Okay, that made me cry. Like I wasn't praying hard enough already.
Those are precious pictures. Tough to look at too. The abortion industry is scary.
It should make anyone cry or jolt them to the bone, anyway. I certainly did. And I have been a pro-life activist and have studied the issue since 1982. I thought I'd seen everything by way of pictures. But I hadn't.
Every once in a while we need to be graphically reminded of what we're fighting for. And those who advocate this butchery need to be literally shocked into their senses. I decided that it was time once again to stop playing around and get down to brass tacks.
This is what it's about. This is abortion. A lot different from epithets about "choice" and "reproductive rights," and railing against priests and Southern white male fundamentalists and coat hangers, isn't it?
The abortion holocaust (just like the Nazi one) continues to go on right under our noses. When will people rise up in outrage and DEMAND that it be put to an end? What will it take?
Nothing saddens and outrages me more than this. To me it is so utterly obvious that this is wrong. And equally obvious that Christians should raise hell till it is stopped.
But it doesn't happen. What can one do (emotionally)? No human being can feel all the sadness and sorrow that such things naturally would bring about. It just goes on and on.
Hi Dave, I want to tell you about the Life Training Institute http://prolifetraining.com/index.htm You might know about it. It is definitely the best pro-life organization in the world. Scott Klusendorf is the LTI president. “Scott equips pro-life students and adults to make their case persuasively in the marketplace of ideas. Groups that use his training include Focus on the Family Institute, Hume Lake Christian Camps, Summit Ministries, and the MacLaurin Institute to name a few. His seminar “Making Abortion Unthinkable: the Art of Pro-Life Persuasion” trains pro-life apologists to defend their beliefs in a winsome and attractive manner.” Scott uses the very best philosophical and scientific arguments to make the pro-life case. He trains literally thousands of people each year with the very best arguments. Eminent ethicist Francis Beckwith says “Scott Klusendorf is the best public advocate of the pro-life position I have ever seen.” I strongly, strongly, recommend that you put the Life Training Institute on one of your blog posts. Tell as many people as you can about LTI. It is going to make a huge difference. Scott has an incredible pro-life blog too.
Yeah; it's a pretty cool group. Personally, I think legal abortion will only be overcome by a massive revival. It'll take a miracle. We may change a few minds by various means, but I don't think it'll be any major shift until actual revival hits. It may be another 20-30 years or more. I expect to be an old man by the trime I see major cultural changes take place.
Fr. John Hardon always thought that the 21st century would be one of great revival, because in history, terrible centuries were always followed by ones with revival and renewal. It's still a young century: not much indication of that yet, but God is at work bringing that about in ways we can't comprehend.
Thanks for your perspective on the abortion situation. I want to give some evidence that Scott’s approach in general and Scott’s organization in particular should be encouraged rigorously. BTW, for discloser, I don’t work for Scott. Fifty years ago philosophers widely regarded talk about God as literally meaningless, as mere gibberish, but today no informed philosopher could take such a viewpoint. In fact, many of America’s finest philosophers today are outspoken Christians. In the journal Philo prominent atheist philosopher Quentin Smith writes “the secularization of mainstream academia began to quickly unravel upon the publication of Plantinga’s influential book, God and Other Minds, in 1967…in philosophy, it became, almost overnight, “academically respectable” to argue for theism.” Why couldn’t we make the same kind of impact in social ethics? Francis Beckwith writes ”It is my contention that in order to achieve true political success and to influence one’s culture in the long run, one must present intellectually convincing arguments that may not be fully understood by everyone, but will be taken seriously by the legal, medical, and philosophical communities. Since it is inevitable that the ideas that are prevalent in these communities will trickle down to the masses, as evidenced by the apparent success of the intelligentsia-supported abortion-rights movement, (See Krason’s excellent presentation of the history of the contemporary abortion-rights movement in Abortion, 7-75.) it is not exaggeration to claim that to influence the legal, medical, and philosophical communities is to influence the world.” If we should not be anti-intellectual about apologetics in general, why should we be anti-intellectual about social ethics/cultural apologetics? BTW, Francis Beckwith has a new pro-life book from Cambridge University Press, the leading academic publisher in the world. The book is http://www.amazon.com/Defending-...ie=UTF8&
s=books What do you mean by abortion will only be overcome by a massive revival? I think you have to show why Francis Beckwith’s and Quentin Smith’s assessments are incorrect before you can use the word only. Based what Plantinga did, and what Beckwith says, and some other things, I would argue that Scott’s and Beckwith’s intellectual type of activity is an absolutely crucial element that must take place to bring about an earlier revival, or at least make some major changes earlier. Look how influential (negative influence though) the intellectual ideas of Immanuel Kant, David Hume and Darwin have been. In Love Your God With All Your Mind, J.P. Moreland writes “If a culture reaches the point where Christian claims are not even part of its plausibility structure, fewer and fewer people will be able to entertain the possibility that they might be true” Shouldn’t we create and sustain a cultural milieu in which the soci
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Shouldn’t we create and sustain a cultural milieu in which the social conservative viewpoints are considered an intellectually viable option for thinking men and women? I ask these questions in a respectful way.
Sure, all that stuff's great. I've devoted my life to promulgation of an intellectually-respectable Catholicism and larger Christianity.You don't need to convince me of that. It's been my life's goal and passion since 1981.
But abortion is not simply an intellectual matter. It's a spiritual battle with the forces of evil. The battle will only be won, therefore, when there is a huge revival in the Church and Christians wake up.
The abortion industry is here today because Christians fell asleep in the 60s and eventually caved in to many of the tenets of the Sexual Revolution. Poll after poll shows that Christians are not that far behind the general public in things like divorce, cohabitation, pornography, contraception, number of children, etc.
Abortion is here because the Christian community is so compromised and in bed with the world, that even something this horrible will not wake it up.
Why are there not marches in the streets every day? Where are the boycotts? In the Civil Rights era, thousands of people were organized and people marched and did sit-ins. That was about inequality and equal rights.
Pro-life is about the right to live at all and to not be butchered. So why the massive civil rights movement compared to Christians allowing abortion to continue without a huge social upheaval?
Well, it's rather simple: civil rights involved the people who were marching. They themselves had been discriminated against and they themselves were to benefit by their own civil disobedience activities.
But with abortion, the people who protest are not personally involved. We have nothing personally to gain. That's why it is allowed to continue, because people are so me-centered, that it never sinks in that 4000 babies are being slaughtered every day. After all, we don't see the slaughter. It's all hidden behind antiseptic hospital and abortuary doors. We never even see the baby who is slaughtered. He or she is hidden behind mother's bellies.
We allow all this to happen, while we look down our noses at the Germans in the 1940s, who went about their business with the smoke of Auschwitz or Treblinka ascending to the sky on the next block. What's the difference? I say we are far worse than they are, because we were a more Christian nation, and because we could have learned from their example. We also have all the advances in ultrasound, photography, medical technology, etc., so that we know full well what we are doing. We know we are slaughtering human beings (whereas, many Germans actually were unaware of the death camps).
We are even much more brutal than the Nazis in how we kill. I'd much rather be shot in the head or gassed, than torn limb from limb, burned head to toe, sucked into a vacuum cleaner, or having scissors put into my neck and having my brain sucked out, a minute before I was about to be born. Our numbers put theirs to shame: some 50 million or so legal murders since 1973, compared to six million. We have them beat by a factor of more than eight.
But back to the immediate topic: the battle won't be won with intellectual arguments. In fact, with apologetics it is the same way. No one is truly won to Christ or to the Catholic Church by mere argument. The apologist performs almost entirely a negative role: we remove obstacles to belief. God then gives grace for the person to move forward in his spiritual life, and/or into the Church. It's His doing, not any apologist's. Any apologist who thinks it is his work, rather than
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. . . maybe 1% of the entire picture (if that), is deluding himself and ought to cease doing apologetics immediately and get his head on straight.
Likewise, for this diabolical evil of institutionalized abortion to end, the entire ethos of the country will have to change, and that requires supernatural revival. We need several generations of Christians who will start having children again (stop contracepting and learn to love children so much that they produce many more of them), at a rate far above the "maintenance" level of 2.1 per family.
In fact, if Christians (esp. Catholics) had simply continued having children the way they used to, and had not quickly caved into the contraceptive mentality, so that the numbers of children of Christians are scarcely any different, then abortion would already have been a thing of the past.
One-half of all these additional children that would have been born (since, say, 1967) would have now been of voting age. If they had been raised properly, as disciples of Jesus, they would then vote the pro-abort politicians out of office and we could quite possibly overturn abortion by constitutional amendment. That could have happened NOW, if only Christians had been Christians, and had lived a biblical worldview rather than a two-thirds (or more) secular worldview where we are scarcely distinguishable from the secular world.
All the Christians had to do was have children and raise them as radical disciples of Jesus. But we chose not to. Christians continue to vote for Democrats, who favor the murder of children. I always think of the example of good ole John Glenn, the astronaut. This guy (a Senator from Ohio now) voted to keep partial-birth abortion legal (the ghastly description of what that is, is posted above).
Cultures are transformed on the natural level by Christians having lots of children and raising them in the faith, and they then go out and change the society. We clearly see this among Muslims, in many countries now. Look what is happening in Europe. That is because Muslims still have lots of children. They have a more biblical view of family size than most Christians today.
But revival is still required, even given that scenario, because so many souls will be lost to the surrounding secular culture. It takes spiritual and personal revival to remain in the faith, and to remain on-fire with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and progression in the spiritual life.
It takes prayer, it takes penance, it takes the Mass, and the Eucharist, and confession, and constant seeking of advancing in the spiritual life; good works, charitable acts, etc. It's a spiritual battle.
You don't convince pro-aborts by intellectual argument. You convince them by love and a radical willingness to reach out to them.
Now (don't get me wrong), your group is certainly good and needed, and perhaps the best way to go about strictly educational, intellectual approaches to persuasion (it's an ongong argument in the
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. . . pro-life movement of how best to go about persuasion and political action).
All I'm saying is that the battle ultimately will not be won in that way. Abortion is too deeply entrenched in the culture. It's too diabolical and evil. It's now part of the fabric of our culture, sad to say.
It's like trying to reverse the scrambling of an egg. How do you do it? Sometimes whole generations have to simply die out, and God works on the next one that isn't, perhaps so brainwashed from the outset that it is hardened to spiritual and moral reality.
The philosophical community could change because there is no personal stake in abstract arguments about whether God exists. Philosophers like siversity of ideas because that makes it more interesting for them, just as it is far more interesting (and challenging) for me as an apologist to dialogue with an articulate, amiable critic of the Catholic Church than with someone I agree with.
That's completely understandable, and far different from a culture immersed in self-centered sexuality, and sexual "freedom", that is used to being able to have sex without any consequences. Abortion is tied into personal expedience and the feminist myth of "the free woman" who can be just like a man in just about every way except physiology.
My definition of radical feminism is: "the hatred of men along with the simultaneous desire and goal of being as much like them in every way as possible." Identifying with the oppressor . . .
Since men don't and can't have children, it was crucial to radical feminism (in its overall unisexist philosophy and mentality, trying to obliterate any gender differentiation) to create a situation where any woman could be child-free as well, so as to not be beholden to men and female biology. And so it happened.
Some Catholic observers today (I believe my mentor Fr. Hardon was among them) believe that nothing short of flat-out persecution will wake the Church (i.e., us laymen, along with compromised bishops) up out of its stupor. It will take much blood and suffering. That has always brought about revival in the past and it will again. We can only pray at this point that it is not too late to require martyrdom for our unimaginably great sins of omission. Perhaps a revival alone without persecution can accomplish the paramount goal of a culture that again respects life. I suspect not. There is a reckoning and a judgment for 50 million unjust dead that will take place, one way or another.
Thanks, Dave for putting all of that up, even though it makes me weep also.
All of that needs to be kept up being shown aggressively to the public as Barak Obama and Hillary and Edwards are off and running for the White House, (and Nancy Pelosi supports it ! and she is RC !!) and they sanction and believe in that kind of barbarism.
I have never understood anyone who claims to be a Christian and does not put the Pro-life/Abortion tragedy and Pro Family/ against same sex marriage/Homosexuality issues first in the way they are going to vote.
We're of one mind there, Ken. Nice to agree!
Yes, thanks again Dave for your work and heart.
God bless you,
OMG i dont know what else to say this is wrong those pics made me cry and shiver inside i am 12 weeks pregnant with my third child and i can not understand how someone could have this done or even domeone doing it its murder and it has to be stopped this has made me sick and yes i didnt realize how bad this wa until i seen the pics i am horrified at all this how could soemopne kill an innocent little child its disgusting and so r the people who do it its wrong it needs to stop it isnt right and it shyould be made illegal how can soemone have a baby inside them 4 up to nine months and then just get it killed its unbelieveable anyone ever getting this done or doing it obviously has no heart or feelings.they were babies once themselves how would they have liked that done to them its tradgic how this can still be giong on
That is just so wrong how ANYONE can be so cold hearted to have such a horrific procedure done is beyond me, to be able to have your child aborted at 9 months is just so wrong and anyone who allows it to be done is a murderer
As a child can be born prematurely and survive and live a full life i cannot comprehend how people can justify aborting a baby at 9 months let alon aborting it at all. Children are a gift from God, and by aborting that gift you throw back everything God has done for you in his face. I am also sickened by the fact that some young women basically use abortion as a form of contraception. They have absolutely no respect for life or their own bodies. I am disgusted that america lets abortion happen up to nine months, and im disgusted that abortion is legal at all. I understand that there are circumstances where a mother may feel that she cannot keep the child, but killing it is the answer, especially with so many infertile couples in the world hoping and prayer for a child to love!
The means of abortion, if it is possible, seem to make it even more horrifying.
Injecting salt into the amniotic sack- the baby inhales it and is burnt from the inside out.
Tearing up the baby and sucking it out in clumps. Stabbing a baby in the back of the head and sucking out its brain.
I cannot believe that anyone can justify this kind of cruelty towards anyone or anything, let alone a young baby. It is completely inhumane and sadistic to say the least.
I feel very strongly about this as i cannot wait to start a family with the man i love. To end life is to murder. If i was to murder a young man with another person, myself an that person may go to jail for life or be put to dealth. But if i was to abort my baby, neither I or the abortionist would come to any harm. How can this be legal?
It's the feeling you and I have, Kathryn, multiplied by the millions, that will eventually end legal abortion in America. It may take another twenty years, but if the pro-lifers have more children than the pro-aborts, and raise Christian kids, it is inevitable. I hope to see it before I leave this earth.
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