http://www.abort73.com/blog {blog_body} en michael@loxafamosity.com Copyright 2012 2012-02-03T15:28:26+00:00 http://www.abort73.com/blog/unpacking_komens_split_from_planned_parenthood/ http://www.abort73.com/blog/unpacking_komens_split_from_planned_parenthood/#When:15:28:26Z Earlier this week Susan G Komen for the Cure announced that they were suspending their financial support of Planned Parenthood. Officially, they cite the adoption of a new policy forbidding the funding of organizations under government investigation (which Planned Parenthood is). But many believe the move was more a result of mounting social pressure to sever ties with the nation’s largest abortion chain. Despite the slanted media coverage often enjoyed by Planned Parenthood (the LA Times matter-of-factly calls them  an “organization dedicated to women’s health”), the backbone of Planned Parenthood is abortion. It is their financial lifeblood. And while the American abortion rate has fallen 8% over the last decade, the Planned Parenthood abortion rate has increased by 69%. They performed 332,278 abortions in 2009, and of the pregnant women who came to Planned Parenthood for counseling that year, almost 98% had abortions. Two percent received prenatal care, and less than half of one percent  were referred for adoption. Without question, Planned Parenthood’s Final Solution to unplanned pregnancy is abortion. Not surprisingly, Komen’s decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood (they gave them $680,000 last year) brought celebration from abortion opponents and indignation from abortion supporters. This dichotomy was perfectly illustrated yesterday on my own Facebook news feed (as I’m sure it was on millions of other feeds around the world). One of my Facebook friends posted the following your ecard: Remember, if your organization wants to cure breast cancer, stop funding an organization that offers free breast exams. Because that makes sense. Directly below her post was another your ecard. It was the same size and color, but expressed exactly the opposite sentiment: Welcome to Planned Parenthood where we don’t do mammograms but we will gladly give you birth control pills that cause Breast Cancer. For my part, I can’t help but feel that people on both sides of the abortion issue are making more of the Komen decision than we really should. The fact that Komen ever partnered with Planned Parenthood in the first place is strong evidence that the leadership at Komen supports abortion as a matter of public policy. No one who is ideologically opposed to abortion would partner with the nation’s largest perpetrator of abortion. And do not forget that the Komen website continues to deny even the possibility that abortion is a risk factor for breast cancer, despite significant evidence  indicating a causal connection. The fact that the nation’s breast cancer epidemic corresponds to the nation’s abortion epidemic seems lost on them–and keeps them from informing women about one of the few risk factors that is both behavior-based and avoidable. If abortion does increase a woman’s likelihood of developing breast cancer, then it will be exceedingly difficult to reduce breast cancer frequency without first reducing abortion frequency. In terms of their respective bottom lines, USA Today  reports that Planned Parenthood received $650,000 in donations within 24-hours of the Komen announcement. They also report that Komen’s average, daily donations have doubled since the news broke. In other words, both organizations have financially benefited from the split–which is worth considering whether you’re an abortion-opponent who is celebrating this as victory over Planned Parenthood or an abortion-advocate who claims this will cripple breast cancer prevention. A video of Komen founder and CEO, Nancy Brinker, just posted to their website in response to the controversy, reiterates the claim that Komen’s new policy has nothing to do with the fact that Planned Parenthood provides abortions. It has to do with the fact that they don’t provide mammograms. In Brinker’s words, they’ve decided to limit their funding to organizations that are “actually providing the mammograms.”  Despite Planned Parenthood president, Cecile Richards’, erroneous public claims, Planned Parenthood doesn’t provide mammograms, and that, according to Brinker, is the real problem. This, of course, leaves open the possibility that should Planned Parenthood start performing mammograms in the future, they could reclaim their grant money. The real issue for abortion-opponents is one of ideology, and it’s one abortion-supporters don’t seem able to grasp. It boggles their mind why “pro-lifers” can’t make a mental distinction between Planned Parenthood, the abortion business, and Planned Parenthood, the women’s health care provider. Essentially, there are two reasons why such a distinction is impossible to maintain. The first is a practical one. The second is a philosophical one. Think of it in terms of Abort73. Let’s say we devoted a portion of our website to breast cancer education. Now let’s say someone gave us a large donation but specified that is was only to be used for breast cancer-education, not abortion-education. How can an organization with one logistical infrastructure make such a distinction? If we’re using the same staff, the same building, the same computers for both projects, then any donation that benefits one project inherently benefits both. So it is with Planned Parenthood. If they’re receiving money that is tagged for “non-abortion” use, that money still benefits their organization as a whole and frees up other money that can be invested towards abortion. The second, more central issue, is a moral one. Fundamental to Planned Parenthood’s understanding of women’s health care is unrestricted access to abortion. If you don’t understand why this is a problem, just flip the issue. What if there was a huge pornography conglomerate, say a Playboy or Hustler, that was also operating walk-in breast-exam clinics. Would the fact that they’re helping prevent breast cancer erase what they’re doing to demean and objectify women around the world? Would you really be able to make a distinction between the misery and abuse perpetuated by pornography and the health benefits perpetuated by breast exams? Or maybe pornography isn’t an issue you care about either. What if it was sex trafficking? If there was an international organization running a legal, but highly dubious sex brothel, and also offering mammograms, would you be able to support the one, but not the other? Would you be able to say your promotion of their breast cancer services has nothing to do with their sex trafficking? Of course not. And while pornography demeans women and forced prostitutions abuses women, abortion kills women… by the millions, before they’re even born. That is why you cannot make a mental distinction between Planned Parenthood, the abortion clinic, and Planned Parenthood, the health clinic. The Nazi regime provided some great services to Aryan Germans, but none of them come close to compensating for what they did at Auschwitz and Dachau. You may object to the comparison, but this is precisely what’s at stake for those who are ideologically opposed to abortion.   Abortion News 2012-02-03T15:28:26+00:00 http://www.abort73.com/blog/life_and_death_comparing_the_relative_safety_of_abortion_and_childbirth/ http://www.abort73.com/blog/life_and_death_comparing_the_relative_safety_of_abortion_and_childbirth/#When:16:17:14Z Earlier this week a new study was released on abortion safety. The Reuters Health headline reads: “Abortion safer than giving birth.” According to the study, one woman dies in childbirth for every 11,000 births in the United States, while one woman dies from abortion for every 167,000 abortions. These numbers led the researchers to declare that a woman is 14 times more likely to die giving birth than she is to die during an abortion. There are a number of ways to respond to a story like this. The first is to remind people that even if abortion is safer for the mother, it is certainly not safer for the child. Maternal, abortion-related deaths may be a rarity, but fetal, abortion-related deaths are not. We could just as easily say that for every 167,000 abortions in the United States, there are 167,001 abortion-related deaths. The headline of the MedicineNet article was a much more honest one: “Abortion Safer for Women Than Childbirth, Study Claims.” The second thing to note is the sources of the datasets used in this study. While accurate birth data is available from the federal government, accurate abortion data is not. As such, abortion data must be obtained from the Guttmacher Institute, a research group founded by Planned Parenthood and named after their former president, Alan Guttmacher. The Guttmacher Institute openly advocates abortion and seeks to normalize its use around the world. Speaking to this issue, Dr. Donna Harrison, director of research and public policy at the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, says, “Abortion mortality is not systematically collected. What Dr. Grimes’ paper most clearly illustrates is the immediate need for reporting requirements for abortion deaths in all 50 states.” The third thing to recognize is that the study’s authors, Dr. Elizabeth Raymond and Dr. David Grimes are both abortion advocates. The express purpose of their study  was to demonstrate that abortion is “dramatically safer than continuing the pregnancy.” Dr Raymond works for the Gynuity Health Projects, a group seeking to expand reproductive health technologies (abortion) worldwide, and Dr Grimes makes no secret of his contempt for state-mandated efforts to dissuade women from having an abortion. They had a clear, ideological agenda going in, and their abortion-related data came from an organization that shares their agenda. Finally, we must remember that in the scope of abortion-related health risks, there is much more to consider than mortality rates. The two most serious health risks to be tied to abortion are not even considered by studies like these. They are rejected out of hand. But if abortion increases a woman’s likelihood of contracting breast cancer  and/or experiencing extreme mental trauma, then the safety scale shifts considerably. Dr. Joel Brind suggests that legal abortion has accounted for roughly 300,000 cancer-related deaths  in the United States, and many have suggested that the female suicide epidemic in China  may easily be tied to their forced abortion policy. At the end of the day, those who support abortion can give you all sorts of reasons why abortion is perfectly safe for aborting women, and those who oppose abortion can give you all sorts of reasons why it is not. At some level, these are important discussions, but they are peripheral to the central ethical question. Does abortion kill an innocent human being? That is the question at the heart of the abortion debate, and that is the question that ultimately determines whether abortion is an amoral surgical procedure or a historic injustice.   Abortion News 2012-01-26T16:17:14+00:00 http://www.abort73.com/blog/eulogy_for_the_martyred_children_what_mlk_has_to_teach_us_about_abortion/ http://www.abort73.com/blog/eulogy_for_the_martyred_children_what_mlk_has_to_teach_us_about_abortion/#When:21:32:53Z Yesterday seemed a good day to revisit my copy of A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. Included in Part II (Famous Sermons and Public Addresses) is his “Eulogy for the Martyred Children” – delivered at the funeral for the young girls murdered in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. Two years ago, I spent a weekend in Birmingham, AL and attended the Sunday-morning service at 16th Street Baptist Church. I entered alone with a bit of trepidation. For all its historic significance, it remains a relatively small congregation, and I stood out like a sore thumb. I was underdressed and under-pigmented (ie the only white person in attendance), but that visit was easily the highlight of my trip. I don’t know that I’ve ever been so moved by prayer or singing, and the sermon did not disappoint. The first thing to strike me about Dr. King’s 16th Street memorial address was the title given to his sermon: “Eulogy for the Martyred Children.” By definition, a martyr is someone who “willingly suffers death” rather than renounce a “religion” or “belief.” Strictly speaking, that’s not what happened on that tragic Sunday morning in Birmingham. Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Denise McNair (11) were not killed for their religion or beliefs. They were killed for the color of their skin. And they did not die for any professed allegiance to the civil rights movement. They died without warning because a bomb blew up in their Sunday School class. I make this distinction not to criticize Dr. King’s assertion that these girls were martyrs, but to point out that it was a martyrdom wholly beyond their control – which makes their deaths even more tragic. “These children,” Dr. King notes, were “unoffending; innocent and beautiful.” In life, they were unnoticed on the national scene. In death, King asserts, they have something to say to everyone. And the first audience he addresses is not the KKK, but rather “every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows.” Continuing, he declares that the deaths of these four girls comdemn “every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice.” Finally, their deaths say to each of us, “black and white alike… that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.” Dr. King knew that culpability for this crime went well beyond the men in white hoods who detonated the bomb. In large measure, this crime was only possible because of the silence of the church and the unwillingness of decent people to publicly challenge an unjust system. And so it is with abortion. But this reality did not leave Dr. King in despair; it simply drove him deeper into the faith that sustained everything he did. He continues: …in spite of the darkness of this hour we must not despair. We must not become bitter; nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence. We must not lose faith in our white brothers. Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality. Here again, the connection to abortion is a powerful one. As Dr. King said some years earlier in his “American Dream” speech, “moral ends” can only be achieved through “moral means.” Why? Because “the end is preexistent in the means.” Elsewhere in that speech he makes a few more observations that are well worth considering by anyone who sees a connection between the children martyred by the KKK in 1963 and the children martyred by abortion today. Addressing the 1961 graduates of Lincoln University, King tells them: Each individual has certain basic rights that are neither conferred by nor derived from the state. To discover where they came from it is necessary to move back behind the dim mist of eternity, for they are God-given. Through our scientific genius we have made of this world a neighborhood: now through our moral and spiritual development we must make of it a brotherhood… We must keep our moral and spiritual progress abreast with our scientific and technological advances. This poses another dilemma of modern man. We have allowed our civilization to outdistance our culture. …it is a torturous logic that views the tragic results of segregation and discrimination as an argument for the continuation of it. Even a superficial look at history shows that social progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless effort and the persistent work of dedicated individuals. We need religion and education to change attitudes and to change the hearts of men. We need legislation and federal action to control behavior. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important too. I call upon you not to be detached spectators, but involved participants, in this great drama that is taking place in our nation and around the world. Certainly all of us want to live a well-adjusted life in order to avoid the neurotic personality. But I say to you, there are certain things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon all men of good will to be maladjusted. What a remarkable thing that one of our greatest American heros, a man lionized by virtually all sectors of society, was so unapologetically religious. What are politically-correct historians to do with a man like that? MLK spoke of America as a schizophrenic personality – one that “proudly professed the principles of democracy,” but practiced the “very antithesis.” I suppose our historical treatment of Martin Luther King, Jr. exhibits much the same schizophrenia. As we increasingly mock biblical conviction and increasingly demand that religion not influence public policy, we still manage to celebrate the life of a humble Christian minister who changed the world by refusing to keep his religion private.   Miscellaneous 2012-01-17T21:32:53+00:00 http://www.abort73.com/blog/factories_of_death_lessons_from_auschwitz/ http://www.abort73.com/blog/factories_of_death_lessons_from_auschwitz/#When:20:21:56Z In 2005, the BBC produced a 6-part documentary on Auschwitz. I watched it this week while researching a new video for Abort73’s “Personhood” page. It was a sobering and unpleasant five hours, but it was good for my soul. It makes the trials and tribulations of my life seem fairly laughable and exposes how grossly insignificant are so many of the things that occupy my attention. Whether you agree with the comparison or not, the ideological connection between abortion and the Holocaust is a familiar one, aided of late by the release of Ray Comfort’s 180. The basic similarities between abortion and the Holocaust are laid out on Abort73’s page, “Systematic Injustice.” By way of review, both involve the state-sanctioned extermination of a victim class that is considered “sub-human.” Both involve a network of killing centers whose activities are largely hidden from public view, and both involve the brutal deaths of multiple millions of innocent and helpless victims. Critics of such a comparison will argue (among other things) that abortion clinics are not trying to exterminate all unborn babies, but this betrays an ignorance of who the victim-class is. Certainly, Planned Parenthood isn’t trying to exterminate all unborn babies, but they are trying to exterminate (or “eliminate” as they call it) all unwanted, unborn babies. The reason I revisited the Auschwitz documentary this week (which I viewed in part last year) is because of a Peter Singer  quote that I plan to use in our new video. Singer is a bioethics professor at Princeton University who argues that unborn human beings should not be considered persons because they are functionality inferior to cows, pigs, and chickens. Elsewhere in his book, Practical Ethics, he says that killing a newborn baby is the moral equivalent of killing a snail. Though it’s tempting to simply write off such a barbaric assertion, Singer is too influential to be ignored. Rather, we must point out that these arguments have been made before. The first episode in the BBC production includes a clip from a Nazi propaganda video for their Adult Euthanasia Program. The euthanasia program was created to exterminate the mentally and physically disabled, but was soon expanded to include prisoners who weren’t fit for hard labor. Justifying the necessity of such a program, the Nazi video declares that the “gibbering idiots” targeted for extermination are “inferior to any animal” and are a “burden [to] future generations.” Though Singer and his ideologic colleagues don’t call unborn human beings, “gibbering idiots,” they demean them with plenty of equally unflattering names. More to the point, they’ve borrowed the “inferior to animals” and “burden to society” arguments almost verbatim. Though I’ve long been aware of the abortion/Holocaust comparison, watching Auschwitz revealed a host of more subtle connections that I hadn’t noticed before. One of the biggest relates to the industrialization of the execution process. The Nazi state faced two practical obstacles to their vision of mass extermination. The first was the emotional toll it took on the executioners. In 1941, after Heinrich Himmler witnessed an execution of Jews in Minsk, he was told by the general on duty that there was a problem with the SS killers. They were becoming neurotics or brutes. According to the BBC, “Himmler realized he had to find a better way of killing.” The second obstacle was their inability to execute and dispose of enough bodies at once. Not only did they need a way to make the killing more palatable for the executioners, they needed to make it more efficient as well. In the end, they graduated from firing squads and pits to a series of failed experiments with explosives (too many body parts in the trees) before finally landing on lethal doses of poisonous gas – a method accidentally discovered when an SS commander almost killed himself of carbon monoxide poisoning after passing out in his garage (in a drunken stupor) while his car was running. Rudolf Höss was the commandant at Auschwitz during the height of the Holocaust. He was a family-man, living with his wife and four young children in a house just outside the gate at Auschwitz. And yet he directed the largest mass-murder in the history of mankind. One of the members of the Nuremburg prosecution team marveled at how “normal” Höss seemed. He was not the “monster” they expected him to be. Rather, he was “objective” and “matter of fact.” He felt he “did his war duty” to the best of his abilities and “never expressed any remorse.” Höss’ only regret, according to his autobiography, was not having spent more time with his children. He was executed in 1947. By creating a system that separated the killers from those being killed (Jewish prisoners were forced to carry the dead bodies to the crematorium), the SS was able to spare their members the emotional toil that would have absolutely crippled a firing squad. In the process, they were able to execute 2,000 people at a time – 10,000 per day during the height of Aushwitz’s operations in 1944. How does this relate to abortion? It explains how and why the abortion industry can staff itself with “normal” people who go about their lives without exhibiting any sadistic tendencies or emotional instability. Because abortion is almost always a blind procedure, abortionists can do their work at a safe, emotional distance. Just as in Nazi Germany, technological advances have made the killing process much less traumatic for the one doing the killing. And the advent of the abortion pill provides even more separation from the victim. Think about it like this, how many abortionists would be able to continue performing abortions if they had to stare their victim in the face and put a bullet in their head? Abort73’s most popular T-shirt  asks the question, “Would it bother us more if they used guns?” It would almost certainly bother the abortionist more! Nazi soldiers couldn’t handle the long-term, emotional strain of having to execute their victims by gunfire, but they had little problem dropping Zyklon B down a metal chute. For mass-murder to be sustainable in the world today, you have to mechanize the process, which abortion has done tragically well. Another connection ties to some of the activities common to both the concentration camp and the abortion clinic. The BBC reveals that the soldiers at Auschwitz frequently gorged themselves on stolen food and drink, received a daily ration of alcohol, lived in wild drunkenness and made stealing from the Jews a common practice. Though the SS maintained a facade of professional discipline, the private reality was very different. Sexual assault was common and for two years, they ran a camp brothel – populated by the best looking among the female prisoners. When soldiers were too drunk to turn the lights off, they shot them out with their pistols. Having just updated Abort73’s page on abortion clinic abuse, I’m well aware that many similar reports surround the abortion industry. Bernard Nathanson  and Norma McCorvey  both testified to rampant drug and alcohol abuse. More recent clinic headlines include sexual assault and fraud. When the war effort turned sour for the Nazis, they began burning their own buildings in mass to destroy evidence, which may be why the FBI was so interested to learn that the abortion clinic recently burned in Pensacola  may have been owned by an abortionist on trial for five counts of murder in Maryland. At one point in the documentary, the narrator observes that, “While the main motivation for the Final Solution was ideological, the Nazis were also well aware that they could benefit financially from the crime.” To this end, the houses and businesses of deported Jews were seized and redistributed. All personal valuables from the millions of executed captives were sorted and pocketed by the guards or placed in a state treasury. The government of Slovakia even paid the Nazis for each of the 60,000 Jews it deported. When things turned particularly desperate on the Russian front, Nazi officials offered to sell one million Jews to Allied representatives. Certainly, there was an underlying hatred for the Jewish people driving these efforts, but they were also motivated by greed. Here too there are abortion-related overlaps. While there is certainly an underlying ideology driving many abortion advocates, there is no denying the financial windfall abortion provides. This should not be overlooked. One of the most frequent objections to comparing abortion to the Holocaust is tied to the idea that abortion destroys still developing embryos and fetuses while the Holocaust destroyed fully-aware men and women, most of them with families. The implication is that the experience of death was much worse for these men and women than it is for aborted, unborn children. This is likely true, but does that make abortion any more justified? Is the death of a young child who doesn’t know what’s happening any less heinous than that of an adult who does know? What is lost in many discussions of the Holocaust is the violence leveled against children. Of the estimated 1.1 million Jews who were killed at Auschwitz, an estimated 200,000 were children. On average, 75% of the people on each transport were killed upon arrival. These were almost exclusively women, children, and the elderly. The rest would be worked and starved to death. When one of the former guards interviewed by the BBC was asked how he could justify the execution of even young children, he replied that though they weren’t the enemy at the moment, they would grow up to be the enemy. And so long as they couldn’t work, they were useless consumers. “Children entered the gas chamber playing with toys,” wrote Rudolf Höss. “I looked upon them as enemies of our people… the reasons for their execution seemed right.” In the same vein, it is commonly argued today that children born into poverty are better off dying in the womb. They haven’t done anything wrong yet, but they’ll grow up to! At best, they’ll be a drain on society. At worst, they’ll be criminals (as argued by the authors of Freakanomics, who believe abortion helps eliminate future crime). In Nazi Germany, almost the only Jewish children not to be killed directly were those selected for medical experimentation by Dr. Josef Mengele, who set up shop at Auschwitz. He was especially interested in twins and subjected them to all sorts of genetic testing. Sterilization experiments were also common. This reveals another striking parallel with abortion. Socially, the Nazi party considered Jews to be sub-human, but medically, they were perfectly willing to recognize their humanity – and to put it to scientific use. By the same token, though human embryos and fetuses are considered socially sub-human, their full humanity is unquestionably recognized by the medical community that covets the use of their cells. Embryonic stem cell research  and significant vaccine development  is built upon the intrinsic humanity of aborted children. The BBC production laments the fact that so few of those employed at Auschwitz ever came to trial, but fails to mention that Dr. Mengele, the most brutal and notorious of all Nazi doctors, turned up years later in Buenos Aires – as an abortionist. In the early 1940’s, Auschwitz was home to the largest mass-murder in the history of the world. But it did not begin as a concentration camp. It began as a Polish army barrack. Today, Planned Parenthood is home to the largest abortion business in America, but it did not begin that way either. It began with birth control and sterilization and worked its way up from there. As noted in Abort73’s “A Legacy of Eugenics,” Planned Parenthood and the Nazi party were anchored on the same underlying principles. I suppose it’s no wonder then that their histories bear so much in common. The BBC estimates that 1,300,000 prisoners were taken to Auschwitz during the four and a half years of its existence. Almost 85% (1,100,000) didn’t make it out alive. In 2010, 361,384 unborn children  were taken to Planned Parenthood. More than 91% (329,445) didn’t make it out alive. Spread that out over four and a half years and the grand total is 1,482,502 – which is a number even Auschwitz would be envious of.   Abortion Arguments 2012-01-11T20:21:56+00:00 http://www.abort73.com/blog/abortion_remains_a_sordid_business/ http://www.abort73.com/blog/abortion_remains_a_sordid_business/#When:21:07:23Z Yesterday I updated Abort73’s page on abortion clinic abuse. Today I read of a purported connection  between one of the abortionists recently charged with five counts of murder  in Maryland and the Florida abortion clinic that caught fire over the weekend. Though I suspect the connection between the two may be nothing more than journalistic sensationalism, it was another example of how consistently sordid the abortion industry proves to be. The moral character of its practitioners seems little changed in the 40 years since Dr. Bernard Nathanson first found them to be “as picturesque and venal a band of scoundrels as had been collected [in the history of surgical medicine].” Why were these two stories connected in the first place? Because the Pensacola abortion clinic that caught fire on New Year’s day shares a New Jersey mailing address with the abortion clinics owned by Steven Brigham, the abortionist on trial for five counts of first-degree murder. Authorities have not yet determined whether the fire was an act of arson, but it has turned into a federal investigation because of the nature of the business and the history of violence associated with this particular abortion clinic. It was bombed in 1984, and ten years later an abortionist and clinic escort were shot and killed in the parking lot. Paul Hill, the gunman responsible for the 1994 murders, was executed in 2003, and it’s worth mentioning here that Abort73 uniformly condemns the use of violence to oppose abortion. Though it’s too soon to say much more about the investigation in Pensacola, it’s remarkable what the investigation in Maryland has already turned up. It began in August 2010 when Brigham and an abortionist colleague, Nicola Riley (also charged) dropped a severely-bleeding patient off at a local hospital after a botched abortion. When authorities showed up at his clinic to investigate, they found 35 second and third trimester fetuses in his freezer – prompting the Cecil County state attorney to seek murder charges under a Maryland law that prohibits the intentional harm of a viable fetus. The stories also reveal that Brigham performed abortions in Florida until his medical license was revoked in 1996. His New Jersey license was suspended in 2010, and a “cease-and-desist” warning was issued to him that same year in Maryland. Leading abortion advocates argue that Steve Brigham is simply an “anomaly,”  but that is clearly a stretch. The name, Kermit Gosnell, comes to mind. As pointed out on Abort73’s clinic abuse page, it is only the political-safety net surrounding most abortion clinics that keeps more stories like these from coming out. When inspectors finally go in, very bad things come out. Case in point, the abortion clinic closest to my house has been closed since September after miserably failing a state health inspection  – the first it was subjected to in many years. A settlement was reached today  that will allow them to reopen, but it took four months and a $10,000 fine for the clinic to finally satisfy the relatively basic state health requirements. Call this an anomaly if you want, but I don’t. After all, can we really expect anything less from an industry whose entire business model  centers on the violent destruction of the most innocent and helpless members of the human race?   Abortion News 2012-01-04T21:07:23+00:00 http://www.abort73.com/blog/innocent_blood_john_ensor/ http://www.abort73.com/blog/innocent_blood_john_ensor/#When:16:36:41Z I received a copy of John Ensor’s new book, Innocent Blood, a couple months back. At the time, I was finishing my own book on the subject of abortion and so I left John’s book on my shelf until this week. It’s a bit disconcerting to be that far into the writing process only to realize that someone older and wiser has a brand new book out on the same topic. Whether my own book ever sees the light of day remains to be seen, but it is finished and as it turns out, it shares remarkably little in common with Innocent Blood. Innocent Blood is very much a “big picture” book. John goes to great lengths to place abortion in a broader historical and theological context. In fact, abortion doesn’t even enter the discussion until the book’s halfway point. Along the way, he points out that child-killing has always been at the forefront of Satan’s efforts to thwart the gospel – beginning with the mass-infanticide that surrounded the birth of Moses and repeated following the birth of Christ. Abortion is just the latest and most widespread manifestation of his age-old agenda. On page 19, Ensor asserts that what was accomplished on the cross is “far more extensive than we often imagine. Christ did not only die for the guilty,” Ensor states, “He died for the innocent.” How so? By innocent, I don’t mean sinless before God. All of us are guilty before a holy God. I mean harmless, pure, or free from guilt before our fellow man or the laws of man… So, when I say Christ died for the innocent, I mean his death secured gifts of temporal deliverance (that is, in this life) for the weak and the innocent as well as eternal deliverance from our sin before God. (20, 21) When I first read that last sentence, I put a question mark in the margin because I wasn’t sure where he was going. How does the death of Christ secure temporal deliverance for the innocent? John explains himself on the next page. Not only does the death of Jesus atone for the sins of those who believe, it also brings regeneration. Lives lived in the flesh become lives lived in the Spirit. Consuming love for self is replaced with love for Christ and neighbor. And one fruit of that transformation is the temporal rescue of the innocent by those who have been eternally redeemed through the cross. More times than not, the prayers of the oppressed are answered through the intervention of cross-bought believers – and John provides numerous, historical examples to back such a premise. As someone who has been vocationally devoted to combatting abortion for more than a decade now, much of the book’s reasoning is familiar territory for me, but John makes one (huge) assertion that I had never before considered. He writes: “Abortion is the defining experience of this generation.” He prefaces this remark by relating an experience he had sharing the gospel with a man who had killed his wife. This man knew he was guilty, REALLY guilty, and his own moral compass wouldn’t accept forgiveness since the evil he had done demanded justice. He saw himself as too wicked to simply be let off the hook. Here enters the doctrine of bloodguilt. The gospel doesn’t say to the guilt-plagued soul, “Don’t be so down on yourself, you’re not such a bad person.” The gospel says, “You’re right to be down on yourself, but the just wrath that your actions deserve has been paid, blood for blood on the cross.” There is nothing cheap about God’s grace. How does this relate to abortion? To answer that, consider a hypothetical scenario raised in the book. “Imagine preaching the gospel in the town of Dachau in the 1940s and intentionally avoiding, rather than addressing, how the death of Christ on the cross can atone (cover over and wash away) the murder of innocents.” Ensor believes this is the same situation we are in today because, “no other generation is more stained with bloodguilt than the current generation.” It’s estimated that one-third of American women will have an abortion in their lifetime, and for each one, there’s a father (plus family and friends who are also affected). For many of them, abortion is the defining event in their lives. A gospel that has nothing to say to them about the bloodguilt of abortion may be no gospel at all. Ensor explains: When you talk to someone today about the gospel, male or female, you are almost certainly talking to someone who has experienced abortion… How is it possible to bring a liberating gospel to a generation that is so deeply and specifically marked by the bloodguilt of abortion and say nothing about it?… The times and the context determine what must be emphasized in the gospel. Our times are marked by the bloodguilt of abortion… To think of abortion as a secondary issue – or worse, a merely political issue – is to fundamentally misunderstand the defining experience of our times. (64, 65, 68) If this is true, how is it that so many Christians who seek to faithfully engage in culturally-relevant, missional outreach continue to ignore such a prevalent cultural marker? Ensor answers this question on page 66: The difficulty we are up against – the thing that renders so many of us passive and all but useless in this area – is that sexual sins and abortion do not play nice on this postmodern playground. To introduce them into the conversation as they really are at any meaningful level is simply too painful for us. So we often choose to offend God rather than man. As a high school and college student, I didn’t want to get “sidetracked” by the abortion issue because I thought it would hamper my efforts to evangelize. What a silly notion that ended up being. And though I’ve long been aware of the fact that my evangelistic opportunities have been far more frequent and fruitful since becoming a public opponent of abortion, this is the best explanation I’ve heard for why that is. Towards the end of the book, Ensor suggests that abortion “may well be Satan’s chief weapon against world-evangelization today” – both for the future evangelists it destroys in the womb and the paralyzing guilt it lays on generations of men and women. In other words, if you want to bring the gospel to bear on the lives of the people all around you, you better give some thought to how the bloodguilt of abortion fits into the picture. And John’s book will certainly help you do that.   Miscellaneous 2011-12-23T16:36:41+00:00 http://www.abort73.com/blog/unplanned_abby_johnson/ http://www.abort73.com/blog/unplanned_abby_johnson/#When:01:15:55Z Earlier this year, I read Abby Johnson’s, Unplanned, as part of my research for Abort73’s “Crisis of Conscience” page. The book chronicles Abby’s dramatic departure from Planned Parenthood after eight years in their employ–the last three as the director of one of their Texas abortion clinics. Combining her testimony with those of Bernard Nathanson, Norma McCorvey, and Carol Everett, Abort73’s “Crisis of Conscience”  offers an inside-look at the abortion industry and examines the factors that led these prominent abortion-practitioners to reverse their course. Along the way, I authored some accompanying blog posts to give more individual attention to each story–except I forgot to do one for Abby. I was reminded of that last week when I inserted a quote from her book into Abort73’s “Birth Control and Abortion” page. Better late than never. Looking back at my notes from the read, one of the things that is unique to Abby’s situation is that she wasn’t just an abortion-insider. She was a Planned Parenthood-insider. None of the other high-profile exits involved someone working for America’s largest abortion provider. To put things in perspective, consider that while America’s overall abortion rate has fallen by about 8%  over the last decade, Planned Parenthood abortions have increased by 69% over that same span. Their year by year abortion numbers are below: 2000: 197,070 2001: 213,026 2002: 230,630 2003: 245,092 2004: 255,015 2005: 264,943 2006: 289,750 2007: 305,310 2008: 324,008 2009: 332,278 While publicly claiming that their desire is to make abortion increasingly rare, Planned Parenthood has almost doubled their abortion output. All the while, their supporters are quick to argue that abortion is just a small part of what Planned Parenthood does, even going so far as to say that there would be more abortions without Planned Parenthood. This is demonstrably false, but even among abortion opponents, some think it’s unfair to single Planned Parenthood out. A recent Abort73 reader post said: I appreciate most of what I’ve read on this site, but your lambasting of Planned Parenthood isn’t called for because it’s very inaccurate. Yes, they perform abortions, but abortions only account for 3% of the services they provide. They also provide things like cancer screening and birth control (35% of their services). So obviously they DO care about things other than abortion. You’re hurting your credibility to suggest otherwise. The 3% claim is a talking point manufactured by Planned Parenthood itself and is easily refuted  with their own, published numbers. But the access Abby provides gives us insights not normally available to the public. I should note at the beginning that Abby never saw abortion as anything less than a necessary evil and her entire Planned Parenthood career was carried out under the belief that she was helping prevent abortions. She describes her initial contact with a Planned Parenthood recruit this way, which happened at a college career day: “Our goal at Planned Parenthood is to make abortion rare. Women need to know their options so they can avoid unwanted pregnancy, don’t you think?” She was nodding as if she knew we agreed on this. I felt my eyebrows lift in surprise. I repeated her words, “Your goal is to make abortions rare? How do you mean?” She explained that Planned Parenthood was the leader in providing community education about birth control. Just imagine, she said, how many abortions could be avoided with only simple information. Because Planned Parenthood made birth control available to women, thousands and thousands of abortions weren’t required. But when women really did need an abortion, she said, the organization’s clinics were vital to their safety. (12-13) With that backdrop in mind, this is what Abby realized about Planned Parenthood’s priorities, eight years down the road: We were one of the few clinics in our affiliate that performed abortions. And those abortions earned a lot of money. The clinics that didn’t perform abortions had little means of providing revenue. Things got worse for our affiliate as the year progressed. We were moving further and further into the red, and by mid-spring of 2009 we were forced to lay people off… The month after that second affiliate meeting, I was braced for more bad news, but nothing compared to what I received… Planned Parenthood, we learned, was planning to open a massive seven-story, 78,000-square-foot clinic in Houston, and supposedly an entire floor was being devoted to medical and abortion services. I understood that it could be the largest abortion clinic in the nation, and that plans were in place to seek an ambulatory surgical license, which would qualify the facility to perform late-term abortions, possibly up to twenty-four weeks. My stomach knotted at the news. I’d always believed that late-term abortions beyond the age of viability (twenty-one to twenty-four weeks) were wrong. I’d always insisted I would never work for an organization that performed late-term abortions. I can’t do it. I won’t do it. I’ve always said I’d draw the line there. But rumors were flying, as any Google search will show you. They’d start the clinic going to sixteen weeks as their current license permitted. But I got conflicting reports, internally, depending on who I spoke to, about the actual plans for late-term abortions. I heard they’d never go beyond sixteen weeks, I heard nineteen weeks, and I heard twenty-four weeks. This was my affiliate. Why would they go that high? This wasn’t about access to care. I knew that. The percentage of late-term abortions is fairly low, and there was already a Houston abortion clinic (not part of Planned Parenthood) that performed that ghastly procedure. Why was our leadership supposedly planning to get into the business? Wasn’t our stated goal to decrease the number of abortions? Hadn’t that talking point been drummed into me from the day I was recruited… Didn’t I teach this to my own staff? There was nothing preventative about aborting viable babies. What greater good would be served? I didn’t like any of the answers that came to me. I could only conjecture, of course, but in light of the budget discussions, I couldn’t help but do the math. The later the abortion, the higher the cost. A late-term abortion, I knew, could cost between $3,000 and $4,000. There was big money to be made. Could this be driving Planned Parenthood? (111-112) “Abby,” I was told pointedly, “nonprofit is a tax status, not a business status.” I was ordered to get my priorities straight—which meant I had to get my revenue up… I sat there stunned… Since when has generating revenue been our goal? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing… The assigned budget always includes a line for client goals under abortion services and a line for client goals under family planning. When I looked at the numbers, I did a double take. I noticed that the client goals related to family planning hadn’t changed much, but the client goals under abortion services had increased significantly. My mind started racing. Something’s got to be wrong here. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Our goal at Planned Parenthood is to decrease the number of abortions by decreasing the number of unwanted pregnancies. That means family planning services—birth control. That is our stated goal. So why am I being asked, according to this budget, to increase my abortion revenue and thus my abortion client count? And so I asked the question out loud. I came away from that meeting with the clear and distinct understanding that I was to get my priorities straight, that abortion was where my priorities needed to be because that was where the revenue was. This meant that my job as the clinic director was to find a way to increase the number of abortions at my clinic. (114-115) I should point out here that Abby makes a significant distinction between corporate Planned Parenthood and the office staff who actually work for them on the ground. As hard as it may be to grasp from the outside, she writes that many of her “pro-choice coworkers [were] driven by compassion and tenderness, by motives of truly helping women and making the world a better place.” She says there is “good and right and wrong on both sides of the [abortion debate].” Is she saying there can be anything “good and right” about advocating for abortion? I don’t think so, but her experience reveals a contingent of Planned Parenthood employees who find abortion abhorrent and legitimately believe they are working to prevent them. Interestingly, it wasn’t the financial revelations alone that were responsible for Abby’s departure. The primary motivation was something far more visceral. After eight years of shutting out the actual mechanics of abortion, she witnessed one for the first time. After being unexpectedly asked to assist with an ultrasound-guided abortion, she writes: As I took the ultrasound probe in hand and adjusted the settings on the machine, I argued with myself, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to take part in an abortion. No, wrong attitude—I needed to psych myself up for this task… Maybe this will help me when I counsel women… I could not have imagined how the next ten minutes would shake the foundation of my values and change the course of my life… I applied the lubricant to the patient’s belly, then maneuvered the ultrasound probe until her uterus was displayed on the screen… I could see the entire, perfect profile of a baby. Just like Grace at twelve weeks, I thought, surprised, remembering my very first peek at my daughter, three years before, snuggled securely inside my womb. The image now before me looked the same, only clearer, sharper. The detail startled me. I could clearly see the profile of the head, both arms, legs, and even tiny fingers and toes. Perfect. And just that quickly, the flutter of the warm memory of Grace was replaced with a surge of anxiety. What am I about to see? My stomach tightened. I don’t want to watch what is about to happen. I suppose that sounds odd coming from a professional who’d been running a Planned Parenthood clinic for two years, counseling women in crisis, scheduling abortions, reviewing the clinic’s monthly budget reports, hiring and training staff… “Okay,” the doctor said, looking at me, “just hold the probe in place during the procedure so I can see what I’m doing…” I watched as a new image entered the video screen. The cannula—a straw-shaped instrument attached to the end of the suction tube—had been inserted into the uterus and was nearing the baby’s side. It looked like an invader on the screen, out of place. Wrong. It just looked wrong. My heart sped up. Time slowed. I didn’t want to look, but I didn’t want to stop looking either. I couldn’t not watch. I was horrified, but fascinated at the same time, like a gawker slowing as he drives past some horrific automobile wreck—not wanting to see a mangled body, but looking all the same…. At first, the baby didn’t seem aware of the cannula. It gently probed the baby’s side, and for a quick second I felt relief. Of course, I thought. The fetus doesn’t feel pain. I had reassured countless women of this as I’d been taught by Planned Parenthood. The fetal tissue feels nothing as it is removed… My head was working hard to control my responses, but I couldn’t shake an inner disquiet that was quickly mounting to horror as I watched the screen. The next movement was the sudden jerk of a tiny foot as the baby started kicking, as if trying to move away from the probing invader. As the cannula pressed in, the baby began struggling to turn and twist away. It seemed clear to me that the fetus could feel the cannula and did not like the feeling. And then the doctor’s voice broke through, startling me. “Beam me up, Scotty,” he said lightheartedly to the nurse. He was telling her to turn on the suction… The cannula was already being rotated by the doctor, and now I could see the tiny body violently twisting with it. For the briefest moment it looked as if the baby were being wrung like a dishcloth, twirled and squeezed. And then the little body crumpled and began disappearing into the cannula before my eyes. The last thing I saw was the tiny, perfectly formed backbone sucked into the tube, and then everything was gone. And the uterus was empty. Totally empty. I was frozen in disbelief. Without realizing it, I let go of the probe. It slipped off the patient’s tummy and slid onto her leg. I could feel my heart pounding—pounding so hard my neck throbbed. I tried to get a deep breath but couldn’t seem to breathe in or out…What was in this woman’s womb just a moment ago was alive. It wasn’t just tissue, just cells. That was a human baby—fighting for life! A battle that was lost in the blink of an eye. What I have told people for years, what I’ve believed and taught and defended, is a lie. (3-7) When it’s not clear to you what abortion is and does, Planned Parenthood’s revenue agenda might not seem that big a deal. What’s so bad about abortion? It’s legal. Nobody is forcing these women to abort. Why shouldn’t Planned Parenthood make as much money as they can? But when you see abortion up close, it goes from being a necessary evil to being an indefensible evil. Had Abby learned that lesson sooner, she almost certainly wouldn’t haven fallen prey to Planned Parenthood’s recruiting spiel, nor would she be living with the grief of two abortions. Growing up, Abby and her family “had always attended church together,” and she was “active in church youth group.” (20) She considered yourself “pro-life,” and yet “[she’d] never carefully thought through the issues and arguments… In fact, [she’d] made it a point to avoid discussions of abortion.” (13) In the end, she became a “pro-choice Christian” and knew lots of other people in the same boat. (58) Let that be a warning to anyone who thinks church kids automatically know that abortion is wrong and a wake up call for any youth pastors who aren’t helping their students think critically and accurately about abortion.   Miscellaneous 2011-12-16T01:15:55+00:00 http://www.abort73.com/blog/confused_complaints_and_the_availability_of_plan_b/ http://www.abort73.com/blog/confused_complaints_and_the_availability_of_plan_b/#When:22:15:06Z Last week, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the FDA  and chose not to permit the over-the-counter sale of Plan B to girls under 17. The resulting media furor reminded me that it was high time to revisit the birth control section  of Abort73.com. I set out to make some updates but ended up with two complete rewrites. The first page  examines the claim that the best way to decrease our national reliance on abortion is to increase our national reliance on birth control. The second page  looks at the mechanics of birth control (and the competing definitions of pregnancy) in an effort to ascertain whether hormone-based “contraceptives” have the potential to cause an abortion. Those updates being done, I can now respond specifically to last week’s decision. Almost all of the criticism I read boiled down to the same two complaints – namely that Plan B is perfectly safe for girls of all ages and requiring a prescription will unduly delay its usage, making it less effective at stopping pregnancy. Both arguments conveniently overlook one huge reality. The morning-after pill is already available without prescription to anyone who is 17 or older. A girl of any age can walk into a drug store and get Plan B without a prescription; she just has to have a parent with her to do it. And that’s the rub. The real complaint here doesn’t relate to safety or urgency. It relates to parental consent. They don’t like the idea that a young girl would have to enlist the help of a parent to secure emergency contraception. And truthfully, she doesn’t even need a parent. Kathleen Sebelius rationalized her decision  by expressing concern that it wasn’t appropriate for 11-year-old girls to be able to buy and consume such high-dose hormones without proper assistance. Dr. Cora Breuner, a professor at the University of Washington, scoffed at such an assertion, saying, “I don’t think 11-year-olds go into Rite Aid and buy anything, much less a single pill that costs about $50.” She then appeals to the plight of  teen girls who are of “more sexually active ages,” and argues that this ruling will force them to “suffer permanent consequences.” Lost is the fact that under current laws, all these girls need is a 17-year-old friend or sibling to buy Plan B for them. How many sexually-active 15 or 16-year-old girls don’t have friends that are 17 or older? I say all this to point out that access to Plan B is already remarkably lax. What other drugs of this magnitude are available for children to walk in and buy off the shelf? By far, the best reaction I’ve read to all this was a reader response to an editorial published by The Atlantic Monthly. It references the author’s assertion that the HHS decision was “anti-science:” I’m a retired public health epidemiologist (and scientist.). I’d like to explain that the Plan B contraceptive is one whopping dose of hormone—the same hormones that are used in birth control pills and the same hormones that are associated with some types of breast cancer. I’d remind you that a 10- or 11- year old girl is just developing in terms of reproductive organs. I can tell you that there is NO evidence that it is safe for girls that age—whose reproductive organs are not mature—to ingest a very large dose of estrogen and progesterone. It is not known scientifically whether there would be any long-term effects. Remember DES—a synthetic hormone given to pregnant women whose daughters, years and years later, suffered numerous vaginal and other cancers as a result of their mothers taking the drug during pregnancy? [JF answer: yes of course I do.] In fact, please read a little about DES here: (or another, more scholarly source, if you will.) Then please think about what is not known even now about unrestricted use of hormones. And there is much concern around the idea of hormones given to cattle and other animals and how that affects our food safety.  There is much opposition to health providers giving young boys growth hormone ( a form of male hormone) and testosterone to small boys or boys with small penis size. The concern is well justified. So I am baffled at the idea that, on the liberal side, there is no evident concern about very young adolescent girls having free access to large doses of progesterone and estrogen. I can certainly understand, and support, the urgent need to interrupt a pregnancy in a very young girl.  But what about repeated use? What about unrestricted use? What about overdose? What about long-term, regular use? I think that accusing people who raise concerns about this “anti-science” is completely unwarranted. It’s not unwarranted to raise concerns about hormones in beef, but it’s “anti-science” to raise concerns about 10- and 11-year olds taking large doses of hormones? It’s not anti-science to raise concerns about excessive estrogen in Beluga whales, but in pre- pubescent girls it’s anti-science? Are you really helping the debate here? In the first story I read on the Sebelius decision, I was struck by the statement that her ruling had “shocked women’s health advocates.” Even before reading the excellent remarks above, it seemed absurd to me that anyone could regard emergency contraception as something that is good for women’s health. It causes brutal, unnatural reactions–stopping and starting processes in the woman’s body in ways that were never intended. Some of the published side effects  include upset stomach, vomiting, lower stomach pain, fatigue, headache and dizziness, irregular bleeding, and breast tenderness. It overrides a woman’s normal, natural bodily functions to prevent ovulation. It thickens cervical mucus to prevent fertilization and compromises the lining of her uterus to make it hostile to implantation. And this brings us to an ethical concern  that goes well beyond the issues of safety and parental consent. Planned Parenthood states  that emergency contraception is 89% effective if used within 72 hours of intercourse. They also say it’s ability to prevent implantation is only theoretical–just as they do  about oral contraceptives in general. In light of the fact that fertilization can occur in as few as 30 minutes after intercourse, this seems a highly improbable and disingenuous assertion to make. How could the morning-after pill be 89% effective at “preventing” pregnancy when taken within three days, if it is not actively inhibiting the implantation of living human embryos who may already be 3-days old? The pill’s first two methods of operation don’t work if ovulation and fertilization have already occurred. Nevertheless, it is commonly asserted  that “If a woman already is pregnant, the morning-after pill has no effect.” The only way this can be true is if you define pregnancy to begin at implantation, which is exactly what birth-control advocates have been doing  since 1965.   Abortion News 2011-12-14T22:15:06+00:00 http://www.abort73.com/blog/one_in_167_the_unique_prophetic_place_of_abort73/ http://www.abort73.com/blog/one_in_167_the_unique_prophetic_place_of_abort73/#When:17:00:57Z I spent last weekend in Atlanta for the National Youth Worker’s Convention (NYWC). I didn’t get to attend any of the sessions, but I’m glad I was there. I’m glad Abort73  was there. According to the conference program, Abort73 was one of 167 exhibitors – not including Youth Specialties, who sponsored the event and easily filled as much space as another 20-30 exhibitors combined. It was a massive production that dwarfed anything I’ve been a part of to date. As I walked around the conference book store, I was overwhelmed by the number of youth-ministry-related books and resources that I’d never heard of. Information overload is an understatement! I don’t know how many of the roughly 5,000 youth workers in attendance were more familiar with the resources being offered than I was, but the vast majority of them had never heard of Abort73, which is why I’m so glad we were there. It was a good reminder that we still have a lot of ground to cover in terms of basic ministry recognition and awareness. I also noticed that of the 167 ministry exhibitors, there were 47 that coordinated mission trips. Another 26 represented camps or conference centers. There were 24 Christian schools in attendance and 18 exhibitors that offered youth-ministry-related training resources. Fourteen ministries were devoted to combatting poverty, hunger, or slavery. Eight exhibitors specialized in graphic design. Eight more offered services related to ministry logistics. Five were built around regional service projects, and three were entertainment venues. The rest of the exhibitors included a Christian speakers bureau, a ministry focused on teen depression and suicide, an insurance company, a Christian humor company, and a Christian hip-hop theater. There was one ministry, Exodus International, that focused on the issue of homosexuality. Abort73 was the only exhibitor to focus on the issue of abortion. To everyone who thinks the church is hyper-obsessed with gay-marriage and abortion, the NYWC exhibit hall painted a very different picture. The relative insignificance of abortion was even more apparent when it came to the speakers. Not one of the more than 150 sessions was devoted to the subject. I realize there is much more to youth ministry than teaching students about abortion, but consider that there were no fewer than 16 sessions devoted to media (using Photoshop, editing videos, designing T-shirts, using iPads in ministry, etc). Other sessions included: Retreat Planning, Fun and Games, Utilizing Technology to Maximize Your Ministry, Keeping Students Engaged, Using Photography for Activism, Crafting Internships that Matter, Creating an Online Ministry, The Art of Bible Storying, and Large Staff Youth Ministry Leadership. In other words, there were plenty of sessions that veered far from the fundamentals to focus on specific ministry niches. That’s not a bad thing, but I would certainly argue that helping youth workers understand how to deal with the abortion issue is far more important than many of the peripheries that received more prominent treatment. Of all people, I can appreciate the value of creating engaging, visually-compelling media, but when you have 16 sessions teaching youth workers how to better “brand” their youth ministry and not one equipping them to teach their students about abortion, that’s a problem. I realize that it’s entirely possible that some of the speakers did talk about abortion during their sessions. There were two sessions focused on social justice and two more focused on sex. I hope that abortion was discussed in these contexts, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t. And I would be very surprised if it received anything more than a passing mention. I’ve witnessed similar omissions on several occasions, and here’s the problem. When abortion is not mentioned in the context of global, systematic injustice, it reinforces the growing notion that abortion is a secondary issue – one that progressive Christians should no longer bother themselves with. When abortion isn’t mentioned in the context of teen sexuality, it creates a church culture that is more concerned about the immorality of premarital sex that it is about the injustice of abortion. And when students are saturated with warnings against sexual engagement, but know almost nothing of abortion, guess what many of them do when they find themselves pregnant? Relevant magazine ran an article in their September/October issue titled: (Almost) Everyone’s Doing It. The subtitle reads: “A surprising new study shows Christians are having premarital sex and abortions as much (or more) than non-Christians.” It’s not that these Christians are unaware that God forbids sex outside of marriage. They know that, but do it anyway – on the sly. And if pregnancy threatens to publicly expose what had heretofore been a private sin, abortion starts to look very good. Unlike many of their secular peers, Christian students are expected to be abstinent. Unwed pregnancy carries more shame for them than it does for the population at large, which is why Christian students may be even more inclined to have an abortion, as a way of covering their tracks. The solution is not to minimize God’s expectation that we abstain from sex outside of marriage. The solution is to provide students with a better understanding of what abortion is and does so if they find themselves in a crisis pregnancy, they don’t exponentially add to their sin by killing an innocent human person. For many student ministries, creating cool videos or graphics is a huge priority. Providing students with an accurate, biblically-informed understanding of abortion is not a priority. But that can change. Some youth ministries intentionally avoid the abortion issue (I heard recently from a high school pastor at a Methodist church who is not allowed to publicly criticize abortion), but most are guilty of a less egregious form of neglect. I asked some of the pastors who stopped by the Abort73 table whether they’ve ever talked to their students about abortion. All but one sheepishly answered “no,” and I got the impression that the importance of helping their students understand abortion had never even occurred to them. Of course, I was right there with them just a short time ago. I came to faith through a large, vibrant, Bible-saturated high school ministry. I was as involved as you could possibly be for four years, and to my memory, we were never taught about abortion from the pulpit – which is probably why I went through high school and college thinking abortion wasn’t that big a deal. I know the leaders in my high school ministry were not abortion supporters, and I’m sure they weren’t intentionally avoiding the subject. It simply wasn’t on their ministry radar – which brings me back to the unique and prophetic work of Abort73. Not only are we working to educate individuals about the injustice of abortion, but we are also trying to awaken churches to the importance of not leaving this issue by the wayside. Here’s how you can help. A copy of our Biblical Mandate booklet  was included in the registration packs for all 5,000 in attendance at the NYWC. Pray that they’ll be read. Pray that God will use my story to help nurture a love for abortion-vulnerable children in the hearts of high school pastors across the country. And at your own church, make sure that those who lead the high school and college ministries are aware of Abort73. Humbly, graciously ask them if they’ve ever taught their students about abortion. If they haven’t encourage them to do so. Point them to our Student Ministries page. I’ve already seen countless others go from indifference to passionate engagement. Sometimes it just takes a loving nudge.    Ministry Updates 2011-12-01T17:00:57+00:00 http://www.abort73.com/blog/killing_is_not_a_cure_abortions_continued_assault_on_down_syndrome_children/ http://www.abort73.com/blog/killing_is_not_a_cure_abortions_continued_assault_on_down_syndrome_children/#When:16:29:07Z The New York Post ran a story last week titled, “The End of Down Syndrome.” It references the release of a new prenatal blood test that screens for Down Syndrome at 10 weeks. Because this is significantly earlier and less-invasive than existing methods, Paul Root Wolpe, the ethics director at Emory University, believes the end result will be a world without Down syndrome – a world where virtually every Down syndrome baby will be identified before birth and aborted. The only question, he says, is whether this is good or bad. Wolpe bases his assessment on a fairly straightforward reading of the data. Right now, only about 2% of pregnant women in America undergo an amniocentesis screening – generally those who are over 35 or have a family history of Down syndrome. When the amniocentesis indicates that the child has Down syndrome, more than 90% of those children are aborted. It’s safe to assume that if the new screening method becomes part of the standard, prenatal routine for all pregnant women, the number of Down syndrome abortions will reach even more staggering levels – since an estimated 80% of Down syndrome babies are born to women under 35. Wolpe calls this a “conundrum” but argues that, “Human beings have always tried to fight and cure disease, and this tool, projecting it forward 50 years… will make a difference in eliminating [Down syndrome] in the world.” Whatever his intentions, this is a warped and misleading statement. In no way is abortion a cure for Down syndrome. And as someone who’s had a lifelong relationship with a Down syndrome family member, it seems perverse to even suggest that Down syndrome is something that should be “cured.” It is not a disease; it’s a genetic irregularity. To target and abort children with Down syndrome is nothing less than the euthanization of an otherwise healthy and happy group of people. Writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, Betsy Hart notes  that though “We live in a supposedly humane and tolerant age… [we still have] little tolerance for humanity that might be a little different.” Sequenom, the company responsible for the new blood test (MaterniT21), publicly claims  that it won’t have a significant impact on the birth rate of Down syndrome babies. Their senior director of research says, “All that this test does is provide a safer alternative to the information that is already available to a woman.” The Down syndrome community is less convinced. In an article for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Blythe Bernhard writes  that families of children with Down syndrome fear that “widespread use of the new test would lead to more abortions, creating a smaller community with fewer resources.” In anticipation of MaterniT21’s release, the Erie Times-News ran a story  on Matt and Meghan Wilkinson, who have 18-month-old twin boys with Down syndrome. When Meghan first learned of their condition in the recovery room, she prayed the diagnosis was wrong, but “quickly discovered that it really didn’t matter; she had already fallen deeply in love with her boys.” She calls them her “miracle men.” By contrast, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch article  highlights a family that learned of their son’s condition early in the pregnancy. Though they didn’t have an abortion, they were filled with “fear and panic” for a week after receiving the news. The family now writes that “it would be devastating if we didn’t have children like Dawson,” but it’s understandable why the news was so hard to deal with when they didn’t yet have a smiling newborn in their arms to help quiet their fears. Dr. Harriet Feick, a neonatologist at Akron Children’s Hospital, is the doctor who delivered the news to the Wilkinsons about their twin boys. She notes  that families are often upset at first, but “she is usually able to win them over.” More times than not, families that are devastated at the initial diagnosis, exhibit “undying love by the time they leave the hospital.” And why shouldn’t they? Feick notes that people with Down Syndrome have remarkably high social IQs: “Though their total IQ may be low, they often seem smarter because they are so social.” A recent article in Brooklyn Ink  notes some of the unique challenges parents face in caring for adult children with Down syndrome, but it also points out that their expectations for a long, healthy, and happy life have never been better. Like children, they can’t always care for themselves on their own, but also like children, they exhibit more joy and less cynicism than the average grown-up. Many of the stresses that overwhelm adults never quite reach them. A related story at MedicalXpress.com  raises the red flags even higher. For those who have no ethical hang-ups with aborting a baby for having Down syndrome, what would you say about aborting a baby for being a girl, or aborting a baby for not being predisposed to academic or athletic success? MaterniT21 tests for Down syndrome through “a complex form of DNA sequencing.” What that means is that these tests will not only be able to identify genetic irregularities, they’ll also be able to identify gender and provide a snapshot of “sports ability, physical appearance, (and) intelligence.” Peter Benn, professor and director of the Diagnostic Human Genetics Laboratories at the Health Center, warns that the simplicity of the test will make it hard to regulate: “If you can send off a blood sample to a laboratory and find out the sex of the baby and go somewhere else to request a pregnancy termination – no one will ask why.” Their research found that even in America, there is strong indication that sex selection abortions  are already taking place after ultrasound-based sex identification. The ability to identify gender even earlier in pregnancy does not bode well for unborn girls around the world. If there’s a silver lining in these otherwise disturbing developments, perhaps it is this. Many people who are indifferent to abortion in the abstract find this growing epidemic of trait-based abortions repulsive – and rightly so. I pray that as they wrestle to explain why it is legitimate to abort a child in general, but not legitimate to abort a child for being a girl or being too short, perhaps their eyes will be opened to the intrinsic depravity of abortion itself. After all, if there is nothing wrong with abortion in general, how can there be anything wrong with trait-based abortion in particular?   Abortion News 2011-11-24T16:29:07+00:00