LifeMinded Ruminations

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I am so glad I went through my unread email from this past week! That’s when I learned of the 8 hour web cast going on today by over 30 of the most well know pro-life leaders and organizations. Every aspect of the pro-life movement is covered including topics such as “The Case for Life”, “The Abortion Crisis”, “Planned Parenthood’s Abortion Empire”, “Pro-life Youth Advocacy”, “Influencing the Culture” and more.

The entire web has been recorded and is available to you (free) to download or listen on line by going to http://endingabortion.com/

“If you don’t save the mother you aren’t going to save the baby!

The phone rang at the Frontline EMC Pregnancy Center in Brooklyn, NY, this week, and the director assumed it was another call from a woman needing crisis pregnancy counseling. This phone call stopped the clinic director in her tracks. It was a credit card company who was excited about the new health law.

“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Linda Marzulla, director of the EMC Pregnancy Center in Brooklyn, stated. “He said they were now doing credit cards for girls who wanted to get an abortion and could put the cost of the abortion on the credit card. He was excited because he said ‘This was something new we’re offering’.”

The credit card representative thought he had called an abortion clinic. Marzulla’s Pregnancy Help Center sits on the top floor of an office building that also houses two abortion clinics on Court Street in Brooklyn. They had called the wrong place by mistake.

The marketing tactic is to have abortion clinics offer credit cards to women who can’t afford to pay cash for their abortions. “They are going to have a low interest rate credit card to give to the girls who have an abortion and have them pay as they go. It’s like the credit cards they give college students. Unbelievable!” Marzulla noted.

Marzulla asked if this had something to do with the new health care law. He told her yes, they have to move forward to give women what they need.

The 11-year veteran of counseling women and men then tried to talk the credit card employee into leaving his job. Marzulla thought he sounded like a nice man, but he should quit this job. “I told him, ‘Don’t you realize you are fostering abortion? Why are you doing this?’ You know what he answered me? He said, ‘They have a choice’.”

Marzulla didn’t waste a second to inform the credit card man what that choice was all about.
“They have a choice? A choice between life and death is what we’re talking about. You are making it easier for women to choose death for their babies!” Marzulla told the man on the phone.
What the pro-life counselor couldn’t believe was how fast this was happening with the abortion health bill just being signed into law.

“This just happened and you’re jumping on the band wagon to make more money off these poor women!” Marzulla told the man.

Talk about a wrong number! When the call with the credit card rep ended, Marzulla called Vitae Foundation to give her accounting of the incident. Vitae has partnered with Frontline EMC Pregnancy Centers by placing ads in subways and busses in the Burroughs of New York City. The ad campaigns have been tremendous, saving over a thousand babies last year.

“When the Vitae ads were on the subways and busses, it really helped. Having that advertising, you have no idea! These kids were coming in droves, there was such turnout,” Marzulla explained. “If you don’t save the mother you aren’t going to save the baby! Forget it!”

Marzulla told Vitae how we as pro-lifers need to mobilize now and be in the media. “We just have to mobilize because all these credit card companies are going to be sprouting up like a grassroots thing because he thought I was Planned Parenthood, that’s why he called me. We’re in the same building and a lot of times the numbers get crossed,” the pro-life counselor explained.

The girls are looking and longing for help, according to Marzulla. “I’ve never really met a girl who wanted an abortion. They’re just backed up against the wall. The kids today know what they are up against so the abortion clinic people tell them, ‘The economy is bad…you aren’t going to be able to afford it…the baby is going to ruin your life.’”

Men shouldn't have a say about abortion...What?

“Men shouldn’t have anything to say about abortion – it’s a woman’s issue.” This ad hominem attack ignores the issue of abortion and attacks the gender of the pro-lifer. This attack is hardly relevant, since arguments and ideas don’t have sexual organs. Gender has nothing to do with the validity of an argument. This reply, usually heard from the most militant and out of touch baby boomer feminists, is sexist, pure and simple. If this statement were valid, then should women be silent when men molest children? Interestingly, the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion on demand in 1973 was decided by male judges…”who shouldn’t have a say because they don’t have to carry the baby.” It’s also interesting that most abortion providers are men. The argument that men don’t have the right to hold or speak their opinion on abortion, has no substance. (Excerpted from “Making Abortion Unthinkable: the Art of Pro-Life Persuasion”)

Want to learn how to defend your pro-life views and answer pro-choice rhetoric? Join me at LifeMinded and learn from the best materials available: “Making Abortion Unthinkable: the Art of Pro-Life Persuasion” by Greg Koukl and Scott Klusendorf

It's only a potential life

Pro-abortionists commonly dehumanize the unborn in order to justify abortion by referring to the unborn as a “potential life.” But calling an unborn child a “potential life” is just a clever rhetorical trick. There is no such thing as a “potential life.”

There are two options. First, we can potentially create life, that is, create a potential for life. When a man and a woman get married and have sex, there’s potential in their conduct for life to be created. Second, we can create a life with potential, one that has the possibility of developing into something good or noble. But that’s the end of our options. We either potentially create a life or we create a life with potential. We never create a “potential life.”

This line of thinking is the same as saying, “I just had a potential thought.” What could that possibly mean? You either had a thought or you didn’t. You could have the potential for a thought, or you could have a thought with potential. But you never have a “potential” thought. In the same way, pregnancy doesn’t create a potential life. If it did, then the problem of that potential life could be solved simply by having a potential abortion. Since a real abortion, not a potential one, is needed to end pregnancy, a real life must be involved, not a potential one. (Excerpted from “Making Abortion Unthinkable: the Art of Pro-Life Persuasion”)

Abortion is Not Health Care

Women in the US can terminate their pregnancy at any time during the usual nine months of fetal development–for any reason–or no reason at all. Often, pro-choice proponents say that abortion must be kept legal because of all the cases where the mother’s life is in danger.

But did you know, according to Planned Parenthood’s own statistics, only 6% of the 1.37 million abortions occurring annually in the US are because of potential health problems regarding either the mother or child? Of that 6%, you could safely assume about half are directly due to a threat to the mother’s life. That’s about 3%.

But think about it. Even in the cases of, for example, an ectopic (tubal) pregnancy, where both mother and baby cannot both survive, the “choice” is obvious and medically necessary, and any OB/GYN would perform the necessary surgery to remove the embryo – no abortion clinic needed. In fact, all OB/GYNs are trained to perform the procedure involved with a pregnancy termination, called a D&C, and medically it is the same procedure you would have if you were suffering a miscarriage. However, it is an individual doctor’s choice whether they wish to perform an elective pregnancy termination, i.e. an abortion, and most of them do not. Why? Because abortion is not health care.

Video with powerful pro-life message: please vote

I’ve been thinking about developing some pro-life videos for lifeminded.org and just came across this one done in Spanish with English subtitles. I think the message is clear and powerful and am considering making one like it in English and using iconic Americans to tell the same story. But before I do, I’d like to get some feedback from others. Please tell me how effective/ineffective you think this video’s message is and why. Just click this link to watch it on YouTube and then come back to my blog and tell me what you think by posting a comment: Life’s Potential

Thanks for your help!

Are you following the healthcare reform debate regarding tax payer funded abortions?

Pro choice Democrats are claiming that pro life Democrats like Bart Stupak, are making a straw man claim about tax payer funded abortion. Pro choice Dems are insisting that the current health care reform bill will not allow any federal funds to go toward abortion (whether in abortion services or insurance policies that cover abortion) and therefore, the Stupak Amendment (which would ensure this) is completely unnecessary.

So here’s what I don’t get: if there are 12 pro-life Dems who will not vote for the current bill unless the Stupak language is inserted; and if Congress needs their votes in order to pass the bill (and they do); and if the current bill truly would not allow tax payer funded abortions without the Stupak language; then why would the pro-choice Dems refuse to insert the Stupak Amendment language? If we end up with the same bill either way, why would they be willing to risk not passing health care reform because of this one issue? Why wouldn’t they just go along with it to get the bill passed since it supposedly doesn’t change anything?

The resistance to the Stupak Amendment by pro-choice Dems, even to the extent of no health care reform at all, doesn’t make sense unless the Stupak Amendment actually would make a difference in whether abortions are paid for with tax dollars. Or am I missing something here? Somebody help me out.

Tax-payer funded abortion: Setting the record straight on the Stupak Amendment

As usual, there is a lot of misinformation flying around about the Stupak Amendment, so I went straight to the source to find out what the amendment actually says and does. Here are direct quotes from Rep. Stupak:

“Under the amendment, individuals receiving federal subsidies for health care coverage are prohibited from using those subsidies to pay for abortions or to purchase insurance policies that cover abortions. The amendment does not prevent private insurance plans from offering abortion services nor does it prohibit individuals or states from purchasing abortion coverage with non-federal matching funds. The amendment specifies that even those who receive federal subsidies may purchase a supplemental policy with private money to provide abortion coverage.

The language in the Stupak amendment is completely consistent with the Hyde amendment which has been in place since 1977 and has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law currently prohibits federal funding of abortion in all federal health programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP). My amendment simply applies current law, the Hyde amendment, to H.R. 3962, health care reform.”

Even though currently legal, I believe abortion is morally wrong because it takes the life of an innocent human being. Naturally, I would be outraged if the Federal government were to force me to pay for abortions via either tax funded abortion services or tax funded insurance policies covering abortion.

You can learn more about the amendment and H.R. 3962 at http://www.house.gov/stupak/.

If you don’t like abortion…then don’t have one

Ever heard this from pro-choice advocates?

It seems like abortion advocates assume that right and wrong is different for different people. This assumption manifests itself in statements like, “You have your truth; I have my truth. Therefore, we should be tolerant of all views. Maybe abortion is wrong for you, but it might be right for others.” This flaw turns the pro-life moral claim about abortion (“Abortion is wrong”) into a preference claim (“I don’t like abortion”). Of course, this misses our point entirely. Twisting objective claims into subjective claims is known as “moral relativism”—the view that there are no objective standards of right and wrong, only personal preferences, like tastes in ice cream.

This is one of the most common ways that abortion advocates relativize the pro-life position. They treat our view as a mere preference that we’re forcing on others. However, it’s not that we don’t like abortion and would prefer that people not have one. We think abortion is wrong, whether we like it or not. This argument confuses our moral claim with a preference claim. (Excerpted from “Making Abortion Unthinkable: the Art of Pro-Life Persuasion”)

Abortion: the Antidote for Child Abuse

I was recently talking to a pro-choice friend of mine about the Tim Tebow ad. After expressing how hypocritical I thought it was of the so-called women’s advocacy groups to be so negative about Pam’s “choice” to not have an abortion (see my post “Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad = Free Speech”), and after graciously listening to me for a little while, my friend responded by saying, “But, there are so many unwanted and abused children in the world.” What she didn’t say, but was clearly implied, was that abortion solves this problem.

Although I sincerely believe my friend has just not thought this through, her defense actually implies an unthinkable moral equation… Killing a child is less offensive than neglecting, abusing or not wanting him, and any of these scenarios is thought to be more evil than murder. In fact, many pro-choice advocates offer killing the child through abortion as an antidote for abuse. The pro-choice slogan “Every child a wanted child” misses the point. The message should be “Every child a valued child.” This makes us responsible for valuing the human beings in our care instead of discarding them when they become inconvenient or unwanted.