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Passed in March 2010, the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as “ObamaCare,” has been widely criticized by pro-life advocates as potentially dangerous to the sanctity of human life. But almost no one predicted the current administration’s latest assault on not just pro-life values but the first amendment and religious liberty itself.
On January 20, 2012, Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), issued a new mandate for all insurance plans in the country. Under the guise of “preventative care,” Secretary Sebelius deemed pregnancy to be a condition that must be guarded against, even at the expense of religious liberty. The HHS administration’s new regulation requires that all employers (including religious schools and colleges, non-profit food banks, pro-life pregnancy centers, and even Right to Life organizations) must provide their employees insurance coverage which includes not only free contraception, but also the morning-after pill and the chemical abortion drug “Ella” – with no co-pay.
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There’s a petition out there that women might want to sign, affirming their opposition to the false claims of government leaders who claim to “speak for women”. The text of the open letter to PRESIDENT OBAMA, SECRETARY SEBELIUS AND MEMBERS OF CONGRESS is as follows:
DON’T CLAIM TO SPEAK FOR ALL WOMEN
We are women who support the competing voice offered by Catholic institutions on matters of sex, marriage and family life. Most of us are Catholic, but some are not. We are Democrats, Republicans and Independents. Many, at some point in our careers, have worked for a Catholic institution. We are proud to have been part of the religious mission of that school, or hospital, or social service organization. We are proud to have been associated not only with the work Catholic institutions perform in the community – particularly for the most vulnerable — but also with the shared sense of purpose found among colleagues who chose their job because, in a religious institution, a job is always also a vocation.
Those currently invoking “women’s health” in an attempt to shout down anyone who disagrees with forcing religious institutions or individuals to violate deeply held beliefs are more than a little mistaken, and more than a little dishonest. Even setting aside their simplistic equation of “costless” birth control with “equality,” note that they have never responded to the large body of scholarly research indicating that many forms of contraception have serious side effects, or that some forms act at some times to destroy embryos, or that government contraceptive programs inevitably change the sex, dating and marriage markets in ways that lead to more empty sex, more non-marital births and more abortions. It is women who suffer disproportionately when these things happen.
No one speaks for all women on these issues. Those who purport to do so are simply attempting to deflect attention from the serious religious liberty issues currently at stake. Each of us, Catholic or not, is proud to stand with the Catholic Church and its rich, life-affirming teachings on sex, marriage and family life. We call on President Obama and our Representatives in Congress to allow religious institutions and individuals to continue to witness to their faiths in all their fullness.
Ladies can go ahead and sign it here. Government leaders, and groups like Planned Parenthood, may claim to stand up for all women… but they don’t.
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I like blog posts telling people what not to do. So when I saw a link to one entitled 10 Things You Should Never Say to a Miscarriage Survivor, I clicked. I read. I smiled. Author Devan McGuinness is straight on about the insensitive statements often used in an attempt to comfort someone who has suffered a miscarriage, but what is most inspiring to me was just how pro-life the post is.
McGuinness contributes to the being pregnant section of the popular web site Babble. In the February 24 post regarding miscarriage, the number 5 thing you shouldn’t say is, “It was not a real baby just a fetus.” Her reasoning:
“A ‘fetus’ is a baby. The mom will feel changes from very early on, making the transition to motherhood already there in her mind. It was a real baby.”
I can’t really explain how happy this made me. Yes, I love that she’s standing up for people who have miscarried, which is tremendous because too many of these women (and their partners) are made to feel as though their loss is no big deal. But here is this contributor on a major web site stating without hesitation that a fetus is a baby.
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Congressman Trent Franks of Arizona believes abortions based on race or gender should be outlawed. On Thursday, February 16, a House Committee approved Rep. Frank’s bill. According to Cronkite News, Franks thinks the issue is one of civil rights. “The effort of this bill here is to simply say we cannot discriminate against unborn children subjected to abortion.”
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I think it would be useful to look at the philosophical basis for defending the right to life of unborn babies from the branch of philosophy called metaphysics. Metaphysics isn’t actually as abstract as it sounds. Essentially it’s just the thinking of being, of existence. Everyone is really capable of metaphysics; whenever we consider the existence of things, how things exist, whenever we know some thing and consider what is – we’re doing metaphysics. It’s actually impossible for any thinking person not to do metaphysics. If we never considered things with being, we would never consider anything. My point is: anybody can do metaphysics, this isn’t just something for intellectual high brows with PhD’s.
Let us begin with the facts that nobody disputes, the basic data that is not controversial, that is accepted by both sides of the debate, and which forms the basis for any further discussion.
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Over 20 years ago, the United Nations held the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The purpose of this convention was to outline the universal rights of children throughout the world. With the new human rights treaty, UNICEF and others could put social pressure on nations to conform their standards with the accepted rights of children.
Towards this end, the Convention decided that any human being under the age of eighteen would be considered a child, typically. Yet the U.N. continually betrays its own standards when it pushes abortion throughout the world. Take, for example, Article 6, which states that children have the right to survive and develop to the fullest.
The U.N. betrays the very children it claims to protect.
Hmmm…and here I thought that unborn children were indeed human beings under the age of eighteen. Remember, it’s the U.N. that made the definition of child include human being rather than person, so you can’t argue a lack of personhood here. By the U.N.’s own standard, unborn children have the right to survive and develop to the fullest.
Article 20 states that children have the right to a loving and caring family, and Article 5 says that every child has a right to a family. This, of course, is why abortion is such a better option than adoption, right, U.N.? Because there are no families out there who would give ANYTHING IN THE WORLD to adopt a baby and love him or her with all their hearts, right? [ Read the rest of this article... ]
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Occasionally, in this world of liberal and biased media, a sane voice makes its way to the surface. TIME Magazine’s Joe Klein has written a poignant salute to Rick Santorum, admitting that his daughter Bella’s smile has given him cause to stop and think.
Sometimes, it seems easy for some to stay in the same old rut, regardless of what we believe. Pro-lifers sometimes fail to provide practical help for women who choose to keep and raise their children, though many pregnancy centers and ultrasound buses are a model of exactly what pro-lifers should be doing. Pro-choicers seem to focus on convenience and to believe in the false weakness and helplessness of women—regardless of modern science, the amazing “window to the womb” that 3D and 4D ultrasounds provide, and the research on how abortion hurts women, too.
But I have to say that I admire any pro-choicer who allows themself to be moved by a compelling pro-life story, fact, or argument. Or a pro-life face like Bella Santorum’s.
What, after all, does it hurt to stop and think about the consequences of your beliefs? What do your beliefs really say about you and how you view the world? What does your advocacy for “choice” do to the helpless and innocent who surround us in this world?
So, if you are pro-choice, I ask you to read the words of Joe Klein, look at the face of Bella Santorum, and stop and think for a minute. [ Read the rest of this article... ]
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“I firmly believe — I want to remove all doubt in anyone’s mind where I am on this subject…”
– Nancy Pelosi
Pelosi has said enough. Her position on the HHS mandate is quite, quite clear.
Nancy Pelosi is an absolute supporter of absolute coverage of contraception by absolutely all insurance companies, regardless of religious beliefs. In doing so, she defies Constitutional religious liberties, the tenets of the Catholic Church, and even the beliefs of her family.
“My mother has differing views, but she taught me that we all have a free will, and that is a gift of God. My hope is that another gift of God, science, will take us even farther from this discussion, which really shouldn’t be a public policy issue.”
You need a lot of nerve to throw God’s gifts back in His face like that. Or a lot of foolhardy hubris. Pray for her.
To justify the mandate, Pelosi cites an unreliable statistic that over 98% of Catholic women use birth control – the real number is nearer to 68%.
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I often hear pro-choicers talk about this topic. I recently found this post, and knew it was a wonderful opportunity to write about men and abortion.
Pro-choicers often say that men shouldn’t have input in abortion decisions because it’s solely a woman’s issue. The author of that post even went on to say she wanted to “silence all the male voices in the abortion discussion.” Pro-choicers say the decision should be left up to the woman – it’s her body after all, right? They say that most pro-lifers are men who are trying to control women’s bodies. Apparently, since men can’t give birth to babies, they don’t have any business in what happens to their own children. I beg to differ. Men have every right in the world to have a say in what happens to their children.
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20 Week Human Fetus
The National Right to Life Committee believes a new pro-life bill could greatly cut through the entire legal structure that maintains legal abortion on demand. For that reason, a congressional pro-abortion leader said on Tuesday that stopping the bill is a high priority for the pro-abortion movement.
The legislation was introduced in the House on January 23, 2012. Its House sponsor is Republican Congressman Trent Franks of Arizona and has 130 cosponsors. The bill is known as H.R. 3803. In the Senate, the bill was introduced by Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah on February 13 and is known as S. 2103.
In a press release, the National Right to Life Committee noted that the legislation is based of an NRLC model bill that has been enacted in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Idaho. Other states are expected to vote on the legislation in 2012. The bill states that at least by 20 weeks after fertilization, an unborn child has the capacity to feel pain. Because of that fact, abortion in the District of Columbia would be prohibited beginning in the sixth month of pregnancy. The bill leaves the ability for an abortion to be performed when the life of the mother is endangered.
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TIME Magazine photo shows angry Christians protesting Obamacare mandate. Haha, just kidding! Those are Afghans.
Here are three things that are totally happening. Don’t worry about what they have to do with each other. I’ll get to that. Just bask in the crappiness of these three things:
1. This past Tuesday, Feb. 21, on a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, four Korans were accidentally included in a heap of trash that was dumped into a burn pit.
The materials had been taken from a library at Parwan Detention Facility, which adjoins the base, because they contained extremist messages or inscriptions. Writing inside a Koran is forbidden in the Islamic faith, although it was unclear whether the handwritten messages were found in the holy book or other reading materials.
Some Afghans saw the Korans burning, and some of them even burned their fingers trying to remove them. Cue pandemonium! Since then Obama has apologized to President Hamid Karzai and the nation of Afghanistan — twice. He has apologized super hard. Protesting Afghans apparently don’t care.
“We don’t care about Obama’s apology,” said Kamaluddin, a 25-year-old Kabul protester who uses only one name. “We have to protest to be responsible to our god. They are burning our Koran. An apology is not enough.” (source: Time)
This of course begs the question: what is enough?
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Clearly, he hates little girls.
Once again proving how hated those who stand for life are in some corners of society, Sarah Fister Gale at Salon explains how Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum “would have killed my daughter.”
She explains how a prenatal test of her unborn baby’s amniotic fluid revealed that she had Rh negative disease, which would have been fatal to her if left undiscovered. The prenatal testing saved the child’s life by enabling Gale’s doctor to track her development, ensure that she was delivered at the safest time, given a full blood transfusion, and monitored to make certain the disease was eliminated. Thankfully, little Ella is alive and well today.
What does this have to do with Rick Santorum, though? [ Read the rest of this article... ]
