Though the media blackout on Kermit Gosnell was well-maintained until the verdict was announced, the dam finally broke at the end. Bit by bit, an increasing percentage of the population became aware. By necessity, once the horror of the Gosnell’s atrocities were in plain view, it was time for damage control. Forced to cover his crimes, the pro-abortion members of the media dutifully informed us that Gosnell was an anomaly, not representative of the fine, upstanding abortion doctors serving American women for decades in their need for “health services”. In perhaps the most glaringly obvious attempt to discredit the connection between Gosnell and the larger abortion industry, William Saletan at Slate wrote a piece entitled, “Kermit the Rogue“. Says Saletan:

Saletan goes on to attempt to discredit the “myth” that there are over 1,000 live-births after failed abortions in America every year. He ignores entirely the fact that what Gosnell did to babies outside the womb, abortion doctors across the nation are doing to babies inside the womb every day. The cognitive dissonance displayed here is staggering.

So instead of focusing on the simple truth of what abortion is, many of its proponents sidetrack us instead with the arguments about whether or not a fetus is, in fact, human at all. This is a distraction from the debate we should be having, and it is waged under a banner of false language, of euphemisms like “choice” and “reproductive rights” but never the specificity of scientific fact.

I’ve had enough. I propose that in the wake of Gosnell (and in light of the other butchers like him whose crimes are now coming to light) that we dispense with excessive diplomacy and go on the offensive. We must stop giving cover to those who would obfuscate and confuse the issue and challenge them instead. The simple fact is this: no honest, informed person can possibly believe that an abortion does not take a human life.

Science makes no provision for this idea. From the startlingly clear imagery provided by ultrasound technology to the detailed information provided by genetic testing to the continued advances in embryology, science is on our side. It always has been, but the evidence is mounting. We should not be afraid to stand on its findings.

In 1989, world-renowned French geneticist Dr. Jerome Lejeune was called to testify as an expert witness at a trial in Blount County, Tennessee. A divorced couple was fighting over what at the time must have seemed like a scenario out of a science fiction novel: custody of their seven cryogenically frozen embryos. After establishing his remarkable credentials, Dr. Lejeune provided the court with a lengthy explanation of embryonic development and genetic makeup. When it came time to ask his opinion on the central issue — the humanity of the embryos – his response left no room for doubt about his scientific opinion.

Q.: … I will ask you directly, Dr. Lejeune: You have referred to the zygote and the embryo as quote early human beings.’

A.: Yeah.

Q.: Do you regard an early human being as having the same moral rights as a later human being such as myself?

A.: You have to excuse me, I’m very, very direct. As far as your nature is concerned, I cannot see any difference between the early human being you were and the late human being you are, because in both case, you were and you are a member of our species. What defines a human being is: He belongs to our species. So an early one or a late one has not changed from its species to another species. It belongs to our kin. That is a definition. And I would say very precisely that I have the same respect, no matter the amount of kilograms and no matter the amount of differentiation of tissues.

Q.: Dr. Lejeune, let me make sure I understand what you are telling us, that the zygote should be treated with the same respect as an adult human being?

A.: I’m not telling you that because I’m not in a position of knowing that. I’m telling you, he is a human being, and then it is a Justice who will tell whether this human being has the same rights as the others. If you make difference between human beings, that is, on your own to prove the reasons why you make that difference. But as a geneticist you ask me whether this human being is a human, and I would tell you that because he is a being and being human, he is a human being.

He is not alone in his certitude. A 1981 Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing solicited testimony from a number of doctors and experts. Their statements were unequivocal:

“It is incorrect to say that biological data cannot be decisive…It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception.”

Professor Micheline Matthews-Roth
Harvard University Medical School

“I have learned from my earliest medical education that human life begins at the time of conception.”

Dr. Alfred M. Bongioanni
Professor of Pediatrics and Obstetrics, University of Pennsylvania

“After fertilization has taken place a new human being has come into being. [It] is no longer a matter of taste or opinion…it is plain experimental evidence. Each individual has a very neat beginning, at conception.”

Dr. Jerome LeJeune
Professor of Genetics, University of Descartes

“By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.”

Professor Hymie Gordon
Mayo Clinic

“The beginning of a single human life is from a biological point of view a simple and straightforward matter – the beginning is conception.”

Dr. Watson A. Bowes
University of Colorado Medical School

The official Senate report reached this conclusion:

Physicians, biologists, and other scientists agree that conception marks the beginning of the life of a human being – a being that is alive and is a member of the human species. There is overwhelming agreement on this point in countless medical, biological, and scientific writings.

The physicians are not alone.  Faye Wattleton, Planned Parenthood’s longest-serving president, told Ms. Magazine in 1997:

I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don’t know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus.

Other pro-abortion voices have similarly expressed this belief. It is too obviously true to credibly deny.

This should empower us. Many who are supportive of abortion do not, for obvious reasons, share our religious views. And far too often, those who are pro-life make the mistake of basing their arguments on faith or scripture, thus entangling ourselves in debates over metaphysical things in which the larger point we are making is lost. We do not need to make a religious argument about personhood or the existence of human life in the womb. We have the facts on our side, and we can fight like empiricists. We have the benefit of logic and reason, and we are opposed by little more than emotion and misdirection.

We need to be the ones framing this debate. We mustn’t allow ourselves to be sidetracked by spurious arguments anymore.

At the same time the IRS was ramping up its harassment of Tea Party groups in 2011, liberals were outraged and President Obama threatened to veto the debt ceiling legislation when Republicans tried to end public financing of Planned Parenthood’s abortion mills and incessant political advocacy. Even now, Planned Parenthood continues to receive public funding and also operates a 501(c)(4), presumably with private contributions, although accounting gimmicks make this separation highly dubious. Meanwhile, Tea Party groups whose stated mission is to educate citizens about the Bill of Rights and accept only private donations were held to a much higher level of scrutiny.

The contrast is spectacular and revealing: for modern liberalism, abortion is a public good but freedom of speech is not. Obama made this explicit when he told Planned Parenthood, “God bless you” and then went on to tell the graduates of Ohio State to reject the voices that warn that tyranny is just around the corner. If the revelations of the past few days have taught us anything, it is that the phrase “unaccountable bureaucrat” is not just a political cliché, and pace Obama’s assurances, there really is a petty tyrant that is always lurking around the corner of every page of ambiguous and ill-conceived legislation—and ObamaCare is by far the most heinous example.

President Obama claimed in a press conference yesterday that he had no knowledge of the IRS program, but this does not absolve him of responsibility. During his State of the Union address in 2010, President Obama made it clear that he was vehemently opposed to 501(c)(4) organizations engaging in political activity and urged Congress to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Perhaps, like the knights who killed Saint Thomas á Beckett after hearing Henry II wish for his death in a fit of rage, the IRS employees were just trying to please their boss.

“Paying the Tax,” by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, c.1620

This should give us pause when we consider the wide-ranging powers granted to the IRS under ObamaCare. Indeed, the landmark ruling of National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius only upheld ObamaCare by interpreting its most onerous provisions as an exercise of the taxing power. Liberal pundits echo Obama’s claim that we have nothing to fear, but they said the same thing about the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups. In this light, the words of the Declaration of Independence reverberate through the centuries as a warning that is just as relevant today, “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.” The HHS contraceptive and abortifacient mandate is only a foretaste of what is to come.

In the age of Obama, we can no longer hope that the executive branch will exercise prudence and sound judgement in the enforcement of the law. Whenever the law allows for discretion, it also allows for abuse. As far as we know, this scandal is not the product of some Nixonian conspiracy, although the scope and longevity of the IRS program do not reflect well on Obama’s leadership if nobody ever thought to bring it to his attention. As the saying goes, “A fish rots from the head down.”

Most likely, these abuses are simply the result of an incompetent and ineffectual President who despises the citizens that elected him and takes no interest in the task of governing when it does not suit his latest initiative to remake American society. If we can take Obama at his word, the IRS employees were simply left to their own devices without proper oversight. It is only natural that they would follow the example of a President who never misses an opportunity to chastise his conservative opponents and to politicize every function of the government under his control. Sadly, in his peevish aloofness, Obama is the pettiest tyrant of them all.

—

Correction Note: the original version of this article referred to the debt ceiling debate as taking place in May 2012 when it was in fact the summer of 2011.

As the smoke clears and the wounded are tended to following the horrific bombing in Boston yesterday, the case of America’s most prolific serial killer, Kermit Gosnell, has been once again pushed to the back of our collective consciousness. Yesterday’s tragedy, so raw and present in the minds of post-9/11 Americans, leaves little room in our thoughts for the details of Gosnell’s gruesome trial.

But we can’t afford to let this story once again slip out of the eye of the media. Not when it focuses the spotlight on the reality of abortion. Not when it brings to public awareness the atrocities committed by a man who, among other demonic violations of human decency, severed the spinal cords of living babies, beheading them with impunity.

By now, you’ve probably heard these charges more times than you care to count. To be honest, I have mostly avoided the details myself. As a father of six — including a newborn — I can’t even stand to read the stories about Gosnell’s “house of horrors”. I don’t have the stomach for it. But it’s too important too ignore.

Just weeks ago, the media blackout on Gosnell had been almost total, but through social media campaigns like this one, a begrudging change had started taking place. Ever-so-gradually, a number of outlets were goaded into talking about the story. Yesterday on Facebook, I saw the following image about last Friday’s tweet campaign, promoted by whoisgosnell.com:

Glenn Beck, who has the journalistic freedom that comes with owning his own media network, did an 18-minute segment on his 5PM newscast on Monday night:

“This is the most disturbing show that I have ever done,” Beck said. “This is some of the most disturbing information and some of the most disturbing pictures I have ever seen.”

Beck also blasted the mainstream media for not covering the Gosnell trial until they were “shamed into it.”

“For over two decades…Kermit Gosnell convinced people to snip the necks of the perfectly healthy babies. Several per day. Week after week after week, year after year, baby after baby after baby,” Beck said.

Raising his voice in outrage, Beck added: “That means this man killed more children in a single month than all the school shootings in the history of America combined, and no one in the media says anything.”

Until they were shamed into it. But some have no shame. Like our President. When White House spokesman Jay Carney was pressed for some statement from President Obama on the Gosnell trial, the sheer cowardice of the President shined through in his non-response:

 “I’ll say two things. One, the president is aware of this. Two, the president does not and cannot take a position on an ongoing trial, so I won’t as well.”

From the Daily Caller:

When pressed about Obama’s vote as an Illinois state lawmaker against a law to provide medical care to a baby born due to a botched abortion, Carney also dodged.

“Well, again, you’re relating it to a case that I can’t comment on and the president can’t comment on,” Carney said. “I would simply say that the president’s position on choice is very clear. His position on the basic principle — that as President Clinton said, abortions ought to be safe, legal and rare — is very clear.  I just don’t have comment that could shed light on this specific case.”

Last March, Obama weighed in on the death of Trayvon Martin after the Department of Justice opened an investigation into the case.

“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Obama said at the time.

The Washington Post reports that Carney initially had refused to comment on the case, explaining that the White House was “not going to wade into a local law enforcement matter.”

But it took no time at all for the President to make a speech about what happened in Boston. And that was appropriate, despite the ongoing investigation. Because it’s appropriate for the President to comment on significant tragedies within the country he leads, even unsolved or unconcluded ones.

Of course, we know why he won’t talk about it. It throws his own voting history into question. It highlights, in a very unflattering way, his position on human life.

As the pressure stays on, and the story comes to the attention of more Americans, some are no doubt asking how the Gosnell situation happened. How have we, as a nation, reached a point where something so horrific was taking place right under our noses?

I have a theory: we created this problem through our collective, national obsession with sex.

This condition afflicts people without concern for race or creed, and it dehumanizes us. It starts by disassociating sex from procreation through contraception. Whereas marriage as a social institution was once predicated upon the idea of family-building, providing a stable environment for the raising of those children that were considered the proper fruit of the conjugal act, there is now only state-sanctioned sex, accompanied by a handful of legal rights. Of course, many have wised up to the fact that the commitment of marriage is overrated if they can just as easily have sex in whatever adult, consensual arrangement they wish to enter into.  Freed of the stigma of out-of-wedlock birth, sex has shrugged off its social taboos that once confined it to marriage. Fornication is the new normal. Virginity before marriage is increasingly considered cause for pity, even scorn.

The upshot of all of this is that people have, by and large, ceased to be lovers, though they may feel something akin to love. They have instead become “sexual partners” — objects for the provision of pleasure, merely to be discarded when boredom sets in, or when someone new, more exciting, younger, or more attractive comes along. Sex isn’t for family anymore, so it certainly isn’t for keeps. We have decided it’s better to keep our options open.

And so we continue to objectify and devalue each other with bacchanalian abandon. Our casual views on sex have lead, unsurprisingly, to a society that is riddled with free, easily accessible pornography, which afflicts even those trying to live good lives and have healthy marriages. Talk to any priest about the sin he hears confessed most, and that one rises to the top of the list. Talk to those who have struggled with it, and the shame and helplessness that they feel in their encounters with this incredibly powerful appetite and the ease with which it can be fed, seemingly consequence-free, is apparent. But we know all too well that an erasure of web browser history does not similarly wipe clean the consequences for our souls, or, perhaps, for our humanity. Something inside us knows, even as our entertainment, educational institutions, and medical professionals try to assure us that porn usage and masturbation are healthy and normal, that something about these things is deeply wrong.

Still, in line with our national embrace of prurience, the FCC is now seeking to loosen decency standards for television and radio content. According to The Hill‘s Brendan Sasso, “The commission asked for input on how it should handle expletives and brief non-sexual displays of nudity. The rules only cover broadcast TV and radio stations—not cable, satellite or Internet content.” The needle moves, gradually but constantly, toward depravity.

As we become increasingly comfortable with viewing other human beings as sex objects, we should not be surprised that human sex trafficking, too, is an enormous problem in the US. It is widely reported that the Superbowl is ranked as the single biggest sex-trafficking event in the world. The nation that is world-famous for fighting a war about slavery remains one of the biggest consumers of slaves — of which, there are an estimated 27 million worldwide, an all-time high.

Orwell knew when he wrote 1984 how important licentiousness was to the building and maintaining of a totalitarian society. Aldous Huxley showed us the same thing in Brave New World. From grammar-school “erotic play” to the pornographic “feelies,” from the widespread distribution of contraceptives to the complete biological and psychological separation of sex and procreation, we were warned by these early-20th century literary prophets that it is sex, not religion, that is the opiate of the masses. As our liberties are taken away, we become increasingly sexually libertine, in seemingly direct inverse proportion. But who cares about religious liberty or the 2nd Amendment if the fleshpots are free?

If consequence-free sex is the norm, there are bound to be…consequences. Abortion and sex are inextricably related. You don’t have the former without the latter. What happens when, despite our best application of scientific barriers to conception, nature still finds a way? What happens when, horror of horrors, a girl actually gets pregnant? We don’t want them “punished with a baby,” do we? Let’s not kid ourselves: once we are accustomed to looking at people as objects, it’s a whole lot easier to kill them.

This is how we arrive at the present moment. This is how we have come to Gosnell, and a media unwilling to talk about the nauseating evil he was capable of. As Charles Krauthammer recently said, “the fact that it’s not covered is very easily explained. It puts the pro-abortion forces in a very bad light. It brings the issue of late term abortion starkly into relief.” And our President, and most of the mainstream media, are abortion promoters.

We have suppressed decency for so long that we have effectively killed it. We have so accustomed ourselves to the selfish pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of difficulty and inconvenience that we objectify human life without hesitation.  We have so powerfully numbed our consciences to the reality of abortion that we can live with it, and in many cases, even embrace it. Even those of us who abhor abortion have no choice but to spend every day living, working, and continuing on as normal in a country that has eradicated the equivalent of roughly 17% of the current US population. 54,000,000+ children have been murdered since Roe. To put that in perspective: that’s more than all the American soldiers killed in every war, conflict, and military operation we’ve been involved in since the American Revolution — by a factor of forty.

We have created the monster that is Gosnell. Despite our willingness to watch 24/7 coverage of the Boston bombing, despite our eagerness to share graphic photos of that carnage in the name of “news,” deep down, we are terrified of knowing the truth about the violence committed daily against the unborn. When we are reminded of this violence, when we those have images displayed before us, we recoil in horror. We are in denial, and yet something inside us knows that this is an evil that cannot continue in a nation that calls itself good.

Why is America silent about Gosnell? We are afraid that he is a mirror. We want him to go away. We do not know how to cope with having him held up, only to see our own reflection.

Keep holding up the mirror. It’s time we wake up to who we have become. Maybe there’s still time to change it.

But first I think it’s important to give some context. What needs to be saved about the American culture in the first place? The family.

A nation is only as strong as its foundation, and for a society, its foundation is the family: Children, mothers and fathers. But in America, all three are threatened as never before.

Children

• We kill 1.6 million children a year by abortion.
• A child sex abuse scandal continues to spread across our public schools and other institutions while the media and courts refuse to give sustained attention to it anywhere except in the comparatively small abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.
• About 9 out of every 10 children 8-16 years old have viewed pornography online.
• In our hookup culture nearly 1 in 3 teens is having intercourse, mostly with people they don’t consider their boyfriend or girlfriend.

Women

• Women are routinely treated as objects of pleasure in our advertisements and entertainments  — Beyonce at halftime at the Super Bowl, for example.
• Pornography is by far the biggest money-maker in the entertainment industry; polls say 2 out of every 3 young men you meet spend hours each week looking at it. This dramatically affects the way they treat women. Pornography is our culture’s most common expression of the female.
• According to the U.S. Justice Department 1 in 3 adult women in America has been the victim of rape or physical assault at some point in her adulthood.

Men

• Fathers abandoning their families is a national epidemic — their failure to help is the leading cause of poverty in women, and contributes to a whole host of problems, as James Dobson and Kurt Bruner point out in Fatherless.
• Men’s entertainment — from rap to metal to video games – is filled with crassness, violence and misogyny. Whether it’s hip hop culture or Oscar comedy, objectifying and demeaning women is mainstream
• Videogames have become the national pastime, for men especially. About 3 out of 4 gamers is 18 or older, spending an average 18 hours a week playing video games. Whether you think this makes men “shiftless, boring wimps” or contributes to violence, or not, it at least makes virtual violence  the centerpiece of our culture’s self-expression of masculinity.

So, with a tidal wave of anti-family sentiment that powerful, what could possible reverse the course? Only a sea change.

I argue over at the National Catholic Register (“The March for Life Lesson We Can’t Afford to Ignore”) that the significant victories we are experiencing in the right to life are capable of bringing about just such a sea change.

1. Embracing the right to life will mean stopping the slaughter of infants.
2. Embracing the right to life will pull the rug out from under the sexual revolution which has done so much damage to women.
3. Embracing the right to life will mean forcing men to take responsibility for their actions once again.

Now, I know there are very good arguments for why my position may be wishful thinking, and expecting too much. They just may be right. A culture like ours, in which the basic fundamentals of family life have been so systematically destroyed, may be unfixable.

In that case, the consequences will be severe. God won’t punish us in some mystical way. He won’t have to. He will punish us the way he punishes gardeners who don’t water their gardens.

• Our population will not replace itself, making our crushing debt crisis an imminent threat instead of a future worry.
• People who live sexualized childhoods will suffer in their self-esteem and their ability to form mature attachments, and their sexual maturity, worsening the cycle in the next generation.
• A nation of broken families will suffer economically, and a culture inordinately devoted to entertainment instead of self-mastery and value-production won’t snap out of that quickly.

That’s “the hard way” out of our mess: To be brought inch by inch to our low point until we look around, startled that we have gone from the world’s only superpower that unfortunately scored poorly on math tests to a has-been nation that aborted its future but was too busy on our smart phones to notice that it was gone.

But we might not need to learn this one the hard way.

I remember saying at a party once, “I don’t get why people don’t wake up to reality and reject this stuff!”

To which a woman responded incredulously, “Tom, you and nearly every person in this room has done just that.”

Indeed we have. And as we saw at the last March for Life, our numbers are growing every year.

I believe that if we focus on the right to life — if we focus on the “killing babies” plank of this twisted anti-family agenda — we can win this. Evil’s greatest victory in our time is that parents are willing to kill their kids. But the greatest threat to evil in our time is that of course they won’t keep doing that.

If we redouble the efforts we have made to compassionately and fearlessly defend life and help mothers, we absolutely can win this.

And we also wouldn’t have this…

The President of the United States recorded a message for NARAL Pro-Choice America, which celebrated the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade on Tuesday.

“To everyone at NARAL Pro-Choice America, thank you for your tireless advocacy,” Obama said. “I couldn’t be prouder of the work each of you is doing.”

By the way…

Why don’t Republican Presidents do this for pro-life groups? I remember my frustration that George W. Bush placed a phone call to the March for Life when we were all located about 200 feet from his house.

Really? Phoning it in?

I understand that Presidents don’t usually attend political rallies. But if Obama can record a video message, why can’t the next Republican President cut a video for the March for Life? C’mon folks, it’s the 21st Century.

Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, Dick Durbin, Dick Gephardt, Dennis Kucinich…

…and now Rep. Stephen Lynch.

You see, there’s a Senate race in Massachusetts now that John Kerry is over at the State Department. Lynch was once pretty solid on life, but over the years his support for the unborn weakened significantly. But he was happy to have the press label him as “anti-abortion.” Helped him win Catholics in South Boston after all.

Well not anymore. He’s running for statewide office now.

“I have never seen the ­repeal of Roe v. Wade as a part of any solution,” Lynch said in an interview. “I do not think that solves anything, and, as a matter of fact, it doesn’t reduce abortions.”

Pathetic.

Of course, his opponent in the Democratic primary is Rep. Ed Markey and he can tell Democratic voters that he has been a stalwart supporter of abortion — well, since 1983 when he renounced his previous pro-life position.

Pray for Massachusetts.

But that irrefutable fact didn’t stop MSNBC host Toure Neblett this past week from thanking God that abortion is legal, and that in some ways it saved his life.

Just how did it save his life? you’re probably wondering.

I’ll let Mr Neblett explain:

15 years [ago] I was in a committed relationship with a woman who I knew was just not the one. She also knew it probably wasn’t going to work out and then she got pregnant, and I was terrified.

I knew [we] were not going to be able to form a lasting family. She decided it was best to have an abortion and days later she did, we did, and in some ways that choice saved my life

Mr Neblett went on to say he was not smart enough or man enough to raise a child at that time, so he would have destroyed three lives had this woman given birth to their child. “I thank God,” he concluded, “that when I fell into a bad situation, abortion was there to save me.”

Mr. Neblett does a nice job of putting a cheery spin on a decision no one should be proud of. But what he should have said is “Look, I treated this woman as an object in order to satisfy my sexual desires. I knew full well I might end up becoming a father, but I did it anyway. What I am truly thankful for is a handful of Supreme Court justices whose decision on a court case 40 years ago allowed me to weasel my way out of taking responsibility for my actions.”

What’s curious about Mr. Neblett’s decision to thank God is that doing so contradicts everything we know about God. Didn’t God tell us not to kill one another? Didn’t Christ say there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for another? Didn’t Christ also say that when we take care of the unwanted, the poor and the neglected, we are actually taking care of Him? And didn’t Christ say “he who seeks to save his life will surely lose it”?

If Mr. Neblett was truly a family man (as he later assures his viewers he is), then why didn’t he give up his child for adoption? Why not allow this “unwanted” child to live in a household where it would be cared for? Wouldn’t that be better than denying it the gift of life all together?

The mother of Ryan Bomberger seemed to think so.

In 1970, Ryan’s biological mother was raped. Despite her pain, she chose life and decided to give him up for adoption. He was taken in by a loving, Christian family of 15 and has gone on to do many amazing things, including raising a family of his own and winning an Emmy. But what I imagine he is most proud of is his work with The Radiance Foundation, an organization he founded with his wife Bethany. The Radiance Foundation is an organization that seeks to affirm the intrinsic value of each and every person, including “unwanted” and unplanned pregnancies like the one his mother had in 1970 and the one Mr. Neblett had 15 years ago.

Here’s a brief video about Ryan’s fascinating life

As previously mentioned, Ryan is active in the pro-life movement. Just the other day he appeared on MSNBC to discuss the 40th anniversary of Roe v Wade. It’s definitely worth watching.

If you’re interested in learning more about The Radiance Foundation, I encourage you to visit their website. Bravo, Ryan. Bravo. You’ve given us just one more reason to continue the fight for the unborn.

1-800-CALL-A-GIGOLO

Did Mehcad Brooks start his acting career doing ads for sleazy dating websites/pay-per-call numbers? How I’d wish they’d edited out a few of those mmmm-mmmm-mmms at the end. They just don’t stop.

Brooks says that a few hundred thousand “of us have chipped in to get you something special.” It’s not clear by the end of the ad what it is. I don’t think I want to know…

This is part of a new campaign called “Draw The Line.” Though, I’m not sure what lines they’re drawing. In his ad, Brooks claims to not want limits put on him. So much for healthy boundaries. In another (very confusing) ad, the message starts out being about abortion and somehow they bring in a the sad story of a woman in Kenya who was kept at the hospital after the birth of her baby because she could not pay the bill. I don’t understand that part of her story, but they keep showing footage of her other small children, as well as other mothers with their babies. They all look pretty poor. She doesn’t claim to want abortion or to celebrate it.

The Center for Reproductive Rights exists to promote abortion. Please, someone, draw a line and make it clear what this campaign is all about. The footage made me wonder if they weren’t trying to suggest that these poor women simply shouldn’t be having so many/any children. And of course, it’s full of some very, very talented celebrities looking very, very serious about this very, very important cause…whatever it is.

There’s really not much to say. But if you want to know what the abortion movement is about and you think it has something to do with sleaze, by all means circulate the Brooks ad!

Twenty young children, slain for no good reason. Adam Lanza just decided they were inconvenient to him. It was horribly wrong to do this. What Lanza did was wrong not because the parents of those children loved them and wanted them to remain alive. What Lanza did was wrong because each those children was an individual, unique, beautiful human person with his or her own soul and right to continue living.

It is a right that precedes all other rights, and no other rights are possible without it. It is a right that no one can take away, it can only be surrendered through one’s own actions. Adam Lanza ignored the unalienable right those children had to live and killed twenty of them.

Every single day in our country the body count of the Newtown massacre is met two-hundred times over in abortionists’ facilities. Two-hundred Newtowns, daily. The mind reels, the heart breaks.

In response to the Newtown massacre a hue and cry has arisen to restrict gun rights. The awful irony is that the Venn diagram of those who most ardently support such restrictions on guns and those who most ardently support a woman’s right to choose an abortion very likely have significant overlap.

Those same people would be hard-pressed to identify the moment at which the child in utero acquires the right to life, usually preferring to avoid the question entirely. They’d rather discuss the woman’s right to choose what to do with her body and ignore the hard reality that the presence of a new person in her womb changes the dynamic of the question utterly—of course it is her body, but it is also that child’s home.

President Obama and all who have been speaking after him on the topic of gun violence have repeated variations of, “If we can save even one child, it is worth it; we have a responsibility to act; we will be judged on how we move to protect the most vulnerable amongst us.”

Who can disagree with that? And yet, so many who call for measures that would save, at most, a few dozen children’s lives per year in this country defend a practice that directly takes 4,000 children’s lives per year.

Let’s move to value and protect them all.

Well, one bishop understands this point powerfully. Rather than simply stating the doctrine of the Church or explaining embryonic development, Denver’s Archbishop Samuel Aquila tells about his own experiences.

During his three years in college, Aquila worked as a hospital orderly. He freely admits that he didn’t practice his faith as much as he should have. Aquila even confesses his ignorance that several states had already legalized abortion.

But his story is undeniable.

The second abortion was more shocking. A young woman came into the emergency room screaming. She explained that she had had an abortion already. When the doctor sent her home, he told her she would pass the remains naturally. She was bleeding as the doctor, her boyfriend, the nurse and I placed her on a table.

I held a basin as the doctor retrieved a tiny arm, a tiny leg and then the rest of the broken body of a tiny unborn child. I was shocked. I was saddened for the mother and child, for the doctor and the nurse. None of us would have participated in such a thing were it not an emergency. I witnessed a tiny human being destroyed by violence.

The memory haunts me. I will never forget that I stood witness to acts of unspeakable brutality. In the abortions I witnessed, powerful people made decisions that ended the lives of small, powerless, children. Through lies and manipulation, children were seen as objects. Women and families were convinced that ending a life would be painless, and forgettable. Experts made seemingly convincing arguments that the unborn were not people at all, that they could not feel pain, and were better off dead.

I witnessed the death of two small people who never had the chance to take a breath. I can never forget that. And I have never been the same.

Read the rest of what Archbishop Aquila has to say. His story and others like his are exactly what we Catholics need to share with the world. May God bless Archbishop Aquila for speaking so powerfully.