Pro-life

From Bishop Vasa’s latest column.

Some months ago a prominent Catholic public person, described as faithful to the church, was asked if being pro-choice or pro-abortion was an issue which conflicted with the Catholic Faith.

Here is what was said: "To me it isn’t even a question. God has given us a free will. We’re all responsible for our actions. If you don’t want an abortion, you don’t believe in it, then don’t have one. But don’t tell somebody else what they can do in terms of honoring their responsibilities." According to a close relative the choice to have an abortion or not to have an abortion had no moral component whatsoever. "They were just choices."

It seems to me that there are just choices and there are unjust choices. Choices would be the preference for chocolate ice cream over vanilla ice cream or sherbet instead of ice cream. That is just a choice.
A just choice would be to choose to pay a fair and living wage to employees as opposed to simply meeting the mandatory standard of minimum wage laws. An unjust choice would be to choose to terminate the life of another human being. This is not just a choice and it is not a just choice; it is an unjust choice.

Furthermore it is an unjust choice which is diametrically opposed to the clear and consistent teaching of the Catholic Church as well as to the clear and consistent teaching of God Himself in the Ten Commandments. The direct, intentional taking of the life of an innocent human being is inhumane and unjust. It is not just a choice!

It is categorically impossible for the same person to state that he or she believes simultaneously both what the Catholic Church teaches and that abortion is just a choice. What we believe must inform what we do.

Of course that Catholic politician he references is Nancy Pelosi.

Update: Lifesite has now picked up the story along with Amy Welborn.

I posted previously on the Knights of Columbus in Madison, Wisconsin putting up "I regret my abortion" billboards that has had some very positive effects. Now the same thing is happening in Tulsa by Catholic Charities.

Tulsa – A battle for hearts and minds is expanding across the Tulsa area. Catholic Charities and Planned Parenthood are expressing their concerns on a big scale.

The Catholic Diocese has now paid for ten billboards advertising a retreat that offers counseling to those who have had an abortion. The two groups don’t see each other as opponents, but they have very different goals.

"We want to offer a message of hope to both men and women who are suffering from the pain of an abortion," says Mary Lee Ingram with Catholic Charities. "Most people would be surprised to know that by the time a woman is 45, one in three will have had an abortion in the United States."

"I think anything we can do to make it easy to access birth control prevents unwanted children," says Nancy Kechel with Planned Parenthood. "And, I am terribly concerned about what happens to unwanted children."

They say too many of those kids end up with problems like drugs or criminal records. Planned Parenthood has their ads on bus shelters. They want people to know that money is not an obstacle if they need help.

Wow if only we could route out all those unwanted kids any results of pregnancies that were not directly unintended. We could round them up and kill them and imagine all the crime and drug related problems we could prevent.

Seriously though hats off to Catholic Charities in Tulsa for such a worthwhile effort.

The nation’s largest abortion business has started a new wireless communications system partnering with a long-time pro-abortion long-distance carrier. Planned Parenthood’s new cell phone service will allow pro-abortion activists to not only make calls but get action alerts from the organization.

Planned Parenthood Wireless is a new affinity program that allows its supporters to sign up for a mobile phone service and see 10% of their monthly bill go back to the abortion business.What a disgusting idea that is.

The pro-abortion group will also use customers’ monthly bills to include action alerts and information and will provide 30 free minutes of calls every month to encourage its members to talk to friends about abortion issues.
[Via The World IMHO]

So when you drop a call does the display say it was terminated? If you call to complain about terminated calls will they say that since it was only a one cell coverage organism that it does not really count as a call?

"Can you hear me now? No you just vacuumed my brains out." Will probably not come out as a commercial for this new product.

Exactly what cell phones will they have? Obviously a Razor would fit right in. The following is a previous parody that I did, that I think fits right into to this line of thinking.

Now anybody seeing this advertisement would be highly suspicious of these amazing claims. They would notice that no reputable scientist supports these claims and that there is no research showing that stem-cell phones would actually work. Why then is it that with the same outlandish claims and circumstances that people have become so convinced of ESCR?

Is there a phrase more infamous than "Roe versus Wade"?

The principal people involved in this most infamous legal case were from
Dallas. "Roe" is a pseudonym for Dallas resident Norma McCorvey. Henry
Wade was the Dallas district attorney who filed the original charges in
the case.

It all began here – in our home town, where we raise our families, where
we go to church, where we live, and love, and learn, and work.

We are three bloggers who also live in the Dallas area. We are deeply
committed to ending abortion in this country. To that end, we have
committed ourselves to the following: On each First Friday for the next
eleven months, we will fast and pray for the intention of ending
abortion. This will culminate at the annual Dallas March for Life in
January of 2008, where we will join our bishop and the faithful of this
city in marching to the courthouse where Roe was originally argued.

We ask anyone reading these words to join us. Fast and pray with us each
First Friday, no matter how far removed you are from Dallas, for an end
to abortion. We especially ask other Dallas area bloggers and residents
to join us, at least in spirit.

We will not win this battle in the courts. We will not win this battle
in the media. We will not win this battle in any earthly way. We will
only win through prayer, fasting, and devotion to Christ.

It began here. Let it end here.

Jesus, we trust in you.

Mark Windsor – Rafting the Tiber http://yawper.stblogs.org
Julie Davis – Happy Catholic http://happycatholic.blogspot.com
Laura Hughey – …and if not… http://and-if-not.blogspot.com

MEDIA ADVISORY, Feb. 15 /Christian Newswire/ — Yesterday, on hundreds of college campuses nationwide, students were handed a Hershey’s kiss with a free condom. This “Condom and a Kiss” campaign has been going on for several years and is a way for students who practice contraception or support it to spread their message and their products.

But yesterday, a new player entered the field. At the University of Mary Washington , a public university in Virginia, a group of students, called Project Plus, have been actively spreading a message opposed to this mentality via posters and articles in the school newspaper. Contradictory to the normally sexually spurred activities of Valentine’s Day, these students reached out to their peers with a message that “True Love is worth more than Contraception”. With full sized Hershey’s Chocolate Bars with that message on the front, they passed out 360 bars in less than 2 hours, even on a snow day for the small school which canceled classes. Perhaps because of the snow, the “Condom and a Kiss” campaign that the group hoped would be present did not show up. But they still had lots of good conversations and both positive and negative responses. As students entered the popular student café, members of Project Plus asked them if they would like a free candy bar. The most popular response was “No… wait, you said free?” The students were astonished that anyone would be handing out so much chocolate for free!

The theme of the chocolate bar give-away was “Without Contraception, you get so much more”, an analogy pertaining to the tiny Hershey’s Kisses that the “Condom and a Kiss” campaign hands out with condoms, compared to full sized Hershey’s bars. Inside the candy wrapper it read, “It makes sense that condoms are handed out today with nothing more than a tiny chocolate kiss. This reflects how little love you can express while using one. Using contraception tells your lover, ‘I don’t want to share every part of myself with you.’”

This group started with posters talking about the side effects of the pill.

Florida is so much in the abortion news these days. Now comes word the Orlando National Organization for Women has chosen the design for a pro-abortion plate to counter what NOW calls the "notorious" and wildly successful Choose Life plate.

(231,608 Florida Choose Life plates have been sold in the seven years it has been available, earning almost $5 million toward adoption support. It currently ranks eighth out of 120 FL specialty plates.)

The pro-abortion plate is entitled, "United for Choice." Its illustration shows a baby star shooting heavenward from inside the mommy star, pathetic and disgusting.

I can think of many other captions for a pro-abortion specialty license plate. How about you?

I do find it rather interesting of the seeming religious component of the baby star shooting heavenward. Do products of conception, tissue masses, non-humans, etc go to Heaven by their understanding? But the graphic obfuscation goes right along with the linguistic gymnastics used like ‘choice’ to say something without invoking the reality of what you are supporting. Though I am surprised they didn’t select a slogan like "Choose Choice" I will be curious as to how many people actualy choose such a plate. The Choose Life plates are fairly common and I am always glad to see a high percentage of them in church parking lots, hopefully I won’t see any of the new ones there.

Here are some of the pro-abortion plates that didn’t get selected.

Washington DC (CNA) — Abortion is a multi-million dollar a year business that makes most of its money by killing black children, says Day Gardner, president of the National Black Pro-Life Union.

In a statement released yesterday, Gardner called on African Americans to open their eyes to the fact that more than 1,000 black children die each day by abortion.

“These children are denied their most basic human right — which is the right to life; a right which our ancestors so proudly worked for, marched for and many of them died for,” she said.

Since abortion was legalized in the U.S., more than 44 million children have been killed by abortion, and 15 million of them were black children, Gardner pointed out. More than 37 percent of all abortions are performed on black women annually. Last year, more than 400,000 black babies were aborted.

“Abortion has become the number one killer of black people in this country — killing more African Americans than accidents, heart disease, stroke, crimes, HIV-AIDS and all other deaths combined!” she said.

“What bothers me is we are very quick as a people to recognize racism everywhere else except the one place that truly affects all of us,” she said. “Most blacks will agree that racism is sill very much alive, yet say nothing when abortion facilities are placed purposefully in minority and poor communities. This is no accident!”

Administrators at Mercy High School, a Catholic school located in Farmington Hills, Mich., abruptly canceled the upcoming appearance of best-selling author Dan Flynn, alleging the content of his speech was "inappropriate."

The lecture, scheduled for February 12 and sponsored by Young America’s Foundation, was an after school event and attendance was voluntary. Flynn’s topic, entitled "Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood," exposes the real foundations of the abortion-rights movement — the historical fact that Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, was an anti-Catholic bigot who advocated concentration camps and forced sterilization.

Carolyn Witte, the school’s principal, said the lecture was unsuitable for high school students. The "content could be misunderstood," Witte told YAF. Flynn’s speech is taken from his book, Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall For Stupid Ideas, which is backed by 985 footnotes.

Witte continued by saying her students — whose ages range from 14 to 18 — were too "sensitive" to hear a topic about Planned Parenthood’s roots. "I’m not suggesting that I or the school is anti-Mr. Flynn," said Witte. "I just have not heard Mr. Flynn speak."

While Mercy High School administrators didn’t think their students were mature enough to hear a topic related to abortion, the school has brought in speakers to talk about chastity and has shown videos regarding sexual abuse.

Update: Dale Price remembers that this is the same schools that had a fundraising lunch with Catholic and pro-abortion Gov. Granholm back in 2003.

Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) – The celebration in Italy of the Day for Life promoted by the Italian Bishops’ Conference which starts for the diocese of Rome an annual ‘Week for Life and the Family’ offered the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI an opportunity on the first Sunday in February to reaffirm the value of human life at every stage and the importance of the family based on matrimony. “I join the Italian Bishops to renew a call to all men and women of goodwill reiterated also by my venerable predecessors- the Pope said -, to be open to the great and mysterious gift of life. Life is the work of God and it cannot be denied to anyone, not even the smallest and most helpless unborn child, not even in case of some serious disability. At the same time, in unison with the Bishops of the Church in Italy, I urge people not to by misled into thinking that man can dispose of life, to the point of legalising its interruption with euthanasia, perhaps under the guise of human pity".

The Holy Father then recalled that the family is the "cradle" of life and of every vocation, “the family founded on matrimony is the natural environment for the birth and education of children and therefore it guarantees the future of the whole human race”. Suffering today of profound crisis and faced with many difficulties, the family must be protected, assisted, safeguarded and valued. “If this task falls in the first place to the spouses- the Pope said -, it is also a primary duty for the Church and all public institutions to support the family with pastoral and political initiatives taking into account the actual needs of married couples, the elderly and the new generations”. Recalling the recent celebration of the Day of Consecrated Life, Pope Benedict XVI recalled that in a happy family, illuminated by the faith and by holy love of God, there can more easily flourish vocations at the service of the Gospel in the priesthood, in religious life and the different forms of consecrated life. Before leading the recitation of the midday Angelus prayer the Pope urged those present to pray that “through ongoing efforts to promote life and the institution of the family, our communities may be places of communion and hope which renew, despite many difficulties, the great ‘yes’ to authentic love and the reality of man and the family in keeping with God’s original plan”. (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 5/2/2007; righe 25, parole 383)

Maureen Whitman who went to the March for Life with a group of teens and another parent had each of the teens write their experience of the march and she has been posting some of them each day.