More pro-abortion "Catholics" in our government

Obama has tapped Kathleen Sebelius to be Heath and Human Services Secretary. Sebelius vetoed a bill that would have informed women being coerced into abortion that they have a right to refuse and has ties to George Tiller, the abortionist currently charged with nearly 20 counts of performing illegal late-term abortions. Sebelius has said that she believes "there are certain inalienable rights established for a person, but those are not applied in utero.” Please visit Catholics Against Kathleen Sebelius and sign against her confirmation.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us!

It hasn't taken our new president long to start advancing the culture of death. Our little family has been praying frequently for the intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe to stop the FOCA and the evil of abortion. I urge all my fellow Catholics to pray for her intercession as well!

Jennifer at Conversion Diary has a link to an article she wrote on discussing abortion with those that are "pro-choice." It's insightful and very helpful, I encourage you to read it!

It's heartbreaking to consider what this presidency means for the unborn. All I can say is pray fervently, have faith in God, and dig your heels and fight to keep the ground the pro-life movement has gained. I contacted a crisis pregnancy center to see about volunteering, and tomorrow at adoration I will be praying for the unborn.

They need us now more than ever. Never give up hope, never surrender.



photo by laura grace

Egypt Septuplets stir debate on fertility drugs.

There are so many things wrong here, I don't know where to start.

Biden. Not impressed.

Biden, Obama's VP, is a pro-abortion Catholic who pays lip service to the Church's teaching on when life begins.

Still not voting for Obama.

A realization

A couple of days ago I had a sudden realization. My husband is adopted, and he was born in January of 1979- almost exactly 6 years after Roe V. Wade. His birth mother legally could have chosen to abort him.

We don't know much at all about her, or where she is now. But wherever she is, I want to say, thank you. Thank you for giving my husband life. Because of the choice you made 29 years ago, I have a loving husband and 3 beautiful little girls. The world wouldn't be nearly as beautiful without them.

I read somewhere on the internet that I shouldn't vote for McCain because he doesn't value human life.

Unlike Obama, who totally does. I mean, you know, besides unborn babies. But they don't count.

Sigh.

As an aside, I've been reading a lot of what former abortionists and nurses who participated in abortion have to say. It's terrifying. But very eye-opening.

Pro-life, Pro-Compassion

Blessed Mother Teresa was an amazing woman, and her humanitarian efforts usually garner a lot of adoration from liberal leaning folks. One thing you won't hear them talk about much is her steadfast commitment to the unborn.

"Any country that accepts abortion, is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what it wants."

Many other beautiful and inspiring quotes from her on abortion can be found here and here.

One of the many things I admire about Blessed Mother Teresa was that she never lost her compassion for the mothers committing the abortions. She spoke frankly against abortion, but also reminded us to come to mothers who have aborted their children with love-

And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love, and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even his life to love us.

Abortion is such a heartbreaking act, such an intrinsically evil act, that it can easily stir up disgust and hatred towards the ones committing the act. When I was pro-choice, one of the stumbling blocks to accepting the truth about abortion was the vocally hateful pro-lifers. We don't win any converts when we scream and cuss and (God help us) kill or bomb. We have to meet the evil of abortion with the love of God. We have to come to the mothers who are broken and suffering with love and compassion. How can we ever help them to see that their precious children deserve love and compassion if we show them none? We can do this without compromising and diminishing the truth! We can stand up for the unborn without trampling on the women who have been led to believe that their children are expendable, that their own bodies exist for the pleasure of men, that sex and abortion on demand are "rights" they are entitled to.

My Pro-life Conversion

In part 3 of my conversion story, I mentioned that I also experienced a profound conversion from pro-choice to pro-life. I don't really recall abortion being mentioned much when I was growing up, though I knew what it was and that it was a bad thing, and that basically every one in my family was against it. I don't ever recall hearing "pro-choice" "pro-life" or things like that, and certainly no one in my family picketed abortion clinics or things of that nature. I never really thought about it much as a teenager, even though I was sexually active. Although I didn't consider myself anti-abortion, I didn't really think of abortion as "good" either, and just assumed if I got pregnant unexpectedly I'd keep it. After I had my first daughter at 18, I joined a liberal pro-choice message board for teen moms. I remember being horrified when one young lady posted that she was 20 weeks pregnant and had changed her mind and no longer wanted to have her baby, asking for resources on procuring an abortion at such a late date. I posted that I thought that was wrong and implored her to keep her baby and place it for adoption, and was promptly torn to shreds. I learned after that to keep quiet anytime anything surrounding abortion made me uncomfortable. I became an "ultra-liberal uber feminist" and was pretty staunchly pro-choice, though I could only weakly proclaim to believe in "abortion on demand and without apology." In April of 2004 I even drove 12 hours on a stinky bus out to Washington, D.C. for the very first "March For Women's Lives" (it was originally to be called the March For Choice, I believe, but the disingenuous name change came right before the march was to take place).

Although I could parrot out "it's just a clump of cells" fairly convincingly in the case of 1st trimester abortion, I couldn't do so for later abortions. After all, I had been pregnant, I had felt my baby moving in my womb as early as 14 weeks. "Clumps of cells" don't do that. For later term abortions, I just didn't read descriptions of what they were and how they were done and maintained that any restriction on abortion would lead to a collapse of not only the "right" to abortion, but of all the other rights that women had fought for. This is a common fear dangled before women on the fence or who begin to question the validity of the common arguments in favor of abortion. NOW states on their website that "reproductive rights are issues of life and death for women, not mere matters of choice." At the march we chanted "Pro-life, that's a lie, you don't care when women die!" I didn't like everything about abortion, but of course I didn't want women to die. I was very convinced that any restriction on abortion would lead to women dying by the tens of thousands due to botched "back alley" abortions.

So in a sense, I think I always heard my inner voice and in some ways saw through the lies propagated to justify abortion. As for when I started to actually listen to that voice, I can't pinpoint the exact moment, but there are some moments along the way that stick out to me. My first pregnancy, of course, started to unravel it some, though initially I fought back against it and insisted that having a child made me more pro-choice than I had been before. But I don't think that anyone can honestly go through a pregnancy and not feel, deep down, somewhere inside that that baby is actually a baby, that all unborn babies are babies, that they are alive. My second daughter, of course, forced me to confront the less savory parts of the pro-choice movement, namely the aborting of unborn babies with special needs and defects. It had always bothered me but I chose to ignore it. Once I had her, I couldn't anymore. Perhaps I could pinpoint her birth as the start of the unraveling of all I had tried so hard to believe.

One view I had to confront was: Abortion is okay because they aren't people yet! They aren't aware and they're dependent on their mother to survive! My daughter was in a drug induced coma the first week of her life. She wasn't aware. She didn't open her eyes. They told me she might always be like that. She was dependent on tubes and ventilators to keep her alive. She was still my daughter. She was still human. What was the difference between her lying there and her inside of me? A few layers of skin and muscle and a birth canal? Why was it okay to kill one and not the other? Even more disturbing are those like Peter Singer, who insist that babies like my precious daughter should be killed after birth. He agrees that there's little difference between an unborn baby and a born baby. He simply differs in maintaining that neither have any rights. What about adults who become severely disabled? If whether or not we deserve to live is dependent on our ability to be self-aware, how can we condone the killing of unborn children while protecting adults? Where does it stop? I used to think the term "Culture of death" was trite and inflammatory. Now there's nothing I can say but that it is apt.

Why is it okay to abort unborn babies with defects and special needs? I remember holding my sweet baby girl and thinking in disgust that if her severe brain damage had been detected prior to birth, I could have aborted her, even so close to delivery. My Buddhist brother recently made a similar observation. While my heart breaks for parents faced with serious and/or fatal diagnosis for their babies, and while I feel much compassion for them, regardless of whether they choose to carry their children to term or not, I can not accept that aborting those babies.

Inevitably, what I realized was that I simply could not advocate for my daughter while maintaing that children like her, children with special needs, could be aborted, no questions asked. My daughter deserved to live as much as any other baby. My daughter is a chid of God as much as any other baby. Every baby may not be perfect, every baby may not be convenient, but every baby deserves to live; every baby is a child of God. I can not rectify being the mother of a child with special needs with complying, whether implicily or explicitly, with the aborting of unborn babies with special needs. Babies like her. How could I?

18 months or so after Riley's birth, I took a part-time job in supported living, helping adults with mental and physical disablities in their daily tasks. This only affirmed my belief that babies with special needs have just as much right to live as "normal" babies. Disablity is natural. It's a normal part of the human condition. I worked with people with varying degrees of mental impairments. Trust me when I say that they don't need anyone to feel sorry for them. They're perfectly happy. They experience a normal range of emotions. They have friends, and they have people they don't like. They all have unique and distinct personalities. They're just as "human" as "normal" adults. They enjoy life as much as anyone else does. Even severely impaired, non-verbal persons, "matter". My daughter may have been in a drug-induced coma for the first 5 or 6 days of her life, but at no point did I ever question her worth, her dignity, her humaness. Why shouldn't the same apply to a non-verbal, non-responsive adult? We have worth, we have dignity, because God wrote that onto our hearts. Every one of us, no matter how good, how bad, how extraordinnary, how disabled- every one of us has instrinsic value and worth because of Him. He loves us wholly and completely regardless of how perfect or how flawed we are. Every one single one of us.

From this point on, the pro-choice rhetoric just crumbled. It was like seeing it all with new eyes and I couldn't believe the things I had justified, the things I had believed and fought for. I'll likely explore that later on, but for now I think this post will suffice.

Obama moving more to the center?

Not surprising, most candidates do, but one thing stuck out to me-

Obama also said "mental distress" should not count as a health exception
that would permit a late-term abortion, saying "it has to be a serious physical
issue," addressing a matter considered crucial to abortion rights activists.

This makes me slightly less terrified of the FOCA. But even with "a serious physical issue" there's still no reason to have a late-term abortion! If the baby is viable, then deliver it and try to save it! Once again, I think the insistance on the "right" to late-term abortion has to do with wanting women to be able to abort babies found to have problems.

And anyone who doesn't think a late-term abortion will cause "mental distress" must have really bought the "just a clump of cells" lie hook, line, and sinker.

Election Woes

As the election draws near, I feel more and more discouraged and disillusioned. Not knowing much about Barack Obama, I was initially excited about the prospect of him being the next POTUS. Until, of course, I discovered how rabidly pro-abortion he is. He starts to stumble down off the pedestal he's been placed on quite easily once you start to open your eyes. Predictably, he's attempting soften his staunch pro-abortion stance by cozying up to evangelicals on other issues, such as playing up his support of faith based initiatives. It's not possible to be all things to all people, to be simultaneously radical and moderate, but maybe the adoration is getting to his head? Actually, he reminds me a lot of Ronald Reagan, with regards to his ability to talk pretty and make people feel warm and fuzzy about themselves and their country.

McCain, on the other hand, is no saint. His continued, unrepentant usage of racial slurs to describe his torturers during his time as a POW are unacceptable. He supposedly used called his wife a Very Bad Name, though the story sounds a little far-fetched and I can't anything even remotely unbiased on it. He overall seems to have issues with anger, which certainly isn't surprising, given his history, but might make him a poor choice for president. He also supports embryonic stem cell research using "discarded" embryos "left-over" from fertility treatments. Then there's the whole Iraq debacle.

I'm absolutely not voting for Obama under any circumstances, if only for the fact that he promised NARAL his first act as president would be to sign the reprehensible Freedom of "Choice" Act. I'm not sure if I can stomach voting for McCain, though. I'm seriously considering writing in "None of the Above."

And let's just point out the ridiculousness of this part of FOCA-

FOCA provides that “[i]t is the policy of the United States that every woman has the fundamental right to choose to bear a child, to terminate a pregnancy prior to fetal viability, or to terminate a pregnancy after fetal viability when necessary to protect the life or health of the woman.”

If the woman's life or health is in danger and the baby is viable, then deliver the baby and do your damnedest to help it! Why on EARTH would you need to kill a viable baby to "protect the life or health of the woman?"

The cynic in my says it's doublespeak to protect a woman's "right" to abort a baby with special needs.