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.

Proponents of same-sex marriage often claim that conservatives and Catholics especially are hypocrites because Jesus loves and forgives everyone, so if we don’t recognize same-sex couples as being equivalent to heterosexuals, we are not properly emulating Jesus. Mainline Protestants and sadly, dissident Catholics, have largely embraced homosexuality based on this flawed logic. There is also a notion that in order to evangelize, we must walk among the lowly and the downtrodden and be one with them. This is only partly true.

“Marriage of the Virgin,” by Rosso Fiorentino, 1523

Jesus spent his public ministry walking, preaching, and healing amongst the poor and the sick. However, the words he gave us are not merely a commentary on the world constrained by the circumstances of that time. The fashions and follies of the world are constantly changing but Jesus was and is the living and eternal word of God made flesh. Jesus did not seek popularity or approval or fame, but spoke the truth. As Christians, we are not called to bring the brokenness of world into the Gospel and to reinterpret it according to our wishes, but rather, we are called to bring the Gospel out into the world which desperately needs to hear it.

Critics often argue that the only references to homosexuality are in the Old Testament, but ironically, the scripture reading from this past Sunday reinforces the traditional definition of marriage when the Apostles wrote to the early Christians, “It is the decision of the Holy Spirit and of us not to place on you any burden beyond these necessities, namely, to abstain from…unlawful marriage.” In this context, the “law” in question is the Law of Moses. It being the Easter Season, the reading is from the New Testament and is in perfect continuity with the many statements made by Jesus regarding adultery and marriage.

When Jesus speaks of man and woman being “joined in one flesh,” this is literally true, for in the act of procreation, man and woman are joined together in body and soul to participate in the creation of a new life. One cannot be pro-life and also support same-sex marriage, because the two concepts are so profoundly inseparable. Every child is the living and breathing expression of the sacred union of man and woman. We cannot separate marriage from procreation without separating procreation from life. Marriage in God’s plan is the source of life. The forces at work in Delaware, Rhode Island, and elsewhere are proudly and happily urging the destruction not just of marriage, but of the sacredness of life itself.

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.

North Dakota’s pro-life legislation bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, and further bans it for purposes of gender selection or due to genetic defect. Now the question becomes what happens next. Critics of the bills have cited the expense that the state will incur after the inevitable litigation begins and the strong possibility—indeed the hope—that this ends up in the Supreme Court with a showdown over Roe.

A few thoughts regarding this potential watershed moment for the unborn in America…

*The alleged concern about the costs of litigation are comical. If the secular left in this country really feels that money shouldn’t be wasted on lawyers, then there’s an easy answer—don’t challenge the law. Let it stand and move on. Or work to undo it through democratic means rather than judicial fiat.

*With regard to the substance of the law itself, what is the woman who might casually identify as a feminist, but not be a passionate secular left-winger, going to be at the debate over abortion for purposes of gender selection.

The abortion industry has gotten a lot of mileage and made a lot of money by pretending they’re about the health of woman. What happens to that perception when a highly visible clash over whether we should be a society that tolerates the most flagrant form of gender discrimination—murder in the womb—breaks out? There will be a sharp contrast drawn between the abortion industry’s desire for a practice that almost always works against baby girls and the pro-life movement, which staffs pregnancy centers aimed at providing the basics for poor, expectant mothers.

If this reaches the Supreme Court prior to 2016, what happens when these same women realize that the president they thought was oh-so-kind and sensitive to female concerns, steps in and gives legal comfort to the corporate industry that carries out abortion for purposes of gender selection? Does anyone doubt that another amicus curiae brief would be filed the Administration on behalf of Big Abortion?

However the politics of it all shake out, we’re headed for a long overdue battle. Thanks to the legislators of North Dakota for starting the ball rolling.

Dan Flaherty is the author of Fulcrum, an Irish Catholic novel set in postwar Boston with a traditional Democratic mayoral campaign at its heart, and he is the editor-in-chief of TheSportsNotebook.com

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.

On Tuesday, Roll Call ran a story about a political group striving to capture a youthful image, and in so doing, find relevance and resonance in one of the most hotly contested political issues of our age.

The group in question? None other than the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League — known to most as NARAL Pro-Choice America.

The problem that NARAL has is simple: it’s facing increasingly youthful, passionate opposition from pro-lifers. The pro-life movement has captured all the vibrant energy on the issue, and that’s something that NARAL hopes to imitate. So much so, that they’re studying young prolifers in the hopes of learning from them.

NARAL leaders have not been shy about acknowledging an “intensity” gap, making it a major theme of last week’s event. In doing so, the group placed Mark Earley Jr., a 24-year-old anti-abortion activist from Virginia, at the center of an effort to fire up members.

The group hired the public affairs firm GMMB to conduct blind interviews with activists on both sides of the issue, then singled out the University of Richmond law student’s tape as the most passionate, said Samantha Gordon, a NARAL spokeswoman. It featured the interview during the dinner “to show that passion to our audience,” she said.

Earley didn’t know he had become the face of the enemy, or even that NARAL was behind the taping, when he was contacted by CQ Roll Call. He said he didn’t mind.

“I had a hunch that it was not for a pro-life organization; I basically just figured my message would be used badly,” he said. “It is good for everyone to know that there are a lot of young people who are very serious about wanting to protect mothers and children.”

If their mission weren’t so vile, this would be laughable. NARAL is on an almost inevitable path to self-destruction. Although a recent NBC News/WSJ Poll shows that support for Roe v. Wade is at its highest point since 1989, that support isn’t unequivocal:

The shift is mostly the result of more Democrats backing the decision—particularly Hispanics and African-Americans—and a slight uptick in support from Republicans.

But the poll showed a consistent tension in Americans’ attitudes toward the decision.

Almost seven in 10 respondents say there are at least some circumstances in which they don’t support abortion.

Some 31% of respondents in the poll said abortion should always be legal, and 9% believed it should be illegal without any exceptions. Between those two opinions are the 23% who thought it should be legal most of the time, but with some exceptions, and the 35% who felt it should be illegal except in circumstances of rape, incest and to save a woman’s life.

But there’s another aspect to this story that nobody is talking about: the demographic war. Pro-lifers skew young in part because their parents — who are presumably also pro-life — have more children, to whom they pass on their philosophy of human dignity and respect for life at all stages. Members of the abortion rights movement champion contraception, small families, and abortion as a means of avoiding the “inconvenience” of a child. It’s only a matter of time, possibly even a single generation, before there are far more of us than there are of them.

NARAL is struggling to project a useful image is because NARAL itself is an organization of a bygone era. Nancy Keenan, the organization’s former president, announced that at the end of 2012 that she would soon be stepping down. The reason?

“Part of my decision was that, at 40, you have the opportunity to engage a new generation, the Millennials, because they are so huge, and that the person at the helm of this organization could reflect that youth and a younger generation,” Keenan said in an interview. “Because now the responsibility lies with these next generations to be vigilant.”

This is the same Keenan who, in 2010, came to a powerful realization:

What worries Keenan is that she just doesn’t see a passion among the post-Roe generation—at least, not among those on her side. This past January, when Keenan’s train pulled into Washington’s Union Station, a few blocks from the Capitol, she was greeted by a swarm of anti-abortion-rights activists. It was the 37th annual March for Life, organized every year on Jan. 22, the anniversary of Roe. “I just thought, my gosh, they are so young,” Keenan recalled. “There are so many of them, and they are so young.”

NARAL is worried, and I can’t help seeing that as a good sign. Abortion is not only a religious issue. (Just ask pro-life atheists.) Things may get worse before they get better, but we have youth on our side. It’s cliche to say it, but children really are our future, and those who love children — and give them the gift of life — are going to shape our course.
(Images courtesy of Alicia Skojec Photography)

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.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

At this point it’s impossible to tell if he’ll win, but like his father Mario (the Governor of New York from 1983 to 1994) he identifies as a Catholic. Just not the kind that thinks it’s important to live out their faith in public. Or in private for that matter, seeing how he and his first wife Kerry Kennedy divorced in 2005 and he currently shares a home with his live-in girlfriend.

In 2011, Governor Cuomo signed a same-sex marriage bill into law. Now, he’s throwing his support behind legislation that would not only expand abortion access, but could put Catholic hospitals and state-funded ministries out of business.

According to Kathleen Gallagher, the director of pro-life activities for the New York Catholic Conference, Governor Cuomo’s proposed legislation would do away with “parental-notification laws, informed-consent laws, restrictions on taxpayer funding of abortion and abortion bans of any kind.”

Although Cuomo says the reforms will help usher in a new era of women’s equality, Bishop William Murphy of Rockville Centre, New York sees the bill in a different light.

In an interview with the National Catholic Register, Bishop Murphy argued that when Governor Cuomo says women should have an unfettered right to an abortion because “it’s their body,” he is “espousing a position that excludes God.”

How so? Bishop Murphy responds with a question: “Are we so sovereign over our individual bodies that God the Creator has nothing to do with how we use our bodies? How we respect them? How we care for them?” He continued by pointing out that…

…in a society where everyone’s dominion over his or her body is so absolute, can we ever recognize that there are social relationships without which we cannot achieve a fully human flourishing? We become monads with no intrinsic mutual responsibility to help protect and build up human dignity.

This may seem abstract, but it illustrates what is happening: A false premise, absolute control over my body with no reference to God or neighbor, leaves us each isolated from one another and thus at risk in society. Thus the governor — and any governor or president or political leader — has to step in and arbitrarily define the legal expansion or limits of human actions and human activities.

When asked about the challenges Catholics would face if Cuomo’s plan were to become law, Bishop Murphy responded by saying the following:

This [law] is, of course, a further blow at the freedom of religious practice and a further undermining of the principle of subsidiarity, which is under tremendous attack today.

Practically, it could mean the [state’s] ability to revoke operating certificates or withhold Medicaid dollars from our hospitals, of which this diocese has six on Long Island. There is the risk that the government could extend its control by finding any of our ministries, schools, charities, etc. discriminatory because we cannot support or make references to people to exercise this new “right.”

Programs that promote birth over abortion could be at risk. And, in keeping with my overall concern, it is another blow against a pro-life position, making that position officially “unacceptable” or “bigoted” or “intolerant,” a very strange fruit in our society, where the majority of Americans, however they define it, call themselves pro-life.

To read all of Bishop Murphy’s thoughts on Governor Cuomo’s sinister plan click here.

Just as we approach the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the ruling political party in Ireland is trying to erode legal protection for those Irish in the womb.

But this attempt to attack Ireland’s pro-life laws is not going unanswered. In fact, over 30,000 Irish rallied in support of keeping Ireland safe for the unborn.

Niamh Ui Bhriain, Director of the Ireland-based Life Institute said:

“This was one of the largest crowds ever seen in the history of Ireland for a public protest.  And it shows the strength of conviction in the Irish people as they stand together to tell Enda Kenny that if he legalises abortion, each and every one at the vigil of the near will work against Fine Gael to make sure that everyone in the party knows they are the abortion party.  And, if he legalises abortion, Fine Gael will be finished as a political party.”

Bravo, Ireland! Keep fighting for women and children!