You pick up the stone on a Friday. At some time over the weekend, you’re supposed to put it down.
The stone can represent many things–your sin, your bitterness toward yourself, toward someone else. It’s the burden you’ve been carrying. It’s been the rock in the pocket of your heart for years.
But over the next few days, you’ll finally be able to put it down. And you’ll finally find healing you didn’t know was possible.
Such is the experience of many men attending a retreat to heal from abortion.
A typical situation begins with two people who come together in passing or in love–but always in passion.
She becomes pregnant.
He doesn’t resist when she says she’ll have an abortion–even though she may be hoping he will take a stand on behalf of their child–that he will choose to stand by her.
Or perhaps he pushes her to abort the baby.
Or perhaps he will learn of the abortion only after it’s already happened.
He’s often the neglected one in such situations.
Since before Roe v. Wade, we’ve heard that abortion is between a woman and her doctor. It’s nobody else’s business.
Except it doesn’t work that way–even though it may take him years to understand that the wound from abortion is the stone that has been weighing him down.
“[Many men] do not associate the symptoms they are suffering [depression, addiction, inability to maintain relationships] with that abortion event in their past. Even if a man is aware that he is hurting from participating in the death of his unborn child, there is no safe place to share that burden.”
He has no place to go–either because no one else knows about the abortion or because those who do know don’t want to discuss it.
Burke explains why healing is so important:
“When you went through that abortion experience the natural need for you to grieve the loss of your child and your parental relationship with your son or daughter was also aborted. For some men and women, forgiving self and letting go of the burden of self-condemnation feels like letting go of the only real connection with their unborn child or children.”
Yet there is hope–for both men and women. Hope comes, not in forgetting, but in honoring and remembering. Healing ministries provide the opportunity to remember, to name the child, to repent, to find forgiveness.
Burke’s book lists the following:
Abortionforgiveness.com is part of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign.
Menandabortion.net helps men find healing and works to raise awareness of men’s abortion pain in counselors, pro-life workers, and society at large.
House of Esau offers weekend retreats for men seeking healing from abortion.
And Rachel’s Vineyard is a ministry for married couples, parents, and grandparents. This ministry provides the stone that symbolizes the burden of abortion.
Burke quotes an attendee of a Rachel’s Vineyard Weekend Retreat: “After I picked up my rock, I was inspired to share with the group. ‘I’ve been carrying this rock for 14 years. I’ve been emotionally dead for that long.’”
Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!
Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertisement.
“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have placed before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants,” Deuteronomy 30:19, ESV~
“For too many of us, freedom no longer means the ability to know, to choose, and to do what’s morally right; rather, it means what the scholar D. C. Schindler described as ‘freedom from reality. . . . As a result, we relentlessly try to reimagine the world to suit our desires, and then coerce others into believing our delusions.” Charles J. Chaput
In 1974 along with some fellow students, I toured a residential facility for the mentally disabled in a nearby county. Patients’ conditions ranged from functional to bedridden.
In those years, seeing someone with challenges was more common. Aborting those with limited capacities or physical challenges had been neither legal nor acceptable when these patients resided in the womb.
A few years later, the center made news. A male employee had raped incapacitated female patients, two of whom had become pregnant as a result.
The parents of the two women took different paths as I recall from news reports of the day.
One family decided on abortion. Their daughter had a genetic disorder they feared would damage the fetus.
The other family’s daughter had been injured in an accident. Her “disorder” couldn’t be passed on. Her baby would be born. Her baby had a mother.
The newspaper reporter further distinguished between the two children. The fetus had tissue, but the baby had blood. Medical personnel would test both to solve the crime.
There was one language for death and another for life.
The language of death is designed to disguise its subject. Fetus is a Latin word meaning young one. Tissue isn’t as graphic as blood–the substance that sustains life. Fetuses don’t have mothers. Only babies do.
Unstated in the reporter’s account, one family would be relieved of a potential new burden the state was already carrying for their daughter since her child would die. The other family claimed an unexpected grandchild. That child got to have a birthday.
Law enforcement used the acquired tissue and blood to identify the perpetrator who paid the price of a prison sentence.
Nearly five decades have passed since SCOTUS handed down Roe v. Wade and companion case Doe v. Bolton eliminating every law limiting abortion (effectively allowing abortion until birth for any reason) across the US. The language regarding the subject continues to distinguish between fetuses to be aborted and children to be born.
Think of hospitals doing late abortions while medical personnel down the hall work around the clock in the NICU to save babies of the same gestational age.
Think of those working where life and death depend on human decisions.
Think of the people making these decisions–irrevocable moments that will resound in eternity.
And think of the babies, as all whose lives hang in the balance are.
Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!
Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.
In January of 1979, I had two children, a husband and a house, and cable television. The cable company ran scrolling public service announcements, and for the first couple of weeks of that New Year, one announcement, in particular, kept catching my eye.
The message declared that buses would be heading toward Washington, DC, to mark the sixth anniversary of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the US Supreme Court decisions that eradicated every abortion regulation in every state.
Two phone numbers ran along the bottom. I called one or the other at different times, finding out what was involved, what I’d need to arrange for my children for the day, what I’d need to wear and bring with me, and how much it would cost. I learned that the two numbers led me to sisters with multiple children, (They would have 14 between them, one or two not yet born).
On January 22, I got on the bus while it was still dark. I had a sandwich and most of a large bag of M&Ms in a brown paper bag. I had on my new boots and coat and thought I looked great.
When we arrived, we walked from the Ellipse to the Capitol where we heard many inspiring speakers. It was a balmy 50-something degree day. I carried one or two of the layers I’d piled on to protect me from the expected cold.
We visited our legislators and walked back to meet our bus—late, even though, or more likely because, one of the organizing sisters Anne was leading our way.
We sat down on the bus physically exhausted. Remember the new boots? I wanted to chop my own feet off.
But we were internally energized.
Over the years, Anne became a mentor to me. My own mother had passed away in 1975. This woman was a wise sage who walked with me through my adventures of young motherhood, held my hand through my years as a single mom, and celebrated with me as I married again.
Her house was a must-stop for me and my kids on trick-or-treat nights. Halloween came before Election Day, which made for enlightening conversation and the chance for me to gather poll working materials.
But Anne was not one-dimensional. She was a fully engaged mother who made amazing homemade pierogis and, with her children, designed elaborately painted (not just dyed) eggs for Easter. She was a Registered Nurse.
And she was our community’s spokeswoman for life. Despite the plates she kept spinning at all times, she was humble.
When I would ask her: How do you do it all—eight kids, a husband, a house, a job, along with volunteer work? She would say, “Sometimes, not very well.”
For anyone who knew her, she led the way by example, sponsoring refugees from Vietnam and housing unmarried pregnant girls.
On January 22, 1980, I stayed home with a new baby. Iranian radicals had invaded the US embassy in Tehran capturing the diplomatic staff. Like today, inflation was high, in double-digits. That winter brought the Miracle on Ice—the 1980 Olympic hockey victories that garnered the gold medal for the US team. I adjusted to having three children, attended the March again in 1981 with my baby, missed 1982 caring for another new baby, attended in ’83, and carried my unborn son, my youngest, there in 1984.
Most of the following years, we attended, various children and I. One year when I had to work, Anne took my younger daughter with her.
When my kids went along, they knew the trip involved a long walk followed by hot chocolate in a legislator’s office. They learned about peaceful protest. They learned about life.
As my children grew up and got busy with school, jobs, and their own families, I began to take students to Washington for the March. In 2002, that meant a few phone calls from parents wanting reassurance of safety in the wake of 9/11 the previous September. The trip came off without incident.
I write as we plan another trip to DC, this year on January 21—the Friday closest to the anniversary—a change from the vision of Nellie Gray, the March’s founder who insisted the event be held on the 22nd every year. This alteration allows for an extended program, helps those who travel from afar (and many do), and more easily facilitates visiting legislators.
Except this year.
Because of COVID, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has forbidden Marchers from entering legislative offices. We are to be allowed inside public buildings only to use the restrooms.
So be it. We go anyway.
It’s been a few years since Anne has gone. Her years of activism were a flaming torch she has passed to those of us still able to make the trip. May we carry it well.
From our private school, we’re to be a small group, my husband and me, several students, a parent, and grandparent or so.
COVID and perhaps the aftermath of January 6 cancelled the March last year.
Pro-lifers head to DC this year with renewed hope, unprecedented hope of seeing Roe and Doe turned into their own grave. Anticipating this turn of events, 15 states are said to have “codified” Roe. Three have absolutely no restrictions “throughout pregnancy.” That means a woman could be in labor, change her mind, and have her baby killed before birth. Others allow abortion until viability, a slippery definition reliant on guesswork and subject to “exceptions” that allow the killing of the allegedly less than perfect.
Further, nineteen states allow “caregivers” to refuse treatment to newborn abortion survivors. Living, breathing little ones, left to die.
Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduIce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
Recently, the Food and Drug Administration cleared the way for abortion medications to be available via telemedicine.
The new rule is intended to allow girls and women to end a pregnancy of 56 or fewer days from the comfort and privacy of their own homes without having to see a doctor in person.
However, with this new rule, there is no way to ensure–as an in-person physical examination would–that the unborn child is younger than 57 days–or even that the pregnancy is not ectopic (that the child is not stuck in the fallopian tube rather than residing in the uterus–a condition that is potentially deadly for the mother).
Before last month, an estimated 40 percent of American abortions, according to the AP, occurred through the chemical method. Yet the requirement that patients seeking chemical abortions meet with a doctor before obtaining abortion medications ensured that deadly complications (like ectopic pregnancies) and attempts at dangerous, late-term abortions (after 56 days) would be minimized.
Now, they can be maximized.
The rule change will be a boon to the abortion industry in several ways. For every surgical abortion, someone has to remove the child, through suction or manual dismemberment, or stab the child’s heart with a sonogram-guided injection and induce labor so the mother can deliver her dead child.
After a dismemberment abortion, someone must reconstruct the child to ensure that the abortion was complete–that there will be no parts left behind to fuel infection.
Mail order abortion meds prevent trauma to a worker having to deal with the actual killing or disposal of the bodies of dead children. Mailing pills to faceless women is much less traumatic than piercing a heart or reconstructing human body parts. And the industry will need employees with much less training. How hard is it to mail pills? Not very.
Less complex. And less costly for those in the abortion business.
Now girls and women who are aborting at home will perceive that they can escape a problem–and no one else has to know. They’ll perceive this notion because the telemarketer/abortion advisor they spoke with via phone or internet told them so, that the process will be simple, “like a heavy period,” that it won’t be so bad.
One “pro-choice” woman says her experience was “unimaginable,” “indescribable,” “the worst pain I have ever felt. . . . With every cramp I felt my heart race and my blood pressure plummet.” . . . . [She was] “nauseated, dizzy and lightheaded.” She thought she was dying.
After reading these accounts and understanding that so many abortions happen this way now, we might conclude that these women’s experiences were outside the norm. Yet, the complication rate for chemical abortion is four times that of surgical abortion.
Four times.
And remember, the girl or woman at home will at some point expel a baby. She is likely to see that baby and understand what she perhaps did not fully grasp at the beginning of the process: a baby who was alive and growing within her is now dead.
“And I would just caution people … especially if the abortion lobby has their way and abortion pills are available through telemedicine, getting it through mail order, available in retail pharmacies, or even over the counter. That’s what some abortion advocates want, just abortion pills over the counter, no prescription required, no questions asked. Imagine what that would mean in the hands of an abusive partner, a coercive partner, a trafficker.”
Ms. Israel reports that 19 states prohibit telemedicine abortions. But that the restrictions can be “wiped out at any moment” by an edict from the current administration.
In the historic discussion leading to legal abortion in America from conception to birth–the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision–abortion advocates pleaded that abortion be safe, that desperate girls and women gain protection from the butchers of “back alleys.”
Now the back alley is the very homes of these desperate girls and women. The butcher comes as a specter in the form of pills invited in by their unwary victim.
This new rule provides nothing but benefits for the abortion industry. It shifts all of the burdens from the industry to its victims. The babies and the mothers bear all the trauma, all the risk, all the cost.
It’s a cost we will never be able to count. But the cost continues to mount.
With 40 percent of abortions happening chemically, 60 percent still happen surgically. Many of those are late-term abortions. And many late-term abortions involve children born alive. Organs from aborted children, living and dead provide the means for medical “research”.
With the Biden Administration removing limits on experimentation involving unborn children, taxpayers will now be paying for atrocities many of us would call unimaginable.
Those doing the research say it’s good.
They’ve usurped the place of God–deciding the functions and fates of people whose lives should be beyond their reach.
What’s happening today in America is reminiscent of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, the fictional account of a man who washes up on the shore of an island where a mad scientist is creating human/animal hybrids–creatures who are part-human, part-animal.
Wells illustrates how animalistic humans can be, how we can be as savage, perhaps more savage than the beasts of the forest.
In today’s reality, researchers are injecting monkey embryos with hESC (human embryonic stem cells) harvested from late-term unborn children, abortion victims. Fully developed, capable of feeling pain. The goal is to produce human organs within the monkeys for transplant.
Such evil, albeit with good intentions, goes deeper than we realize. Petra Wallenmeyer provides some insight:
“People on one side of this issue [favoring such research] argue this practice is necessary for scientific advancement, will benefit vast numbers of people by developing treatments for various diseases, and is ethical because no valuable human is being harmed in this research (emphasis mine). Therefore, federal and/or state funds should be allocated for such research (i.e., through grants or awards).”
Because of the rules change, funds are now available.
But notice the ethical gymnastics involved in justifying this practice. The end result may (or may not) be something good–“a scientific advancement”–to “benefit vast numbers of people.” This assessment dictates that some humans are deserving of beneficial treatment, i.e. the receipt of transplantable organs to be gathered from animal hosts. But for that to happen, others must be deemed not valuable, therefore deserving of dissection and distribution into vials so animal hosts can produce organs for transplant.
While it goes on around us, few are discussing the ramifications of such “work”.
One of the few, Kristen Matthews of Rice University, explains the ethical questions that may arise from this research.
“Should it (the resulting human/animal living being) be regulated as human because it has a significant proportion of human cells in it? Or should it be regulated just as an animal? Or something else?” Matthews said. “At what point are you taking something and using it for organs when it actually is starting to think and have logic?”
Or at what point will it matter if science deems “it” to be a life void of value–whether human or otherwise? And the questions press us to further ask whether any creature labeled an animal might be entitled to greater protection than one labeled human–but considered to be of no “value”.
Science has derailed when some humans are valuable to save and others are only good for spare parts.
In such a world, every person potentially can become someone not of value, available to be sacrificed for the sake of another, more highly esteemed person.
Yet there remain many who will tell us it is all good.
Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil;
Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness;
Who substitutes bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!
Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
Just last week, the Food and Drug Administration cleared the way for abortion medications to be available via telemedicine.
The new rule is intended to allow girls and women to end a pregnancy up to the 56th day from the comfort and privacy of their own homes without having to see a doctor in person.
However, with this new rule, there is no way to ensure–as an in-person physical examination would–that the unborn child is younger than 57 days–or even that the pregnancy is not ectopic (that the child is not stuck in the fallopian tube rather than residing in the uterus–a condition that is potentially deadly for the mother).
Before last week, an estimated 40 percent of American abortions, according to the AP, occurred through the chemical method. Yet the requirement that patients seeking drug-induced abortions meet with a doctor before obtaining such medications ensured that deadly complications (like ectopic pregnancies) and attempts at dangerous abortions later in pregnancy (after 56 days) would be minimized.
Now, they can be maximized.
The rule change will be a boon to the abortion industry in several ways. For every surgical abortion, someone has to remove the child, through suction or manual dismemberment, or stab the child’s heart with a sonogram-guided injection and induce labor so the mother can deliver her dead child.
After a dismemberment abortion, someone must reconstruct the child to ensure that the abortion was complete–that there will be no parts left behind to fuel infection.
Mail order abortion meds prevent trauma to a worker having to deal with the actual killing or disposal of the bodies of dead children. Mailing pills to faceless women is much less traumatic than piercing a heart or reconstructing body parts. And the industry will need employees with much less training. How hard is it to mail pills? Not very.
Less complex. And less costly for those in the abortion business.
Now girls and women who are aborting at home will perceive that they can escape a problem–and no one else has to know. They’ll perceive this notion because the telemarketer/abortion advisor they spoke with via phone or internet told them so, that the process will be simple, “like a heavy period,” that it won’t be so bad.
One “pro-choice” woman says her experience was “unimaginable,” “indescribable,” “the worst pain I have ever felt. . . . With every cramp I felt my heart race and my blood pressure plummet.” . . . . She was “nauseated, dizzy and lightheaded.” She thought she was dying.
After reading these accounts and understanding that so many abortions happen this way now, we might conclude that these women’s experiences were outside the norm. Yet, the complication rate for chemical abortion is four times that of surgical abortion.
Four times.
And remember, the girl or woman at home will at some point expel a baby. She is likely to see that baby and understand what she perhaps did not fully grasp at the beginning of the process: a baby who was alive and growing within her is now dead.
“And I would just caution people … especially if the abortion lobby has their way and abortion pills are available through telemedicine, getting it through mail order, available in retail pharmacies, or even over the counter. That’s what some abortion advocates want, just abortion pills over the counter, no prescription required, no questions asked. Imagine what that would mean in the hands of an abusive partner, a coercive partner, a trafficker.”
Ms. Israel reports that 19 states prohibit telemedicine abortions. But that the restrictions can be “wiped out at any moment” by an edict from the current administration.
In the historic discussion leading to legal abortion in America from conception to birth–the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision–abortion advocates pleaded that abortion be safe, that desperate girls and women gain protection from the butchers of “back alleys.”
Now the back alley is the very homes of these desperate girls and women. The butcher comes as a specter in the form of pills invited in by their unwary victim.
This new rule provides nothing but benefits for the abortion industry. It shifts all of the burdens from the industry to its victims. The babies and the mothers bear all the trauma, all the risk, all the cost.
Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!
Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
I was a high school junior in 1972 when she sat on the stage of our local high school. She wasn’t the speaker for the assembly that day. But she had arranged for the speaker to come.
The speaker was a woman who’d survived the Holocaust. She spoke about how it all began with abortion. It was abortion that devalued human life enough that other ways of killing the perceived-to-be-less-than-us became thinkable, then doable.
Remember, that was 1972. That was before Roe v. Wade (and Doe v. Bolton) legalized abortion in the US until birth.
I don’t remember the name of the speaker on stage. But several years later I would meet the woman who’d recruited the speaker and arranged for the assembly.
And she would become a lifelong friend and mentor.
In 1979, as the mother of two toddlers, I decided to go to the March for Life. I called a phone number within an announcement scrolling across my television screen about buses for the event.
It was the woman who’d sat on that stage when I was a schoolgirl who answered the phone.
She was the mother of eight–the oldest were teens. Her youngest a bit older than my firstborn. She became a kindly sort of aunt to my children.
I still quote her to people. As I was having a minorly uncomfortable medical test recently, I told the technician something my friend first said to me decades ago: “If you eat a frog for breakfast, nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”
Yes, it’s a silly saying. But silly sayings are sometimes a good way to put discomforts and inconveniences into perspective. The best way to discern the inconveniences from actual life problems. The best way to discipline yourself to put the unpleasant task first.
And in such ways, friends give their wisdom to us for us to pass on to others. I’ve repeated the saying to students many times.
When I struggled with my growing family, she encouraged me with her humility. I asked her once how she managed her family, her job as a nurse, and her ministry for life.
She replied, “Well, sometimes not very well.”
As I write, I’ve just come home from a fundraising dinner for our local crisis pregnancy center. My friend was always among the last to leave this yearly event. She was the first to receive an award from the organization for being a champion for life. But I like to think of her as a pioneer. For few trumpeted warnings about what would follow 1972. She was one of the few.
She can no longer attend such gatherings. She’s now widowed and in a home. Because of COVID, I am unable to visit her.
She didn’t live a perfect life. None of us ever does. But I remember the kind spirit, the love, the devotion to truth and right.
Pioneers blaze the trail for those who follow after them. It’s up to us who follow to carry on.
Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!
Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
“Worthy are You, O Lord; worthy are You, O God, to receive glory and honor and power. You alone created all things, and through Your will and by Your design, they exist and were created,”Revelation 4:11, The Voice.
Through God’s will and by His design, we exist. All of us. In all conditions. With seemingly much to offer. And with seemingly nothing.
God wills. He designs. He creates. And He loves what He creates–especially the ones He made in His own image–human beings.
“Then God surveyed everything He had made, savoring its beauty and appreciating its goodness,” Genesis 1:31, IBID.
Justin Hawkins retells the story of a mother who denied her child a safe, uncomplicated surgery that would save his life.
She could not see the beauty within nor savor the goodness of a child she considered imperfect. One with an extra chromosome. One with Down syndrome.
It took eleven days for the child to die. He starved to death for lack of a procedure any “normal” child would have received without question.
You might be surprised to learn that the account Hawkins gives is from 1963–ten years before Roe v. Wade legalized the killing of such children in the womb.
This child’s killing wasn’t in the womb. His death happened in a small room in a sanitized hospital. In America.
Legal justice came to no one for the crime. No justice on this side of eternity.
The 1973 accounting that Hawkins quotes, written by James Gustafson, quotes a doctor who explains that, even in 1963, “a different standard” applied to the disabled.
“That is, there is a different standard. . . . There is this tendency to value life on the basis of intelligence. . . . [It’s] a part of the American ethic.”
A great irony is that many medical personnel, who excel through their intelligence, seem unable to empathize with those who will lack academic abilities in life.
On the other hand, as Hawkins explains, “researchers found that when placed into an experiment in which a researcher feigned pain to study the responses of children, children with Down Syndrome were more likely than other children to attend and attempt to comfort the researcher than did typically-developing children.”
It seems these children have something to offer after all. Kindness and compassion, so often missing today. In rejecting them, we have missed what they can show us and give us.
But Hawkins has seen what so many of us haven’t. He peppers his article with anecdotes from the life of his sister Jenna who has Down syndrome. Jenna came to be after the capability to diagnose disorders such as hers before birth.
He notes, ” [I]t would likely come as little surprise to any family that has decided to carry a child with Down Syndrome to term that the BBC reported in October 2020 that women were offered abortions up to fifteen times over the course of their pregnancies, even after repeatedly signaling that they did not want the procedure (my own mother [Hawkins and Jenna’s mother] recalls being asked five times over the course of fifteen minutes).”
Entrenched in the minds of medical overseers is the conviction that the death of the imperfect is necessary for the lives of the rest of us to contain beauty and goodness.
Through that way of thinking, we have lost so much goodness and beauty.
America is now 48 years since Roe and Doe, the SCOTUS decisions that decreed such deaths legal.
If we gave a moment of silence to every child (62.5 million) who has died in the womb since those decisions, we would stand silent for nearly twelve years.
How much longer would we have to stand for the many innocents who have died outside the womb for the crime of imperfection?
God wills. He designs. He creates children. All of us imperfect in some way.
Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!
Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
“We fed the public a line of deceit, dishonesty, a fabrication of statistics and figures. We succeeded because the time was right and the news media cooperated. We sensationalized the effects of illegal abortions, and fabricated polls which indicated that 85 percent of the public favored unrestricted abortion, when we knew it was only five percent. We unashamedly lied, and yet our statements were quoted [by the media] as though they had been written in law.” ~ Bernard Nathanson
Dr. Bernard Nathanson had been a leader in the movement to liberalize America’s abortion laws. After he became, first, pro-life, and later, a Christian, he admitted that the pro-abortion side had lied. He and his colleagues had claimed, “that the number of illegal abortions was more than ten times higher than it actually was.”
After Nathanson’s transition to a pro-life perspective, Robert P. George had the opportunity to hear the former abortion doctor (Nathanson’s term) speak.
George asked Nathanson a pertinent question: since he had been willing to lie in order to produce what he had thought was a good thing–legal abortion–would he now be willing to lie “to save babies”?
The question stunned Nathanson–but he answered no. When the two met privately later, Nathanson expanded upon his answer.
“You [George] said that I was converted to the cause of life; and that’s true. But you must remember that I was converted to the cause of life only because I was converted to the cause of truth. That’s why I wouldn’t lie, even in a good cause.”
When he was a champion for legal abortion, he used any means at his disposal to achieve his end. As a champion for the cause of Christ and, therefore, the cause of life, his list of potential strategies came down to one: the truth.
Five years into the aftermath of Roe v. Wade, the Chicago Sun-Times did an expose on abortion facilities in the Windy City. Reporters Pamela Zeckman and Pamela Warrick titled their work “The Abortion Profiteers.”
At several facilities, they found an assembly line process that harkened to the back-alley butchery a newly pro-life Nathanson warned us about.
One of the women took a urine sample from one of her male co-workers into the clinic. Clinic personnel told her she was pregnant. When would she like to schedule her abortion?
Doctors held competitions with each other to see who could do more abortions in a day.
But after all these years, the truth about abortion can be hard to find. Much of the media has since decided they are no longer in the truth business.
We only hear the stories of horrific abuse when they go beyond the pale.
Stories about the likes of Nareshkumar Patel tend to remain localized. It didn’t hit the national news that he, a licensed physician, had prescribed abortion drugs for women who were not pregnant. His fee? $250 for a few pills.
What would happen to the abortion “industry” if we knew how it really worked? If reporters like those at the Sun-Times still objectively conducted investigations?
We would know the truth. And the truth could set a multitude of mothers, fathers, and children free. It could also free those stuck in the abortion lie industry.
Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!
Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
Earlier this week, Anne Susan DiPrizio was arrested in the Alabama House of Representatives for spraying the glass separating visitors from legislators with green paint and repeatedly yelling, “Dumb, dumb, dumb.” She “swung and threw paint on” security guards as they were arresting her.
DiPrizio was protesting the Alabama House’s passage of a bill that would ban almost all abortions in the state.
New York and other states are passing laws expanding abortion and refusing to protect children who survive abortion and are born alive.
Some states are going out of their way to make sure that the smallest abortion victims do not live to speak up later on. Others, like Alabama, are doing everything possible to protect the unborn.
America is gearing up for a showdown on Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton the 1973 Supreme Court decisions that eradicated every abortion law in all 50 states.
Forty-six years later, it’s an issue that just won’t go away.
Every year since 1974, the March for Life has brought hundreds of thousands of protesters to Washington, DC, to mark the anniversary of Roe and Doe.
America has seen attacks on abortion facilities. “Fanatics resort to violence on both extremes of the pro-choice/pro-life spectrum,” writes Feminist for Life Serrin M. Foster (emphasis Foster’s).
More recently, it was in San Francisco during the 40 Days for Life–before Easter this year–when a young attacker assaulted an 85-year-old pro-life man praying outside a Planned Parenthood clinic.
The attacker knocked “Ron” down and said, “Stay down, old man–Stay on the ground–unless you want to get hurt.”
While on the ground, Ron wouldn’t let go of the pro-life banner the attacker was trying to steal. So the attacker kicked him several times. But Ron came back the next day. He had committed to a certain number of hours–and he came back to fulfill that commitment.
In response to the attack, he said, “No, I won’t stay down.”
So Ron returned to his post where he stood and prayed quietly. The 40 Days for Life philosophy asks participants to always respond “with love and charity”–no matter what they see, hear, or experience.
Forty Days for Life credits Ron’s efforts with saving the lives of three babies.
Many Americans don’t realize that laws like New York’s–laws legalizing abortion until birth–simply restore Roe and Doe in their original form. Abortion for any reason at any time in pregnancy.
But today when legislatures pass laws allowing abortion until birth and allowing the neglect until death of children who manage to live through the abortion process, Americans see that as extreme.
Most of America–even those who call themselves pro-choice–do not support abortion until birth. In fact, only 13 percent do.
Perhaps America has turned the tide on Roe and Doe. Perhaps the strategies of 40 Days and Ron can win the day.
If the side of life is the side of reason–and the side against life is a violent man kicking a peaceful elder and a screaming woman splattering paint on security guards, we will win.
But we must be like Ron to win. We must peacefully pray and stay at our posts–even if we are bruised.
Peace and prayer will win this, the battle of our lifetime. They are the greatest tools. If we use them and them alone.
Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!
Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
“Eleven jack-booted thugs” raided his house to retrieve the evidence. They thought he was a criminal. But the evidence implicated someone else.
Many someone else’s, actually. They are the someones at Planned Parenthood whom he caught negotiating the sale of the body parts of unborn children.
He calls himself a citizen-journalist. He is David Daleiden, and he spoke at the 2019 March for Life Conference in Washington, DC, last week.
“The body parts [of unborn children], he says are valuable to sell because they are just like ours,” he says, proving the humanity of the unborn because they are just like us.
The videos reveal that Planned Parenthood has violated the law by selling the body parts, performing partial-birth abortions in order to obtain them, and ignoring the Born Alive Act requiring that viable unborn children born alive as a result of abortion receive immediate medical attention.
(Reader discretion advised as you proceed.)
Planned Parenthood claims that they only receive reimbursement for processing, and shipping and handling costs. But Daleiden has recovered a copy of an invoice showing a double charge–per body part–for two fetal eyeballs shipped in the same package.
Daleiden refers to Planned Parenthood’s abortion business as “state-funded, industrial scale abortion.”
The word industrial implies a for-profit venture on a mass scale. Medicine (like education and law) was once a profession–an art practiced with the idea that the main advantage would come to the recipient of a service–not to the practitioner. The patient was someone to assist back to better health–not someone to exploit for profit.
Criminal charges against Daleiden have been dropped, but Planned Parenthood’s civil suit against him remains. He would appreciate your prayers.
There is a wonderful irony in the story of David Daleiden. He describes himself as “the product of a crisis pregnancy situation.” He grew up with the idea that sometimes children are conceived in less than ideal circumstances, but that “now is always a good time to welcome a new little person into the world.”
Now is a wonderful time to welcome the new little people that Planned Parenthood is horrifically exploiting for profit.
David Daleiden could have been among them. He is one Planned Parenthood missed.
And our world is better because of that.
—————————————–
Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered comes out in paperback on January 22, 2019! Get your copy here!
Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
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