers that offer women medical services, information on fetal development and abortion, and help in securing alternatives to abortion are also relentlessly attacked...
Numerous universities and colleges have denied pro-life students the right to form on-campus groups or even to distribute pro-life information. ..
Whole states, have forced all citizens to pay for tax-funded abortions, thus enforcing a duty not to know the abortion kills an innocent human being.

And his final paragraph:

Since abortion is not illegal- because it is, indeed, the premiere constitutional "right" of our times - then freedom itself, for all of society is threatened; and the human dignity of all, no longer found in reverence for universal human rights, is ultimately at stake.
The issue of legalized abortion is thus the political and cultural issue which surpasses any other claim on the human conscience today. It is the supreme human issue of our times. Without the protection of everyone's right to life, neither the Declaration of Independence nor any real freedom can long endure.

Keeping Elizabeth in Mind

2011-12-16T09:45:00.002-04:00

Last night, as we went out to the final vows of Sister Bernadette of the Franciscans of Halifax, we saw an ambulance outside a neighbour's house. It was as we feared; they were coming to take Elizabeth to hospital. Her mother told Nick this morning it is not likely she will return home.

Elizabeth was found to have cancer several years ago and was treated for it, somewhat successfully. Then it returned and was in another organ, and about six months ago, she was told that it was terminal and that they really couldn't do much for her except pain control.

Elizabeth is a 50 year old single woman, living with her mother and step-father. She is not well educated and one might be tempted to think of her as simple. During her working life, she worked as kitchen help in large cafeterias around the city.

But simple she is not; she knows what her life is about and she has accepted with grace the suffering that has been hers. She openly tells what is going on and doesn't hide the fact that it is hard, but she just accepts it with no sense of why me?

I think of Elizabeth as one of the "suffering souls" in this world. Some people get a lot of suffering and they seem the ones who least deserve it. I have met one other woman in my life whom I knew was a "suffering soul". Dianne in Ottawa, a mother who lost her first child to leukemia, and a woman who graced my life with her pure faith. She prayed about everything; if a neighbour asked one of her children to come over and ~~pray~~ play, Dianne would ask God if that was the best thing at that moment. She prayed about absolutely everything; it was as if she was living in the presence of God continuously. Dianne too had cancer and died from it at the young age of 52. I heard from friends that visiting her during her final days was humbling, as Dianne showed more care for her visitors than she did for herself.

Over the past few months, I have felt that Elizabeth is another of God's suffering souls. In some inexplicable way, they carry the cross of Christ in this world and something inside of me says that this is for others.

Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church. - Colossians 1:24

How can anything be lacking in Christ's afflictions? I don't understand this and sense that it is some mystery essential to the meaning of human life. But it resonates as true when I see Elizabeth and remember Dianne, both of whom suffered willingly. And those sufferings somehow bear merit for the rest of us.

Please say a prayer for Elizabeth. She doesn't have long to live and how fitting that she will be facing her final trial at this time when we celebrate the birth of Christ. Lord be merciful to her and give her peace and send her those consolations from You that will fill her with joy.

On Linda Gibbons - well said

2011-12-15T11:21:00.000-04:00

For it is not just the physical threat posed by protesters that these injunctions seek to avoid, but the painful self-reflection - both personal and societal - that the protesters' presence imposes on a nation that has brushed the issue of abortion under the carpet.

Abortion is undeniably controversial. And there are certainly arguments to be made that in 1994, establishing a small, protected bubble around abortion clinics may have been a reasonable step to take in a tense environment. But now, in the final days of 2011, there is no justification for the temporary injunction to be used ever again against Ms. Gibbons or a similarly peaceful protester. To do so is to abuse the coercive power vested by the state in our police and courts. It must stop. Yes, Ms. Gibbons is violating the law, but the completely disproportionate response of the state has been the only real injustice. - National Post

The entire article is here

Update on Linda Gibbons

2011-12-14T20:21:00.000-04:00

Charles Lewis covers the latest on Linda's day in Supreme Court. Read the article here

And you can read the history of Linda's run-in with Canadian law here

News on Father Pavone

2011-12-14T20:08:00.000-04:00

This is one very good priest. Despite three months of imposed exile by his bishop, Father Pavone remains in good spirits and he is even organizing a pro-life seminar with the nuns in the convent where he is staying.

About a week ago, Abby Johnson posted a letter to Bishop Zurek on her blog, expressing her disappointment that Father Pavone would not be able to attend her acceptance into the Catholic Church and her reception of First Holy Communion. A very telling comment from a priest reveals that he had been turned away from the seminary by the same bishop, who said he did not have a vocation. This young man wisely went to another bishop and got permission to enter the seminary there. He has since been ordained and is a vibrant orthodox priest. Nothing more needs to be said, does it?

Lord, please bring about an end to this exile of Father Pavone and return him to the full-time pro-life work to which You have called him.

Pushing the Edge on Viability

2011-12-13T08:20:00.000-04:00

As smaller and smaller babies can be helped to survive (and even thrive), one has to wonder how second and third-term trimesters can be justified.

Born smaller than pop cans, tiniest babies growing up healthy

Madeline Mann, born June 1989, weighing 9.9 ounces

Sex Education is Child Abuse

2011-12-10T09:59:00.003-04:00

From SPUC England, a copy of an address given by Lynette Burrows. Her topic: The Worst Sexualisation of Children is Happening in Schools.

Burrows is an author on children's rights, a campaigner for family values, and not-least, mother of six. She is outspoken and frank, something needed in the murky world of education. Some excerpts:

... the way deeply shocking images were shown as being perfectly normal and commonplace. This is quite a marketing device actually – to normalize the circumstances surrounding what you want to sell, however counter-cultural and offensive they are to what are essentially community and family values.

These films were designed for teenagers and what was unacceptable about them as a means of instructing the young was principally their crudity, insensitivity and assumption of a hard-boiled, quasi- medical approach to human relations but, more importantly, their glossing over important facts such as the failure-rate of all contraceptives, particularly among the young, but also with adult, married couples and the risk involved in promiscuous sex for young people. Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) were always referred to as being ‘treatable’ despite many of them being, in fact, incurable – an old trick that is invariably used by the media particularly the BBC.

The reality of treatment that goes on for years, or all your life, is never spelled out for them...

I cannot see the current sex education programme as being anything but ‘marketing’. Never mind the pious talk of ‘only if you want to do it’, the reality is that they fixate on sex as a way of selling it and grooming young people to be sexually active from as early as possible.

They are still involved in probably most of the sex-education in schools and have managed to put up the number of illegitimate children born to young mothers enormously... we now have an illegitimacy rate that is not far off 50% and still rising.

The rather remarkable thing is that all their tendentious advice is given with the one prescriptive proviso that, should they catch an STI, they must not sleep with anyone else until they are considered safe. This is the first and only mention of the fact that it is possible to be abstinent when it comes to sex. Apart from this one instant, young people are supposed to be like rabbits, instinctively programmed to copulate most of the time.
It seems a bit strange to me that they should consider young people altruistic enough to abstain only for the sake of protecting others and not themselves! Talk about shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

To force sex-ed on to them, before they are ready is therefore to enact mental violence on them for some theoretical reason that is far closer to paedophilia than anything else.

So here we have the theory laid out for public approval. Since sexual curiosity is natural to a child therefore it is alright to allow adults, who have another agenda entirely, to have sexual access to educate them in it. They say, and they are experts, that children need a ‘sexual outlet’ and they are the people to facilitate satisfying this ‘natural’ need. Most people recoil in horror from such a suggestion – and they are right. But the fact is that the material produced now for the innocent eyes of young children is doing just that.

So, I stand by my original opinion that the increase in talking graphically about sex to young children is essentially paedophilic in nature. It is increasing the number of people who are allowed to ‘talk dirty’ to children, and so to breach the protective armour of their innocence.

Fortunately, this government has re-stated parents’ right to withdraw their children from sex-education but many schools are used to by-passing or ignoring pesky parents. Parents have every right to know what material the school proposes to use and to watch it in advance. They must exercise their rights and churches, of every denomination, should act themselves to view the material, to warn parents and inform them of their rights. Personally, I would withdraw my children from any class described as being about ‘sex-education’. They don’t need it and parents can supply all they need to know from their knowledge of the child, from their own instincts and in the context of their family.

And a great line to remember in light of the current debate in Canada on free speech and the Human Rights Commissions.

There is nobody more bigoted and hostile than a liberal whose method or opinion is questioned, and one has to be prepared to stand up to all the misrepresentation and insults they throw.

That would explain why the foul language usually only comes from one direction in hot topics.

h/t Society for the Protection of Unborn Children

Justifying Abortion

2011-12-09T10:10:00.000-04:00

For a wicked sense of humour, check out Hilary's comments on statements made to justify abortion. Here's a sample:

"1) If abortion had been illegal when my girlfriend became pregnant, I would not be in the position I'm in. My career would have been stalled at the outset. I would not have been able to tour around the world and see how other more liberal countries have handled this issue. I would not be speaking to you (the interviewer) today.

2) Maybe later I'll be able to support a child.

3) But free people must have the right to choose when the right time is.

4) This rule especially applies to poor people since welfare and public health programmes are inadequate to raise a child and public schools are overcrowded and underfunded."

Translate:
1) My career is more important to me than human life, even the life of my own child. It is much more important to me to fulfill my personal jet-setting ambitions than be responsible for the care and protection of another human being.

2) Even though I am the lead of one of the world's most highly paid acts, I'm still unable to adequately support a child. By extension, I believe that anyone who makes less money than I should also not have children. Only the super rich should be allowed to have children because material poverty, which I define as being less than super rich, is worse than death.

3) The definition of being free is the freedom to kill another person with legal impunity whenever we want.

4) It is better for the poor that they be killed before birth than attend a public school or be dependent upon state benefits. Kill the poor.

Orwell's Picnic

Life Begins at Fertilization

2011-12-09T09:46:00.000-04:00

h/t Discover Happiness

In abortion debates, pro-choice defenders will almost always say that "life begins at birth". Then what do they call the nine months before that moment, when all your vital systems are getting in place, when you are developing steadily along a medically well-documented journey? What or who is that being if it is not you? Everyone's life history must begin at the start, not at some point in time nine months later, that is arbitrarily decided by those who want power over that life.

Abortions Under Reported in Ontario

2011-12-06T21:02:00.000-04:00

And probably in other provinces too. Kudos to Patricia Maloney for getting this information from the Dept of Health.

Run with Life blog

What is surprising in the information is the number of doctors who performed abortions in their offices. Alveda King says that this was how she had one abortion, almost before she knew what was happening. Her doctor decided that she wasn't ready for another baby and he conveniently removed "the contents of her uterus" during an examination. I wonder how many other times this is done?

In the book I read recently, The Death Peddlers by Fr. Paul Marx, there was one doctor in Oregon who was advocating that all doctors do this and provide abortions for women as soon as they suspected they were pregnant. Why wait for any tests? Why wait for anything? Simply perform a D & C in the office. He claimed that it would clear up the backlog of abortions waiting to be done and would be so much more economical.

I don't know about you, but I find it hard to not get de-sensitised with the glut of abortion information that is around. It is so easy to just read these articles and see these facts, and overlook the issue which is that every single one of these "abortions" takes the life of a human person. No matter how small.

If we could see all of this with the eyes of God, wouldn't we be blown away?

Scam definitely, but perhaps a predator too

2011-12-02T13:03:00.004-04:00

Predator: "1.An animal that naturally preys on others.
2.A rapacious, exploitative person or group."

Yup, I think the definition of "predator" fits David Suzuki well.

Hmmm... video is gone. I guess all the negative publicity got to Suzuki.

Canadian geneticist-turned-environmentalist David Suzuki targeted children in his latest outburst of emotionally-charged enviro-gab, this time scaring the fun out of Christmas by warning that Santa’s home was melting. In a post-black-Friday period of climate-ethical circus generation, this takes the cake. This is beyond reprehensible. - Watts Up with That

"Abortion requires our society to juggle a split personality"

2011-11-29T13:46:00.000-04:00

Given all that we know about the unborn human being, it is clear to me that force of will, rather than genuine ignorance, now seems to be the driving force behind abortion. Our society simply wants abortion to stay legal regardless of the facts. It is not that we don't know the truth; rather, that we don't want to be reminded. It's a strange madness, with teams of doctors struggling to keep premature infants alive in hospitals where just a floor away, babies are being killed and discarded. - Are We Sleepwalking Through the Great Infanticide, by Lea Singh

A great article, read it here

h/t www.prowomanprolife.org

HPV Vaccine - 49 Sudden Deaths, 213 Permanent Disabilities Linked

2011-11-29T12:42:00.001-04:00

Gardisil offers short-term protection against 2% of more than 100 cancer strains. It is hardly worth the risk. It is truly frightening that doctors, when asked to speak about this, declined. If you have a daughter and are considering having this vaccine, please re-consider. Is it worth the risk?

h/t Jakki Jeffs, Executive Director, Alliance for Life Ontario

Pope Warns Americans

2011-11-29T09:58:00.001-04:00

The Pope has to choose his words carefully, in order not to cause an uproar amongst clergy and laity. But there is no mistaking that he is clearly warning the American bishops whom he is addressing of the battle they are facing in the United States.

“The seriousness of the challenges which the Church in America, under your leadership, is called to confront in the near future cannot be underestimated,” he said. “The obstacles to Christian faith and practice raised by a secularized culture also affect the lives of believers. Immersed in this culture, believers are daily beset by the objections, the troubling questions and the cynicism of a society which seems to have lost its roots, by a world in which the love of God has grown cold in so many hearts.”

Cardinal Raymond Burke, a short while ago, spoke of his concern that Catholics would be persecuted for their faith in the United States. I am sure he is referring to the proposed legislation that will prevent Catholics in certain professions from acting according to their conscience.
These would be primarily health workers, who are now being compelled to assist in abortions and will also be made to assist in euthanasia which is gaining ground across all of North America.

Can there be any doubt in Catholics' minds that they simply cannot vote for President Obama a second time? It baffles me how people cannot see that Obama is undermining the Judaeo-Christian heritage of the American nation with almost every piece of legislation he signs. Forty years ago, the Democratic Party was seen as the party of social justice, as the party that fought for the "little guy", but that is long gone. It is now the party of the liberal left, whose agenda is to de-construct the social structure of Christian society.

Feminism run amuck

2011-11-29T09:42:00.000-04:00

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about young men who fail to grow up and become good family men, but video games are not the culprit — women are. Men tend to follow women’s lead — and it is women, not men, who fight Mother Nature. It is women who’ve changed the roles, rules, and expectations of marriage. It is women who embrace no-fault divorce laws that allow them to check out the moment they’re dissatisfied. Indeed, feminists assure women they can’t possibly be happily married until men change who they are or adapt their nature to accommodate the needs of women.

- from Why Marriage Eludes the Modern Woman - by Suzanne Venker

An article that will make some women angry. But I have often thought, in the abortion issue, precisely that "it is women, not men, who fight Mother Nature".

In claiming abortion as a right to make women equal with men, aren't they saying that Nature has made them the victims of perpetuating the species? Perhaps abortion proponents are really another example of people claiming that they are victims. Hmmm, hadn't thought of it that way before.

The New Evangelism

2011-11-28T14:25:00.000-04:00

Across the Catholic world, the buzz word is "evangelism". What is being proposed in dioceses in North America is a new way of communicating the Gospel, in the hope of bringing back Catholics who have lapsed and of attracting new converts to the faith.

The emphasis is on education and explanation of the Church's teachings so that the Catholic population will be rejuvenated in their faith and "engaged" with their local church.

In a recent meeting with someone who works in the Catholic archdiocesan centre here, we were discussing how to bring to the fore "life issues"; for the most part, we were discussing abortion. I was seeking this person's insights as to why so few youth here are interested in the right to life of the unborn. The fellow I was talking with said, quite rightly, that we are dealing with a generation of "unchurched" people. In other words, they have not been taught the basics of the faith, unlike my generation who got a great education pre-Vatican II.

This man said that we need to "evangelize" Catholics with the Gospel before we can begin to talk about the hot-button issues of abortion, homosexuality, and contraception, another teaching of the Church that is sidelined for the most part.

What he said sounded good and I could see his point. But I was left feeling as if we hadn't really met any consensus on the matter and that things would continue as they always have, with no real effort being made to bring the life issues into the light.

The talk by Georges Buscemi, at our recent 40 Days for Life banquet, firmed up some of what I was feeling but hadn't formulated. Georges spoke of the need to bring people to conversion, that is the point of evangelisation. And no one is going to feel the need to convert unless they realise they need to be redeemed, and they will not need redeeming unless they first recognize that they are sinners. If one just wants to feel good and do better in one's life, he or she can take an exercise class on Sunday morning or attend any number of lectures on development of the human person for the better. Going to church is different: it is about salvation and our need for it. And we should never sell that short.

The daily readings of the past week in Oswald Chamber's devotional, My Utmost for His Highest, speak of just this: the necessity of putting the Cross first. All preaching must bring people to the Cross; anything other than that is not preaching the Gospel. As St. Paul says:

For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 1 Corinthians 2:2

And this thought was confirmed once again by an article in First Things by George Weigel:

The new approach must begin with the affirmation that life is fundamental. In the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, John Paul II analyzed the effects of legalized abortion and euthanasia on democracies, teaching in perhaps the strongest language of his papal magisterium that democracies that erect clear moral wrongs into "rights" risk becoming "tyrant states"...

Today, therefore, there should be no question that the life issues are not only genuine social-justice issues; they are the priority social-justice issues. The defense of life expresses both the evangelical bedrock of the Chruch's social doctrine and engages the most fundamental issue being contested in the Western world today, the dignity of the human person. - Evangelical Reform of Catholic Advocacy, by George Weigel, First Things Dec. 2011

If the new evangelism is proposed as fulfilling Christ's command in the Great Commission ("go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” - Matthew 28: 19-20), then the command to make disciples is also the command to instruct as Christ did.

A pastor of a reformed Presbyterian Church told me that he had several ex-Catholics in his congregation, one of whom was a woman who had had two abortions in her young adult life. She said she had never once heard anything preached against abortion in the Catholic Church. She was swept along by the prevailing cultural belief that abortion was the best solution to her problem, and did not consider that it might actually be breaking the Commandments. Such an example shows quite clearly that teaching about sexual morality and teaching that abortion is a sin is a necessary part of evangelizing Christians. Without clear teaching of the Commandments, how can anyone come to understand the kind of life that Christ calls us to live? This kind of teaching should come right at the beginning of evangelization, not tacked on once people have been "gently brought" into the fold. And then you hit them with the hard stuff.

It is precisely the hard stuff that brings us to the foot of the Cross. So rather than leave it until later on, when people have had a sugar-coated Gospel fed to them, our pastors need to deliver the Good News in its entirety right from the start.

Getting the News - Sun News Media

2011-11-26T09:44:00.000-04:00

You won't find this story covered by the mainstream media. No tv coverage, no newspaper coverage, you have to get Sun News Media to hear these stories. The question is why? Are western journalists under some kind of restriction to cover a story about Islamic violence against women? And why do feminists say nothing in defense of these women?

Michael Coren speaks with blogger, Pam Geller, on the case of an Afghan woman who has to choose between marrying her rapist or going to prison for 12 years. 75% of women in Afghanistan jails are there because they were the victims of sexual crimes.

On the same show, Michael spoke with Joy Smith, MP for a riding in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Smith is putting through Parliament a private member's bill C-310, a bill which would make it possible to prosecute Canadians at home for trafficking in persons outside the country. Smith is raising awareness of the horrific nature and extent of human trafficking both outside and within our borders. Girls and boys as young as four are being used in the sex trade by people posing as friendly tourists from Canada and other western countries. Smith is a brave woman dedicated to battling this war on children.

Now, would you find these two women interviewed on CBC or CTV? I dont' think so. So this is a shameless plug for Sun News Media. Since it is no longer available live online, I would encourage you to sign up and get it from your cable company. If you want to hear some real news, that is.

Blessed are the persecuted

2011-11-25T09:05:00.002-04:00

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. - Matthew 5:10

h/t For Life and Family

Abortion and Mental Health

2011-11-25T08:50:00.001-04:00

From Mercator.net

"Publication in a leading psychiatry journal did not prevent a barrage of criticism for the author of a study showing the mental health risks of abortion."

Priscilla Coleman: This review offers the largest estimate of mental health risks associated with abortion available in the world literature. The results revealed moderate to high increased risk of mental health problems after abortion. Consistent with evidence-based medicine, this information should be used by health care professionals.

Q. The study attracted a lot of criticism -- from the American Psychological Association among others -- and you were accused of everything from professional incompetence (virtually) to personal bias. Were you surprised at this barrage?

A. No not at all. It is much easier for them to attack me than to accept the reality of negative mental health consequences of abortion, a reality that goes against the “civil right” the APA has been advocating for over the last four decades. They are extremely biased on this issue and it wouldn’t be realistic for me to expect to be easily recognized by the APA or similarly minded groups as an objective well-trained scientist.

Q. How important is it for women that a truly scientific approach should prevail?

A. Extremely important. This is a very common medical procedure and at least 20 per cent of women who undergo an abortion are at risk for serious psychological problems. They have a right to know if they are in a high risk group and what the real risks are afterwards, just as with any medical procedure.

Nancy Pelosi's Conscience

2011-11-23T18:08:00.000-04:00

Nancy Pelosi, who claims to be a "devout Catholic", is accusing Catholics of having "a conscience thing" when it comes to abortion.

“For a moment, I want to get back to what was asked about the issue on the floor today that Mr. Hoyer address,” Pelosi said. “He made a point and I want to emphasize it. Under this bill, when the Republicans vote for this bill today, they will be voting to say that women can die on the floor and health care providers do not have to intervene if this bill is passed. It’s just appalling.” - LifeNews

Pelosi must be a couple of bricks short of a load. When does refusing to perform an abortion on a woman put that woman at risk of dying? The actual number of women who die from being pregnant is an extremely small percentage of those who are pregnant. In fact, Dr. Everett Koop, surgeon- general under Ronald Reagan, said that he did not know of one single case where a woman would actually die from being pregnant. That is one of the wonderful accomplishments of modern medicine - reducing, if not, eliminating the risk of death from childbirth.

Pelosi's statement reads like one that would defend legal abortion against illegal abortion. But that is not what she is arguing; rather she is arguing against Catholics being able to follow their conscience in the workplace.

Given Pelosi's record on abortion, it would seem that, rather than Catholics having "a conscience thing", Pelosi has "an abortion thing".

A Mathematician Looks at Conception to Birth

2011-11-23T12:58:00.000-04:00

When I hear someone as well educated as this speak of the wonder of creation, I wonder why people like Christopher Hitchens cling to their atheism with such tenacity. I would be so sad to spend my entire life living the denial of what I am going to see the minute I die.

h/t www.prowomanprolife.org

Abortion's Two Victims

2011-11-22T09:48:00.001-04:00

A short video made by a student in a film class in England. She had found this letter posted on the internet, written by an anonymous woman to the baby she aborted ten years ago. Students in the class, both pro-life and pro-choice, reacted positively to the film. The student who made the film prays for the woman who wrote the letter and hopes that, by making this film, just one life can be spared from abortion. I hope so too.

h/t John Smeaton, SPUC Director

Reading the History of Abortion

2011-11-21T10:18:00.002-04:00

When I first became really interested in pro-life issues (about 7 years ago), I began reading in earnest many books on the pro-life movement. I couldn't read enough by pro-life apologists and by people who wrote historical pieces about abortion and pro-life in North America.

I have just finished reading The Death Peddlers, War on the Unborn By Father Paul Marx, a Bazilian priest who started the largest pro-life organization in the world, Human Life International. Father Marx had a PhD in sociology and, by some strange turn of events, he received an invitation to attend a pro-abortion forum held in California in 1970. The forum brought together pro-abortion people from all fields, doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses, even clerics. One of the main themes of the forum was the expected overturn of abortion laws in all states, with many presenters stating that they felt sure this would happen within the next five to ten years. Well, it happened a lot quicker than that and Roe v Wade opened wide the floodgates of abortion in 1973.

Father Marx attended the forum incognito and was taken to be a pro-abort, a perception he did nothing to alter. From this vantage point, he was able to record the entire forum and he then wrote the book from those recordings. Much of the book is just a factual presentation of what was stated by each speaker. Occasionally Marx will insert a comment of his own, but he leaves the majority of his evaluation to the final chapter.

What comes as new to me is the revelation of just how the sexual revolution came crashing into society at that time. I know that the advent of the birth control pill was the final gate-crasher in removing sexual inhibitions, but something must have preceded that. The ground was prepared long before the pill by people and forces that wanted to see traditional morals destroyed. Was it a few people, such as Margaret Sanger in advocating birth control in the 30's? Was it clergy in the churches who began to deconstruct the family and abandoned their condemnation of birth control at the Lambeth conference of 1930? It would be interesting to see all these people and institutions in a chart to see how they were all moving towards the same end, independent of one another. Or perhaps they weren't independent? I think another history book needs to be written, one that follows this decline in sexual morality in the western world.

Back to the book, The Death Peddlers.

What strikes me is the magnitude of the change that took place at this time. And also the speed at which it took place. Doctors who presented at the forum were already doing many abortions and it seems to me that they were doing these because they didn't know what else to do in the face of the numbers of pregnant girls who were coming to them. And then the forum becomes a way of rationalizing what they had already consented to do.

Dr. Joseph Fletcher, a professor of medical ethics and author of the book Situation Ethics noted

... that California's medical profession had been "overwhelmed" by the sheer numbers of women coming for abortions, he said many still carried on the "kitchen and barroom debates" about whether it was ever right to kill unborn babies.

He then proceeded to dismiss the idea of "unborn babies" completely. Arguing that women who had miscarriages didn't have birth certificates for those babies, and that pregnant women who traveled didn't have to have two passports, he claimed that the unborn was not a person at all. Rather ridiculous to argue that, because the culture doesn't recognize something as true, therefore it must follow that it isn't true. Many of the presenters would have been defeated in a logical debate.

He stated that the question of when does life begin had never received a satisfactory answer and therefore he said the question was a religious question, completely dismissing any scientific evidence for the humanity of the unborn. He even quipped that "Plato answered by saying that it is at birth and respiration. According to Aristotle, forty days after conception for a man, eighty days for a woman", a remark that caused laughter.

As Marx remarks:

He had stooped to the rhetorical trick of avoiding the data of embryology and fetology by eliciting laughter at an outmoded and false remark directed at an audience's existing mind-set. Thus had Alan Guttmacher ...blurred the all-important distinction between the expendable ordinariness of the separate body-cells of ovum and sperm and the self-directing uniqueness of the fertilized ovum by remarking ... that if we were going to worry that the fertilized ovum was human and more than a glob of protoplasm then we should indeed be busy catching each woman's monthly ovum and each man's daily millions of sperm. That remark had also been attended by laughter, getting Guttmacher past the pertinent scientific facts.

I have noticed pro-choice supporters still do this, even forty years later and with even more medical evidence before them. One young man, during the 40 Days vigil, even stated that very remark that we should be concerned about all the wasted sperm. Using humour to make light of scientific knowledge illustrates more than ignorance; it indicates a willingness to reduce an important issue such as the right to life of the unborn to a barroom (in this case, sidewalk) joke.

While reading this book, I was very aware of when it was written - 1970. And it was written in the state where the sexual revolution was probably the most active. It reminded me of the very first book I read when I became interested in the pro-life movement, Anti-Abortionist at Large by Raymond Dennehy. Dennehy was a professor of philosophy at the University of San Francisco and he spent four decades, beginning in the late 60's, debating the abortion issue on campuses. At one such debate, he was interrupted by a young college freshman who shouted "so what, we have all had abortions".

Now, I realise just how true that girl's comment was. According to Marx's account, the number of abortions in California were in the thousands. Some hospitals even referred to the phenomena as "suction weekends" because so many college girls came in for abortions. What really saddens me is that this was my generation, I was at university in 1970, and these girls would now be women in their early to late 60's. To realise that that many women of my generation had an abortion, and probably more than one, is staggering. How many wounded women are walking around with this shoved down into their memories?

Another rather startling fact is that Planned Parenthood was not a promoter of abortions. It wasn't until 1963 that Planned Parenthood accepted abortion as moral (prior to that their mandate actually stated "an abortion takes the life of a baby after it has started"). And the journal of California Medicine, in 1970, admitted "the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death."

What comes clear to me, by reading this book after so many others, is the acceptance of abortion simply because of the numbers being done, and the eroding of prior statements against abortion - statements from all sorts of people and organizations, from Planned Parenthood to the medical profession to the Christian Church. The de-structuring of traditional sexual morals gained momentum, broke through all sorts of barriers in the 70's, and continues unabated into the twenty-first millenium. Anyone with a modicum of common sense can see the results: divorce rates doubled, the existence of single parent families increased many fold, the troubling rise of violence and crime amongst the young, the sexualization of the young. Just last week, a reporter on SunNewsMedia asked why we are more concerned about suicide amongst teens when we should be paying attention to the suicide rate of middle-aged men which is the highest of any age group. These things cannot be unrelated to the decline of Judaeo-Christian morality in our society.

The Death Peddlers is a sobering book. Even though it was written forty years ago, it is still timely. Marx's statements on the crux of the pro-life position are still bang-on (abortion advocates continue to evade the heart of the issue, which is the person in the womb). There is a section in the book that succinctly outlines the approach of Stephanie Gray who is now considered Canada's leading pro-life apologist and debater. The truth about the abortion issue hasn't changed very much; pro-aborts continue to state:

The question is not whether termination of pregnancy is justifiable but whether compulsory motherhood is justifiable. - Dr. Fletcher

This issue isn't going away anytime soon. In fact, it can never go away until it is resolved on the side of truth. And that is the side that acknowledges the child in the womb is a human being with rights just like those of us already born. Those rights are greater than the right of a woman not to be pregnant.

One thing is certain: we must continue to fight. With the advent of the abortion pill, formulated to kill an existing though unidentified early embryo, abortion will replace contraception as the chief method of birth control unless our nation rediscovers its disappearing values. It is sobering to envisage the dehumanizing effect on a society which has decided to condone not only the routine performance of the sexual act, whose power and mystery borrow from the power and mystery of life itself, but also the routine extermination of its young.

Quiet Days

2011-11-18T09:04:00.001-04:00

Not too much posting going on here. This is because of a case of bronchitis that has been plaguing me for three weeks now. The doctor said it is viral so advised against filling the prescription she gave me, unless I was feeling worse. Last night I asked the pharmacist for her advice, and she said while bronchitis is usually 80% viral and thus won't be cleared up with antibiotics, what I have now is a sinus infection that will get better with the pills. We shall see, I certainly hope so.

The tiredness that comes with respiratory infections drags on and on. I don't even have the energy to read for more than half an hour. Which means The Death Peddlers is taking forever to get through while The Ascent of Feminism by Melanie Phillips waits in the wings. My husband is a much faster reader than I and he said this book is very informative and much of the suffragette movement reminds him of the pro-life movement of today. That piqued my interest in a book that doesn't look particularly riveting.

For those who like to read political blogs, Melanie Phillips should be required reading. As a non-religious Jewish woman living in England, Melanie's insights on the Middle East are a must to balance western journalism. My own preferences are for her articles on modernism, health care, "fatherlessness" and its effects upon our western societies. Today her article on the proposed legalization of drugs is worth a read as this type of argument keeps cropping up as the "occupying" generation pushes for more entitlements, including those that eventually destroy them.

My husband and I got very accustomed to watching Sun News Media in the evening, available free on the internet. However, at the end of October that arrangement ended and now Sun News is only available by cable or satellite. We caved; we who received no television channels since early September when the signals changed, gave in and got cable hooked up yesterday. Amazing the amount of crap that is on television. But we can now watch Michael Coren on a larger screen and catch news throughout the day whenever we like. Wow, the modern world! It goes well with my revived love of knitting.

In pro-life news in Canada, two items caught my attention this week. One is a protest in Charlottetown, PEI tomorrow by pro-aborts who want the province to re-open an abortion facility in PEI. This is the only province in Canada that doesn't have any abortion services and women must travel to Halifax which is the closest provider. Peter Ryan of NB Right to Life was calling for anyone who could make the trip to go and give support to the counter-protesters who do not want abortions brought back to this little province.
And the other news is a youth pro-life forum in Toronto sponsored by Gethsemane Ministries and Campaign Life Coalition. This is a one day event to be held at Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ parish hall in west Toronto. The speakers that caught my attention were Stephanie Gray, now considered the best pro-life apologist and debater in Canada (I fully agree) and Father Alphonse de Valk. There are other presenters but those are the two that I would most wish to hear speak.
I think these short one-day forums is a great way to bring the pro-life message to communities. Organizing a weekend conference is onerous and costly; but one-day events are much simpler to put together, much less costly and can be offered to the public at a low cost. This one is being offered for $30 for the day, $20 for students. I hope that Nova Scotia has one of these in the not-too-distant future.
Futher details can be found here
LifeSiteNews - Pro-Life Forum in Toronto

Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen

2011-11-15T20:01:00.001-04:00

I have always loved this song, but sadly the lyrics seem to indicate the sexual twistedness that pervades Leonard Cohen's music. So I was thrilled to hear this version, and to know that Kelley got the rights to record her own version of this great song.

40 Days for Life BreakThrough

2011-11-15T13:17:00.001-04:00

Last night, there was a live conference streamed from 40 Days for Life and 9000 people listened to this, causing the server to freeze up. However, things got going and the live webcast went ahead. I listened to a little last night, but it comes on late here so I listened to the recording this morning.

Carmen Pate was the host. Carmen is a post-abortive woman, she is now the executive producer of radio programming for Truth in Action Ministries. Carmen opened the webcast with the statement that she sees more hope today than she has ever seen in her 25 years of pro-life work. She sees God's hand at work in 40 Days for Life, which is bringing churches together in prayer for an end to abortion. The movement is changing hearts and minds in a way that nothing has done before. As Carmen says "wouldn't you want to be a part of this?"

301 cities took part, 131,000 people took part, over 4000 churches were involved, and best of all - 732 confirmed saves - which means that babies scheduled to be aborted on September 28 when the vigil began are now growing within their mothers' wombs and will be born later this year. This brings the total number of babies now living to 5,045 because of the efforts of 40 Days for Life since 2007.

One of the most dramatic results of the 40 Days vigils is the turnaround of abortion clinic workers. Last year, everyone was shocked to find the manager of the Bryan/College Station clinic came out and joined the prayer line. Her story is now available in the book Unplanned. And at the beginning of this year, another woman in Texas left Planned Parenthood where she was the manager and her testimony can be heard on the home page of 40 Days for Life.

And last night, another breaking story. The manager of the Planned Parenthood clinic, Sue Fayer, in Storm Lake, Iowa, told her story of how she went to work at PP because she was pro-life. Because she thought abortion was wrong, in fact she says it is murder, she worked hard to provide family planning counselling to women so that they would not have to resort to abortion. She worked there for seventeen years; her clinic did not do any abortions. However, in 2008, all the managers of Planned Parenthood clinics in Iowa were told they would be taking part in telemed abortions. This online abortion service will save PP much money, as it only requires one doctor in one location who will look at the ultrasounds of women, and if the woman is less than 63 days pregnant, the doctor will push a button which makes a drawer open in the clinic where the woman is. Then the woman will take the pills that she is instructed to while at the clinic, then she will go home, take the rest of the pills as instructed, and deliver a dead baby within a few days.

Abby Johnson describes this method in her book Unplanned, since she herself had a medical abortion of this kind. They are extremely dangerous as the woman is alone, without any medical help closeby, and she basically bleeds until her uterus is empty. I have had three miscarriages and I know that the bleeding is incredible, much more than at birth. With my third miscarriage, I lost so much blood that I went into shock. Fortunately, I was in the hospital where medical staff gathered quickly to assist me. I was immediately given two transfusions of blood and was watched carefully for 12 hours to make sure that I did not relapse. When I went into shock, the nurse could obtain no pulse and no blood pressure. Don't tell me that isn't dangerous. And there is no way I would want to go through that alone.

Sue was fired when she expressed her disagreement with this new procedure; that was in 2008. Since that time, several things have coalesced in her life to the place where she felt called to lead the 40 Days vigil outside the very place where she worked. What Sue revealed was that Iowa is the first state where these telemed abortions are to be done, as a test state, and the agenda of Planned Parenthood is to make these abortions available all over the country. Bottom line: these abortions cost the same as a surgical abortion, but with much less work, less staff involved, so Planned Parenthood stands to make a huge profit from these type of abortions.

So 40 Days for Life has brought out into the light what is going on in the darkness in these abortion clinics run by Planned Parenthood. Far from being concerned with the health of women, these clinics are in the business of making money from intercepting the natural process of pregnancy, and bringing about the death of the innocent unborn child.

Here, in Halifax, the woman who coordinates Project Rachel which is a post-abortion healing ministry, has been praying for the prayer arm of the pro-life movement to come about. She has told me several times that she is so happy to see 40 Days for Life come to our city. Without prayer, we will go astray. And with prayer, even if we do nothing else, God will begin to move others who will become active in the pro-life movement. I don't think it is a coincidence that the issue of abortion is getting more discussed here in politically-correct Canada than in previous years; some MPs are becoming vocal in Parliament on the issue of abortion. Even though our prime minister Steven Harper has said he will not re-open this issue, it may get opened for him, whether he likes it or not. There is something going on like an under-current and it is going to surface. It simply cannot be kept down. I believe that it is the steady faithful prayers of all those involved in 40 Days for Life that is bringing about this change.

Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive his commendation from God. I Corinthians 4:5

Stephanie Gray debates abortion at Ottawa U

2011-11-14T13:21:00.001-04:00

View the Ottawa University debate here

Of interest are those pro-choicers who were invited to debate Stephanie but declined or did not bother to respond. View list here at www.prowomanprolife.org. Why the reticence? Lazy, as Andrea Mrozek suggests, or not feeling up to Ms. Gray's debating style?

Stephanie Gray of the Canadian Centre for BioEthical Reform debates Jovan Morales of the Atheist Community of University of Ottawa

The usual audience shouts that display complete ignorance and rudeness on the part of some male students.

Stephanie, as usual, displays consistent logic while Jovan, while doing a fairly good job, falls down in the logic area. His position is logically flawed and he continues to resort to the statement that a woman has the right to get rid of something growing within her body, claiming that this growing being is not a "person". Several times, he refers to the Canadian law which states that the unborn are not persons, but that is precisely what pro-lifers are questioning: the morality of said law.

As anyone knows who has read history, there have been many instances of laws that have been immoral. e.g. Germany where it was perfectly legal to imprison and kill Jews, the US and Britain where it was perfectly legal to hold black people as slaves. As Stephanie says, personhood is a philosophical definition and is used arbitrarily. The conferring of personhood says more about us as a society than it does about the individual on whom we are conferring that personhood.

Abortion in Canada

2011-11-11T15:34:00.001-04:00

If polling is any indication, the issue of abortion in Canada is certainly not over and done with. In a September National Omnibus poll by Environics, the findings put the abortion issue squarely on the map. Seventy-two per cent of a representative sample of 2000 Canadians surveyed support legal protection for unborn babies.

What Canadians actually think about abortion is not represented in our current laws and policies. Clearly, there is no moral consensus on the issue, yet there is a wide-spread ban on discussing it, a kind of moral dictatorship that prohibits even a mention of the word at any level of policy making.

Even the enormous body of published literature showing abortion’s negative impact on women’s health can’t initiate a public discussion. The most recent, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry (September 2011) found that following abortion women experienced an 81% increased risk of mental health problems and a 155% increased risk of suicide. Bear in mind that this study was based on a total of 877,181 participants of whom 163,831 had experienced an abortion and it took into account pre-existing mental health problems.

Clearly the people of Canada favour legislation to restrict abortion, but the dictatorship held by abortion absolutists terrifies most of us into silence, especially our elected representatives. In the pervading absence of discussion, the absence of law remains, and it is women and their unborn children who suffer. - Natalie Hudson Sonnen, Executive Director of Life Canada in the National Post

"Abortion absolutists" - definitely.

Using Language to Change Minds

2011-11-11T13:12:00.000-04:00

In January, 1971 a conference was held in Los Angeles at the International Hotel, called Therapeutic Abortion: a Symposium on Implementation.

Father Paul Marx, the head of Human Life International, got an invitation to this symposium; he did not understand how one came across his desk, perhaps because he had a doctorate in sociology. In any event, he attended the symposium without divulging his identity as a Roman Catholic priest heading up the largest pro-life organization in the world.

He recorded the entire conference and then wrote up his observations in a book called The Death Peddlers; War on the Unborn. Although the book was written in 1971, he edited it in 1998 and I found a copy last year and began reading it yesterday.

Some pro-choicers continue to argue that the unborn are not human beings; they are not even babies, they are "zygotes", then "embryos", then "fetuses". I maintain that these are simply terms to define states of development; in no way do they define a change in nature of the unborn.

Evidence of this is clear in the book, when Marx records the statements of a nurse Henry Etta Blackmon in a panel discussion "In-Hospital Care and Post-Hospital Follow-up".

... in the case of abortion by D and C, never even mention "abortion", since D and C's were so common. Be on guard to keep your feelings from coming through. 'If you say, 'Suck out the baby', you may easily generate or increase trauma; say instead, 'Empty the uterus,' or 'We will scrape the lining of the uterus,' but never 'We will scrape away the baby.'

"These may seem very, very insignificant to us, but to the patient it can really imply that you are using a judgment, and quite often we are not aware of what we are saying. We have to be very, very sensitive, and very, very aware of what words we are using to describe the procedures used. Use the word "fetus"; this is a fetus; this is not a "baby". You should be able to describe the fetus if requested to."

She then went on to describe it herself, emphasizing how small it was during the first twelve weeks. It was important to be able to touch the patient, she said. Blackmon cautioned: if the patient might end up in an environment where mothers had delivered and/or in an area where babies were among excited parents, forewarn and prepare your charge, because she might identify "fetus" with "baby." There was nothing like anticipating the worst.

For those who still insist on calling the unborn "fetus" or "products of conception", there really is not much time left before they will have to abandon that line of argument. Science has proven otherwise; it is time they acknowledged the science when they argue for abortion. The terms carry no more weight in evaluating human life than the terms infant, newborn, toddler, pre-pubescent, teenager and adult. All are human beings; all deserve protection of their life.

End the Killing in My Lifetime!

2011-11-09T10:10:00.003-04:00

Visit Unmasking Choice

A "Right" to Abortion?

2011-11-07T13:04:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, we concluded the 4th 40 Days for Life vigil in Halifax, NS. Today, the students from the Women's Centre at St. Mary's University have set up, as promised, outside the entrance to the Public Gardens.

First, let's be clear. Abortion has never been declared a "right" in Canada. Making this claim is manipulating words to make people believe what you say. Just as the word "choice" was put forward to advance the legalization of abortion, now the word "right" is put forward to justify that position.

Why do these students feel such a need to do this? After all, abortion is legal in Canada for any reason, at any point in a woman's pregnancy. Are they feeling threatened because a group of Christians prayed publicly for an end to abortion? They have the law on their side; why the need to convince the public of their position?

In the Morgentaler ruling, the court did not declare abortion a constitutional right. Only one of the seven Supreme Court Justices who heard the case, Madam Justice Bertha Wilson, wrote in support of a woman’s right to abortion, and then only in the first trimester of pregnancy. Dissenting Justices McIntyre and La Forest JJ. wrote in their opinion, “Save for the provisions of the Criminal Code permitting abortion where the life or health of the woman is at risk, no right of abortion can be found in Canadian law, custom or tradition and the Charter, including s.7, does not create such a right.” [emphasis added]

Furthermore, they stated that “there has always been a clear recognition of a public interest in the protection of the unborn and there is no evidence or indication of general acceptance of the concept of abortion at will in our society. The interpretive approach to the Charter adopted by this court affords no support for the entrenchment of a constitutional right of abortion.”
- from www.abortionincanada.ca

I suspect that someone is feeling threatened by our public witness to life during the past 40 Days. Someone is feeling the need to tell the public that hey, abortion is my prerogative, don't think otherwise!

Perhaps "the lady doth protest too much".

Why is abortion the second most controversial word in the English language? (the first is "nigger") Why do these feminists not even use the word abortion in their signs? Could it be that the public would find that distasteful? It seems that people are comfortable with saying that women have the right of choice, but they can't bring themselves to say women are perfectly entitled to have abortions, which is essentially what they are saying.

One can hide the ugly reality behind these slogans, but the ugliness remains. And people know it. The reality of abortion is such that people cannot even bear to hear the word.

This is because abortion is the antithesis of normal human sympathies. Women are designed by nature to bond with their offspring; to terminate her child is the most un-womanly thing a woman can do.

Abortion is the big NO. With abortion, a woman puts her life before another's and says that the child's life is not as important as hers. Yes, there are many pressures upon women to abort, and our society certainly does not provide enough support for the women facing difficult pregnancies, but ultimately the woman chooses her lifestyle over the life of her baby. It is not even an equal matching of rights: the woman does not lose her life if she carries the baby, but the baby always loses its life if the mother chooses not to.

If we are speaking of rights, then we should be standing opposite these students with a sign that says "Do I not have a right to live?"

2011-11-04T18:09:00.000-03:00

Re: ''Cancer leading cause of death in all provinces," Telegraph Journal Nov. 2/11

When I read the headline, ''Cancer leading cause of death in all provinces," I was reminded of Mark Twain's quip, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Sometimes statistics need to be taken with a grain or two of salt. Statistics Canada's figures on 2008 causes of death are a case in point.

The leading cause of death in Canada is not cancer (70,588 deaths) or heart disease (50,722 deaths) but induced abortion. In 2008 there were 95,876 abortions recorded, and the stats keepers indicate the real figures are higher due to unreported data from BC clinics.

By any objective standard, each time an abortion occurs a baby dies. Yet Stats Canada fails to recognize abortion as a human death. It thus perpetrates a national lie about the causes of death.

Canadians should not be deluded. Whatever our views on a woman's right to end a pregnancy, none of us should deny that abortion results in someone's death.

Caring and compassionate people mourn the loss of anyone's life. We mourn for those who have died from cancer and heart disease. We need to also mourn the loss of so many, many babies before birth. In 2008, 1096 were New Brunswick kids.

We need to not only mourn, but address the cause of why so many women see an unwanted pregnancy as a disease. Maternity is not a disease. And a child is no mere statistic.

Three of my seven daughters are pregnant at present. Don't tell me I'm not already a grandfather. I know the difference between truth and Stats Can lies.

Peter Ryan
Executive Director
New Brunswick Right to Life Association
Fredericton NB
Tel. 506-459-8990 / 1-888-796-9600

So-Called "Catholic" Politicians

2011-11-04T09:52:00.001-03:00

For the second time in three years, Justin Trudeau was invited to address a group of students in the Peterborough Catholic school board.

Dean Del Mastro, parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, said last month it was “outrageous” that the Catholic school board in his Peterborough riding would give a platform to the Liberal leadership prospect for the second time in three years.

Trudeau reacted with surprise that anyone would question his Catholicity. Although in a CBC interview in 2009, he admitted that his views on gay marriage and abortion were at odds with Catholic teaching.

Once again, we have a politician who claims that he can keep his personal faith and beliefs separate from his public life. That it is perfectly reasonable to be personally against abortion and yet to support a government that makes abortion legal. There is a huge disconnect here in the minds of these politicians, when they think that their personal morals shouldn't influence their public life. Precisely the opposite should be true. We want politicians who will stand for what they believe in, not politicians who will simply be weather-vanes of the prevailing culture.

If the bishops would speak clearly on this issue, such confusion wouldn't exist. But I have only heard Archbishop Prendergast address this issue a few years ago, when he said that he would deny Communion to a politician who publicly supported abortion.

This is a great oppportunity for the Catholic Church to set the record straight. Because it didn't with Pierre Trudeau, Justin's father, and that is the legacy we are living with now.

Read more here
LifeSiteNews

Hope for the Future

2011-11-02T14:22:00.000-03:00

This is a video from the US college pro-life movement. How do we get Canadian students motivated like this? I am puzzled, because here in Halifax, the pro-life club at Dalhousie University has only four members. The one at St. Mary's last year had more students, but I think it may have evaporated with the graduating of those leading it.

What is the malaise in our country that even infects our youth? Is there something intrinsically hostile to freedom of speech in Canada that brings this about? is there an apathy here and for what reason? Is it the lack of outspoken pro-life politicians? I would surely like to know why Canada lags so far behind the United States in pro-life activism.

New Evangelization must include addressing abortion

2011-11-01T18:40:00.000-03:00

Pro-life and filling the pews: A few comments about “new evangelization” / going out in the deep (talk about what “new evangelization means) : Some pastors might believe that abortion is the last thing you want to talk about if you want to get people back in the pews. I think the opposite. For the new evangelisation, or whatever you want to call it, people will only be interested in being saved if they realize they need to be saved. But if they don’t know about their sin, why would they need to go to church? Abortion is probably the biggest, most widespread sin today, so putting a spotlight on abortion is an essential component of the new evangelisation. Once they realize what they’ve done, that they have “crucified Christ” in the person of the unborn child (c.f. “‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’ Matthew 25:40”) they will seek forgiveness, and they will seek it and truly be forgiven only if they find in those who show them their sin the face of the One who will forgive them. But the face of God only shows through in us if we accept God’s forgiveness. And we can only accept God’s forgiveness if we recognize that we are just as sinful as the pro-choicers.

- Georges Buscemi, speaking to the closing banquet of 40 Days for Life in Halifax

A Great Read

2011-10-31T07:40:00.000-03:00

Home-schoolers learn about embryology

A good read - sure puts the simple truth into perspective.

h/t Abby Johnson

Pro Life Ad in Kelowna BC

2011-10-27T16:02:00.001-03:00

“Yesterday, it was the African who was determined to be ‘3/5’s human’ and could therefore be bought and sold, even killed as ‘property,’” continued Bartram. “Today, it’s the baby in womb who has been dehumanized. She has been declared a ‘non-person’ and can therefore be killed at will. The day is coming, however, when legalized abortion will be relegated to the dust bin of history, a sorry chapter in human history to be looked upon with great disdain by future generations.”

h/t LifeSiteNews

Abortion and Breast Cancer

2011-10-26T10:46:00.005-03:00

Michael Coren interviews Dr. Angela Lanfranchi, a breast surgeon from New Jersey. Women need to know this but they are not being told. And the Canadian Breast Cancer Society refuses to acknowledge this link. This is political correctness at the expense of women's health. As Dr. Lanfranchi says "it is just wrong to keep this information from women."

"For teenagers 18 and under, who had abortions between 9 and 24 weeks, their risk went up 800 percent, which is a huge risk."

Some Acid Thoughts

2011-10-24T21:42:00.001-03:00

Down at the 40 Days vigil site, a couple of young men (university students, we presume) have showed up with home made signs for Pro Choice. They are doing this to please some girls, I suppose. They tape the signs to the trees above our professionally made signs and frankly, it just looks tacky. Then they stand ten feet away from us and try to engage passersby in conversations. Meanwhile we at the vigil simply pray.

The other day, my husband said "these guys are just screwing around on my tax dollar". Ah, there's an acid thought. But you know, isn't he right? Most abortions are done because someone got pregnant while in a relationship that is not quite right, not stable, not really going anywhere. Usually that means the guy doesn't want a baby cluttering up the picture. He wants to be unhampered. Why don't I just say it, they are not married. So abortion is the means to clean up the mess. In this case, the "mess" is another human being.

Today, Starr Parker had an article called Moral Responsibilites are Linked to Fiscal Responsibilities. She wasn't quite as blunt as my husband but essentially, she is saying the same thing.

Liberals love to frame the killing of developing humans as being about women's lives, health and rights. But, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 3 percent of abortions are performed for reasons of a woman's health. Abortions that are performed because a woman's life is in danger amount to a fraction of 1 percent. That leaves more than 96 percent for convenience with some 50 percent repeat customers.

Regarding abortion, the liberal agenda is really about two things. One, an alleged right to sexual promiscuity; and two, an alleged right to have others bear social and financial responsibility for that promiscuity.

Fortunately, a sizable part of the American population doesn't see things this way. And, fortunately, a sizable part of our population remains in awe of the miracle of life and our responsibilities toward all aspects of life, both in and outside the womb.

It doesn't take that much thought to realize the fallacious thinking that suggests that matters of economy and matters of morality have nothing to do with each other.

The "right to abortion" culture is simply a subset of the entitlement culture, the culture that says your life is about making claims on others rather than personal responsibility.

Disrespect for life and disrespect for property go hand in hand. We can't divorce our sexual promiscuity from our fiscal promiscuity. Restoring personal responsibility in both areas is what we need today to get our nation back on track.

Read the entire article here
Starr Parker

Radio Gems

2011-10-21T13:27:00.001-03:00

While driving, I often listen to CJLU, the Christian radio station in my town. I dislike Christian popular music (sorry, but most of the songs are droning voices sung on three or four notes, max) but the offerings in the morning and evening are often superb.

This morning, I caught just ten minutes of John MacArthur. I am not saying that I agree with all of his theology, because I haven't heard much of it and I haven't read any of his books. But he made great sense this morning and I wished that I could have written it down as he spoke.

He was talking about Christians who say "well, it must be God's will" to everything that happens in their life and in the lives of others. MacArthur basically said this is crap. Much of what happens in this world is not God's will, but is the success of evil over what is good. When someone's marriage breaks up, that is not necessarily God's will. Nor is the loss of someone's job. Bad things happen to good people and pacifying one's self with the glib slogan of "it's God's will" leads us into a place of acceptance and tolerance of things that should not be tolerated.

As MacArthur said, much that is abnormal is accepted as normal by the world today. I thought of the people passing us at the 40 Days vigil, many of them thinking "abortion is legal, get over it". Well, abortion may be legal, but for a woman to kill her own child is not normal and should not be accepted as normal. I just read about a Catholic priest in El Paso who has been moved 250 miles away to an isolated community because he wrote about the Bible's teachings on homosexuality in the local paper. And the bishop stated that this priest was expressing his own opinion, not the position of the Catholic Church and that he was endangering the Church's tax-exempt status with the IRS. Ah, the clincher - money.

This priest was teaching what we as Catholics and what all Christians who follow the Bible believe: that homosexual behaviour is intrinsically disordered and sinful. So is heterosexual activity outside of marriage, by the way. It is not just homosexuals who come in for reprimand; it is anyone who is breaking the commandment with anyone.

MacArthur said that we are called to pray "thy will be done". What this means is that we try to align our own wills with that of God. Much of what happens in this world would never be the will of God; our accepting of it as some kind of Christian discipline is simply wrong. If something is evil and against the commands of God, then we are to speak up and, as MacArthur says, we are called to "rebel" against the forces of evil in this world.

Christians are not passive wimps who accept whatever happens to them or to someone else. Many of the greatest social reforms have been started and carried out precisely by people who were deeply Christian in their thinking and in their actions. Surely, the chaos of this present culture calls us to be even more courageous as we stand against the tide of worldly, not Godly, values.

Dr. Lanfranchi on Michael Coren

2011-10-20T11:30:00.000-03:00

Next Tuesday, Sun Media will host The Arena which is Michael Coren's popular talk show. His guest will be Dr. Angela Lanfranchi, a breast surgeon from New Jersey and founder of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute. Dr. Lanfranchi is known for her position that induced abortion and artificial birth control are contributing to the increase of breast cancer among pre-menopausal women.

A must to watch, tune it. Coren is good every day, but this show will be of particular interest to women.

Click on this link to watch Sun News live. Michael Coren's show airs at 7-8 pm Central Time, 8-9 pm Eastern Time.

Sun News Network

Late Term Abortions - never mention the baby

2011-10-20T11:14:00.001-03:00

Notice the word baby is never mentioned. Terms such as "elective procedure", "size of the pregnancy", "bpd measurement" are used.
When asked if there is anything wrong with the pregnancy and the answer is no, that the caller's husband has lost his job, her response is simply "okay". No attempt to ask the woman if she could keep the baby if helped, no attempt to dissuade her from abortion. Then the clincher - the price is eight to nine thousand dollars, which will be covered by Medicaid.

You can't convince me that abortion is not a lucrative business.

h/t Live Action

Is there an agenda behind the "Occupy" events?

2011-10-18T12:40:00.000-03:00

David Limbaugh seems to think so. Creating unrest over the differences between rich and poor, inciting people to blame the rich for all their problems, and launching their venom on the banks is all part of what Obama has been doing for the past couple of years. This is a man who wants radical change in America, and he has not demonstrated the kind of patriotism that one would expect of a president.

Obama and Occupy Wall Street are One

President Obama acts as though he merely sympathizes with the Wall Street occupiers' "broad-based frustration" about how America's financial system works, but he's doing a lot more than sympathizing. He's fanning their flames...

Why do we believe that in defaming tea partyers, Obama is projecting? Simply because he is a community organizer at heart with an ends-justify-the-means ethic. He has been engaged in political street agitation his entire adult life, so it is natural for him to assume his political opponents would engage in the same tactics. But they don't...

For a bird's-eye view of the type of protest Obama and his fellow leftists pretended to fear in the tea party events, we need look no further than the Wall Street occupier dust-ups. Here hateful and violent rhetoric abound, just as the ugly specter of racism, particularly against Jews, is in full relief, all of which are as verifiable in the YouTube videos of these protests as their absence has been in the tea party videos.

On her blog, Michelle Malkin cites a Denver protester saying, "There's a lot of stuff that needs to change, and it if doesn't, violent revolution will come."

He continues, "If you get the thirteen families that own the world, including George Bush and his administration, get them in front of the White House and hang them and shoot them, because they deserve that." And if that doesn't impress you, how about the protesters "calling for the beheading of 'white kids,' the 'hanging' of capitalists, and the murder of parents," as reported by the blog "Pundit Press"?

This, my friends, is representative of the type of protest our community organizer in chief claims to be "monitoring" and nevertheless supports -- the type that has led to more than 750 arrests throughout the country, compared with only one arrest in all the tea party protests...

With Obama, it's all smoke and mirrors; nothing is as he would have you believe. Every negative thing he says about the tea partyers is false, including that they don't represent the sentiment of the American majority, which is bursting with outrage at Obama's reckless agenda.

And whereas he pretended to fear violence from the tea partyers, he is actually trying to foment unrest among the occupiers. Their lifeblood is class warfare, and he is stoking its flames every single day.

With no ideas left on his plate that a long suffering American public is willing to further indulge, much less embrace, Obama is reduced to what he knows best: stirring public discontentment and unrest, hoping that this will somehow serve his political interests.

Watch Obama use the Occupiers to get himself re-elected.

LifeSiteNews banned

2011-10-17T16:37:00.001-03:00

Life Site News banned from public sessions of bishops' meeting

I wonder who is allowed to attend? Salt & Light? the Catholic Register?

Apparently just Salt & Light are allowed in and they have been streaming the meetings live to a total of 13-15 viewers. Wow!

How's that for transparency?

Bill Whatcott and Freedom of Speech in Canada

2011-10-14T20:42:00.001-03:00

No matter what your beliefs are about homosexuality, this case is very important for the continuance of free speech in Canada. If people get their feelings hurt by other's words, should that be considered "hate speech"?
Because if it is judged to be "hate speech", then no one will be free to express their beliefs in public.

h/t BigBlueWave

Issues Untouched by Feminists

2011-10-14T07:03:00.000-03:00

The ongoing 40 Days for Life vigil in Halifax has brought out some feminists from the Women's Centre at St. Mary's University. Why is that feminists always push abortion as a solution for women everywhere, while ignoring other issues?

In places where safe, legal abortions are not available or easily accessible, women are still choosing to terminate their pregnancies. Making abortion illegal will nto stop women from making this choice, but will only serve to endangner their lives.

On the issue of sex-selective abortions, as in more girl babies are aborted than boys (even here in Canada, feminists!) these women are silent. So they want to bring abortion to third-world countries, but say nothing about immigrants to Canada bringing their boys-are-preferred ideology to Canada.

On the issue of female genital mutilation, again silence. So when it is revealed that the abortionist Grosnell (the Philadelphia abortionist who was finally arrested) took photos of the mutilated genitals of Muslim women, no feminists speak up about this either.

On the issue of forced abortion, whether that be in China or here at home where parents threaten their daughters with rejection unless they abort, again feminists are silent.

Why does it seem that providing abortion for everyone everywhere is their #1 cause? Why do they think that abortion is the absolute litmus test for female emancipation?

Particularly shocking is the fact that one of the pro-choice women has already had herself sterilized at the age of 20. She says, if she wishes to have a child later, she will simply use IVF. This is sexual freedom?

I think the woman who refuses to sleep with a man and face the consequences of an uncommitted relationship alone, is by far the freer woman.

Freedom of Speech in Canada

2011-10-13T11:54:00.001-03:00

This case has very much at stake for Christians in Canada today... The Gospel of Life is offensive to some people. And no matter how much we speak the truth in love, there will always be some who will be offended...
There is a lot at stake. If this case goes, the wrong way, Christians will find more and more that their rights to speak about the truth will be limited.

- Andre Schutten, legal counsel for Reform Political Action in Canada

Stripping away the lie

2011-10-12T13:13:00.003-03:00

h/t LifeSiteNews

Reproductive Justice

2011-10-11T06:46:00.000-03:00

Over at our 40 Days for Life vigil site, two bikes have appeared wrapped with coloured yarn in the gay pride fashion. Attached to the bikes were signs with the words Reproductive Justice on them.

I am puzzled by this quest for reproductive justice. Perhaps if you read this and have a comment to share, you can enlighten me. I just don't get the picture. What do they consider to be "unjust"? The fact that they are born as women and have the role of bearing the next generation? Is that the injustice they feel?

Is it a desire to be just like men, in every way? To be able to compete in the world of jobs with men, without having the inconvenience of pregnancy and childcare getting in the way? Is that the injustice they feel?

Am I missing something here? Do women not realise that the ability to bear children is something that men don't get to do? That childbearing and child rearing can actually be seen as the good side of the coin.

There are many women out there in low-paying jobs and in jobs that don't challenge their minds who would love to be able to stay at home and raise their children. There are many women in better-paying jobs who don't like their work. I don't see that the job-world holds that much attraction to merit the cause for "reproductive justice".

If "reproductive justice" means that women must have access to abortion for whatever reason, where is the justice for the child in the womb, half of the time that child being female? Is a woman's freedom to be gained at the price of taking another's?

The bottom line must always be crossed: what are the unborn?
If they are not human beings, then abortion simply doesn't matter.
But if they are members of the human race, as medical science clearly states they are, then it matters a great deal.
Because abortion dehumanizes this class of persons in order to do away with them. And every great injustice in the world has happened the same way: by dehumanizing a class of persons, we can then justify the evil that we do to them. Jews were dehumanized by the Nazis in order to exterminate them; blacks were dehumanized by white landowners in order to make them slaves; now the unborn are dehumanized by society in order to abort them.

If I have missed something here, please do let me know.

40 Days for Life in Halifax

2011-10-08T19:23:00.002-03:00

A little action over at the vigil site.

40 Days for Life Halifax blog

40 Days for Life in Halifax

2011-09-29T16:12:00.000-03:00

The vigil began yesterday. As coordinator, I am busy filling in the spots when we don't have enough people at the vigil site. Please God, give us good weather this year.

I am doing more blogging over at the 40 Days blog so drop on over and check out things in Halifax.

40 Days for Life Halifax Blog

Foul Language

2011-09-24T08:33:00.002-03:00

Have you ever noticed that these folks who hate people with traditional values always use the most limited language to express their sentiments?

Why is it that they always resort to "f...k", "wh..e", etc when calling out to people? Do they not realise they look completely pathetic when they do this? When Bristol Palin asks this guy why he hates her mom, he tells her that she, i.e. Bristol, is just "white trash from Wazilla". Oh sure, that really nails it, doesn't it?

I was glad to see that Bristol has obviously inherited some of her mother's spunk. Baby bear has some "mama grizzly" in her too!

Silencing the Christian Message

2011-09-22T22:05:00.000-03:00

Elderly Canadian priest suspended for denouncing abortion/homosexuality - LifeSiteNews

The first I heard of this was on talk radio today in Halifax. The host was surprisingly fair, and he insisted that this was an issue of freedom, not an issue of beliefs. He kept repeating to callers that what mattered was the fact that someone should be allowed to hold their own beliefs and state them. Several times, he said that what this priest said was Catholic doctrine, so why was he being silenced?

I have to commend him, it was refreshing to hear a host be this fair on the topic of religion. His callers were not so fair.

So what relevance does this have for us here in Halifax? Well, it seems to explain why we have no Catholic priests joining the 40 Days for Life vigil this fall. In fact, I got an email today from one who has been coming all three of the past vigils saying that, due to other commitments, he cannot take part this year. What, at 7 am? other commitments? It struck me as fishy, and I wonder if the bishop has put out the word to all priests that he would prefer that they keep their distance from 40 Days.

We will never find out, unless some brave clergy blows the whistle. Which I don't think will happen. Be that as it may, I repeat to myself and to anyone coming to the vigil, that this is what "grassroots" means - it is us, the laity, who are carrying the issue now. We can no longer look to our clergy to lead us on important issues. Oh sure, there are going to be meetings on the "new evangelism" and how to grow the "engaged" church, whatever that means.

As my husband said so astutely this evening: once the new evangelism is in place, how will they teach about homosexuality and abortion without offending those who have been newly evangelised? If you really want to evangelize, at some point, you have to tell people about sin and repentance and the need for a saviour; without that, it is all straw.

Don't worry, Bish, we're used to not having your support

2011-09-20T20:45:00.002-03:00

The bishop of Spokane, Washington has issued a statement that he would prefer that his priests and seminarians do NOT participate in the 40 Days for Life vigil.

In a statement Friday, the diocese of Spokane said priests should place emphasis on education about the abortion issue above confrontational tactics.
“The present political environment has become very toxic and polarizing, to the point that people have become fixed in their positions, especially in regard to abortion, and are unwilling to talk to each other,” the diocese says in its statement. “The pastoral challenge is to get people to take a second look at the issue of abortion.”

from LifeSiteNews

The clergy simply do not understand the fact that abortion has been allowed to continue unabated because they will not take a lead in this. They have been weak and lacking in leadership on an issue that both Pope Benedict and Blessed Pope John Paul II have called the most foundational issue to be defended.

40 Days for Life began precisely because the laity saw the need and it was not being met by the church. So they took matters into their own hands. This is what David Bereit means when he says 40 Days is a "grassroots" movement, it begins with the ordinary lay person and will continue, whether the clergy support it or not. We are not dependent upon the church for support for this movement.

When I hear negative responses from clergy about 40 Days for Life, I find myself thinking of this Scripture passage:

Gamaliel advises the Sanhedrin,

Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.
- Acts: 5:38-39

I wonder where Jesus would be if He were here today? quite possibly breaking up the equipment in an abortion clinic. We just stand on the sidewalk and pray for God's will to be done.

Sorry, kid, wish you weren't here

2011-09-19T19:53:00.000-03:00

Couple awarded 4.5 million for disabled child

Well, they were awarded half of what they claimed for, given the fact that doctors and techs did not read the ultrasounds correctly. If they had, they would have told the couple their baby boy would be born with no arms and only one leg.

... and had they known of their unborn son’s disabilities before he was born, they would have aborted him.

Well, that's just great for the little guy, isn't it? Your parents don't want you, because you are defective. Tell that to Nick Vujicic.

Life Without Limbs

h/t LifeSiteNews

Abortion in the Third World

2011-09-18T15:09:00.000-03:00

From SPUC, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children:

Pro-abortion ideology is costing lives

A few months ago, Stephen Harper the Canadian Prime Minister, was the recipient of a lot of criticism for his refusal to include abortion in his efforts to reduce maternal mortality in the third world. This article shows him to be absolutely right.

How many women around the world are dying in childbirth every year? Accurate numbers are very difficult to calculate for a number of reasons. So we need to be aware that we are looking at estimates and these estimates vary from between 350,000 and 600,000 maternal deaths a year, 99% of which are believed to occur in developing countries. In Britain, the maternal mortality rate is 8.3 per 100,000 live births – and incidentally, Britain does not have the lowest maternal mortality rate by any means. Pro-life Ireland and Malta have a rather better record.

The two biggest causes of maternal death (and this is very well established) are haemorrhage and sepsis.

In many cultures around the world, the mother is the lynchpin of the family and if she goes, the entire family is shattered. We need always to be aware of the human face of this tragedy.

Maternal mortality has been rightly described as 'an international disgrace' but almost as grave a disgrace is the determination by pro-abortion groups to hijack the issue in order to promote abortion around the world. The abortion lobby has a long history of exploiting the suffering of women whilst claiming to act in their best interests. Abortion has nothing to do with saving women's lives. As far back as 1992, a group of Ireland's top obstetricians and gynaecologists signed a letter in which they wrote: "We affirm that there are no medical circumstances justifying direct abortion, that is, no circumstances in which the life of a mother may only be saved by directly terminating the life of her unborn child.”

Countries such as Ireland and Malta where abortion is banned have some of the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world. Any medical procedure which involves the ending of one or both human lives involved is by definition unsafe and it is unsafe whether it occurs in Nairobi or New York. The abortion lobby has been very successful in creating a false association between ‘safe’ and ‘legal’ abortion

South Africa, which has had abortion on demand for years, has witnessed a fourfold increase in maternal mortality since a UK-funded abortion organisation set up clinics around that country. As SPUC’s Peter Smith commented: "It is farcical for the government to talk about safe abortions in situations without sterile surgical facilities, safe blood transfusion or emergency back-up. Running abortion clinics in slums, shanty towns and the bush will harm or kill women as well as killing babies."

The western obsession with promoting its own vision of sexuality onto the rest of the world is not only costing the lives of the unborn; it is costing the lives of women through neglect.

Years ago, my husband and I spent a year in Africa, in one of the poorest countries in the world - Malawi. The very thought of opening clinics to do abortions in areas where there was not clean water or the very basics of hygiene is appalling to me. Many Africans cannot wash themselves daily, many never brush their teeth - do you really think they can operate a clinic with sterile conditions and do abortions on women, then send those women back to conditions where they will be more susceptible to infection and subsequent death?

Abortion is being exported by the western world onto the rest of the world, precisely because of the west's worldview of sexuality: i.e. sexuality divorced from procreation.

I recall an African teacher once saying that he saw a photograph of an American family, a mom and dad and two children, standing in front of a middle class home with a car. This was shown as the American ideal. Then he said, to an African, the picture of a happy family is the mom and dad and numerous children, the house and car simply did not matter. Africans love their children; imposing abortion on them in the name of maternal health care is a complete disregard for their values of family and happiness. Perhaps the push to bring abortion is just an attempt to rationalize the acceptance of this evil amongst ourselves. Misery always did like company.

Mark Steyn on Canada

2011-09-14T07:04:00.000-03:00

Gotcha. So a superior court judge in a relatively civilized jurisdiction is happy to extend the principles underlying legalized abortion in order to mitigate the killing of a legal person — that’s to say, someone who has managed to make it to the post-fetus stage. How long do those mitigating factors apply? I mean, “onerous demands”-wise, the first month of a newborn’s life is no picnic for the mother. How about six months in? The terrible twos?

Fourth Trimester Abortion, by Mark Steyn

Father Frank Responds

2011-09-13T14:36:00.000-03:00

Father Frank Pavone spoke with John Henry Westen of LSN this morning and responded to his recall to Amarillo diocese by his bishop.

Fr. Pavone told LifeSiteNews that he was “perplexed” by the demand and added that he has begun a process of appeal to the Vatican. He stressed that “Priests for Life is above reproach in its financial management and the stewardship of the monies it receives from dedicated pro-lifers, raised primarily through direct mail at the grassroots level. “

While Priests for Life, “does provide for my residence and the expenses associated with the ministry,” he said, “these expenses are very small.” As a diocesan priest, Fr. Pavone has not taken a vow of poverty, however, he said, “I have basically chosen to live in that fashion in solidarity with the pre-born children we are trying to protect—who are the poorest of the poor.”

Fr. Pavone said that he will be obedient to his bishop’s request to return to his diocese. As he puts it, “because I am a priest of the diocese of Amarillo, I will be obedient and report there on the appointed date, putting the other commitments that are on my calendar on hold until I get more clarity as to what the bishop wants and for how long.”

As a leading spokesman for the pro-life movement throughout the world, the removal of Fr. Pavone from his position of pro-life leadership would be devastating. Fr. Pavone remains confident, however, that this will not take place. “In 2005, I made a public promise in a Church ceremony in Amarillo, presided over by a Vatican Cardinal, that this full-time pro-life work would be a lifetime commitment. That’s a commitment I promise to fulfill without wavering.”

Please pray for a speedy resolution of this situation. Let us pray for Father Frank who is the clearest voice in the pro-life movement today. And pray for Father Frank's bishop that he will have clarity of mind and soul in addressing what he sees as a problem.

Life Site News