Eduardo Verastegui still saving lives

I still haven't seen Bella, or any other movie with Latin American superstar Eduardo Verastegui in it, but I'm applauding him because of this. How nice to have an actor you can look up to in real life as well as on the screen. (I know there are more of them out there, but face it, they're a bit thin on the ground these days.)

Update: Here's a video of him making his case. The video is in Spanish, with English subtitles. (hat tip: CNA)

Book note: Render unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life, by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

Uncommon Knowledge on National Review Online has a five segment video interview with Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of the Roman Catholic diocese of Denver, discussing "Politics & Catholics," and also his latest book, Render unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life. The segments were published September 22 through 26, 2008.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

Short listing

Let us say, for the sake of illustration, that you visited a foreign country, and while you were there you saw a man drive his car into a park and start mowing down children. Let us say, for the sake of illustration, that the people around you told you that there was no reason to get upset about it, as long as he only mowed down people beneath a certain height. Let us say that when the cops and ambulances show up you are relieved, until you see the cops and ambulance drivers pull out tape measures, with which they measure all the people who are down. People beneath a certain height they then had thrown into dump trucks to be hauled away, whether they were dead yet or not.

Would you find this acceptable? Would it make you feel better, or worse, that the law was on the side of the driver?

Some people say that this has been the longest presidential campaign in American history. For me, it has been one of the shortest, because the Democrats these days are, officially, on the side of the driver. And I can't vote for anyone who says that individuals can be thrown away simply because they aren't deemed big enough yet.

Catholic teachings on abortion

Via the Alliance Alert:

Cardinal Egan of New York issued the following statement in response to Pelosi:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 26, 2008

STATEMENT OF HIS EMINENCE, EDWARD CARDINAL EGAN CONCERNING REMARKS MADE BY THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Like many other citizens of this nation, I was shocked to learn that the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States of America would make the kind of statements that were made to Mr. Tom Brokaw of NBC-TV on Sunday, August 24, 2008. What the Speaker had to say about theologians and their positions regarding abortion was not only misinformed; it was also, and especially, utterly incredible in this day and age.

We are blessed in the 21st century with crystal-clear photographs and action films of the living realities within their pregnant mothers. No one with the slightest measure of integrity or honor could fail to know what these marvelous beings manifestly, clearly, and obviously are, as they smile and wave into the world outside the womb. In simplest terms, they are human beings with an inalienable right to live, a right that the Speaker of the House of Representatives is bound to defend at all costs for the most basic of ethical reasons. They are not parts of their mothers, and what they are depends not at all upon the opinions of theologians of any faith. Anyone who dares to defend that they may be legitimately killed because another human being “chooses” to do so or for any other equally ridiculous reason should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of the name.

Edward Cardinal Egan

Archbishop of New York

August 26, 2008
_____________

From the Diocese of Pittsburgh:

Statement by Bishop David A. Zubik on“Meet the Press” comments by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

On Sunday, August 24, on “Meet the Press,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stepped out of her political role and completely misrepresented the teaching of the Catholic Church in regard to abortion. She said that Church teaching condemning procured abortion is somehow new and therefore unsettled. She could not have been more wrong.

Jesus proclaimed the sacredness of human life throughout his teaching and ministry. In a Roman world where abortion was commonplace, the Church proclaimed its intrinsic moral evil. The Didache, perhaps the earliest known Christian manual of moral teaching dating from the first century, rejected abortion. Early Church councils considered it one of the most serious crimes.

That teaching has remained constant and unaltered for two millennia.

As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith re-stated in 1974, “The first right of the human person is his life. … It does not belong to society, nor does it belong to public authority in any form to recognize this right for some and not others. … From the time the ovum is fertilized, a life is begun which is neither that of the father nor of the mother; it is rather the life of a new human being.”

The teaching of the Church on abortion is settled. And as old as the Gospels.

Sometimes it all works out

Remember four years ago, when track star Tasha Danvers of Great Britain withdrew from Olympic contention because she was pregnant and refused to get an abortion? She's won a bronze in this year's games.

From Olympian shunned abortion; now has son & bronze medal (Baptist Press, August 22, 2008.):

Danvers reportedly was pressured by some in the track and field world to have an abortion. She admitted later that she and her American husband-coach Darrell Smith briefly considered that choice.

"[T]he thought did cross our minds as an option," Danvers told the Telegraph, a London newspaper, in May 2004 before citing Mark 8:36. "But this line from the Scriptures kept coming into my head: 'For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?'

"For me, the whole world was the Olympics. At the same time, I felt I would be losing my soul."

She gave birth to a son, Jaden, in December 2004 and started on the road back to the Olympics. Her surprising bronze medal in Beijing came after a series of health setbacks, including an injured Achilles tendon and torn hamstring muscle, had produced a disappointing pre-Olympics season.

"Don't ever give up," Danvers said after winning the bronze medal, according to The Times of London. "That's what I want the next generation to understand. Everything doesn't come up all roses all the time. That is the nature of this athletics game."

Not to mention the nature of life in general, I might add...

Full Baptist Press story

Link likes: On the Square, at First Things

The bloggers over at the On The Square blog are turning out some thoughtful and thought-provoking posts, on the whole. (They usually do, in my experience.)

For instance: The Red Planet, by Joseph Bottom, which manages to combine discussions of science fiction and biotechnology, but not in a way you'd probably assume. It comes with a good dash of philosophy, too, and some history. For those of you in the pro-life movement who are concerned about the human rights abuses of some branches of biotech, you might want to consider his statement: "We make a mistake, I think, when we call the worst claims of modern biotechnology a revivified form of the old eugenics." Follow the link if you want to know why he says that, and what he thinks we should call it instead.

For instance: Stork Economics, by James Kerian, in which zero-sum economics is likened to the idea many children have that storks bring babies. It's a cute way of taking on the idea that wealth isn't created, but can only be transferred. It has some practical applications, too, I think.

For instance: The Giving Society, by Michael Novak, in which it is argued that many of the obvious differences between the United States and Europe aren't due to Americans being "Individualists" quite as much as to the fact that Americans are far more prone to give of their time and their money to personally help others.

For instance: The Human Experience, by Amanda Shaw, which tells of a soon-to-released documentary which focuses on the strength of spirit of physically, mentally, and spiritually battered individuals. It's a heart-rending read, but inspiring, too.

For instance: Understanding the Third Reich and Other Great Evils, by Richard John Neuhaus, which happens to be the post I was going back to reread when I got sidetracked by the others linked above... He uses some books on the Holocaust as a jumping off place, and has some interesting observations. Jumping in midstream, and leaving off before the end, there's this:

During the Third Reich, ordinary Germans “had many more things on their minds.” That’s a chilling phrase. We might easily say, and many do all too easily say, that during the era of slavery or during current horrors such as the genocide in Sudan or the daily killing of thousands of unborn children in the abortuaries around the country, most ordinary Americans “had many more things on their minds.” That’s a moralistic cheap shot. The truth is that we all have many more things on our minds, and necessarily so. Such as families, jobs, dealing with sickness, and warding off despair. Not to mention, for many, the distinctly unnecessary hours every day spent surfing and chatting on the blogosphere.

The Third Reich is rightly viewed as an icon of evil. This does not mean, as Ian Kershaw reminds us, that the ordinary Germans of the time are the icon of moral indifference or complicity in great evil. Then it was the Jews, the Slavs, and the gypsies. At other times, it is another class of human beings. Given the requisite mix of circumstances, which is not beyond imagination, it is an idle conceit to think that ordinary Americans would behave more nobly than did the Germans of Hitler’s day. Among any people of any time, moral courage is the exception and not the rule. There are heroes and heroines who contend against the great evils of their time, but even they must be selective. You may be devoting your life to helping the people of Sudan, but what are you doing to help prisoners of conscience in China, or to stop international sex trafficking, or to feed the hungry of Zimbabwe, or to relieve the loneliness of old people in the nursing home within an easy drive from your home? The list goes on and on.

'Happy Birthday' from a sorry father

I was over on the Death Roe site, and they had a link: "Click here to see what songs should be on every Death Roe Survivor's play list." So I clicked. And found that my computer didn't want to play them (a technical problem, my end). So I went to YouTube, and found one I wanted to check out: Happy Birthday, by Flipsyde. I'm not generally a fan of hip-hop (and this song's not exactly a ringing endorsement for chastity or the sanctity of marriage) but... Wow. Powerful stuff. Good stuff. My thanks to the artists who put it together.

From the Death Roe site:

This video debuted in April 2006 in the US after the song Happy Birthday made waves overseas hitting the charts at #4 in Germany, #3 in Sweden and was in the top 15 in Austria and Switzerland. In addition, Happy Birthday, was in the Top 10 downloads on ITUNES in Germany, Sweden & Denmark. Piper, the lead singer of Flipsyde wrote and sings this song to the baby he helped abort as a young man. Filled with introspection that only one who has truly realized the ramifications of the decision to abort, Happy Birthday should serve as a warning to young men and women seeking abortion as an answer. The reality of fatherhood lost is felt, as you hear Piper wonder out loud what his baby would look like, act like, and if the child could forgive him for what he has done.

The 20 weeks campaign

In the UK:

On 6 May Nadine Dorries MP launched the official parliamentary campaign to reduce the upper limit for abortion from 24 weeks to 20 weeks. The matter will come to the vote when the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is debated in the Commons later this month...

Visit the 20 weeks campaign website for more information. For those of you in the UK, there's a petition to sign, if you'd like.

hat tip: Anglican Mainstream

Another way of looking at it

Mother: I'd like to sink my offspring's boat before he can get any wind in his sails, but I need help.

Abortionist: You've come to the right place. Torpedoing becalmed small craft in naturally safe harbors is what we do.

William T. Sali on "Life"

I was following links around (you know how that goes), and wound up on the website for Congressman Bill Sali of Idaho. On the issues page, I clicked on "Life" and found this statement, which I thought was a good one:

President Ronald Reagan said, “Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.”

Each of us is here today because our mothers chose to let us live. They might not have expected or even wanted us at first, but they protected us when we were most vulnerable. Yet today, like every other day, nearly 3,000 mothers are making the decision to end the lives of the small children they carry.

We each have a responsibility to come next to these women and help them protect their children. We must be there for our sisters, our daughters, and our friends—to remind them that they are bearing a beautiful little human and that crushing that little life will not give them the independence they want. If we can’t protect our most innocent and helpless citizens, how can we pretend to provide justice and protection for anyone else?

I am committed, as your Congressman, to give a voice to those most vulnerable in our society, the unborn infant.

My thanks to Representative Sali.

Because I haven't done it in a while, and because Mr. Sali was talking about the responsibility to come next to women being pushed toward having an abortion, may I point out the links in my sidebar for Feminists for Life and Silent No More? As they note at both sites: Women deserve better than abortion. (Not just women deserve better than abortion, of course, but since the pro-abortion people generally claim they're doing it for women, I think it's fair to emphasize that a goodly number of women think the 'pro-choice' movement does us more harm than good.)

You don't have to be 'the father'...

... to be a good dad. Hats off to "Bob," and other men like him.

Book note: No Country For Old Men, by Cormac McCarty

From A Worldview Clash in View -- A Gift from Literature at AlbertMohler.com:

The clash between fundamental worldviews is often difficult to capture, but sometimes literature does what a news report cannot. Consider this passage from Cormac McCarty's novel, No Country for Old Men. In this passage, one of the main characters reflects on this clash:

Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talking about the right wing this and the right wing that.

I aint even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin something bad about em, but of course that's a high compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on.

Finally told me, said: I don't like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I don't think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I don't have much doubt but what she'll be able to have an abortion. I'm goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.

That exchange also pretty much sums up the clash of worldviews. Sometimes literature captures a universe of meaning in a minimum of words.

Full post here.

March for Life 2008 slide show

Barbara Curtis has a dynamite slide show of this year's March for Life in Washington, D.C.

Just look at all those wonderful teens and twenty-somethings! Does the pro-life movement draw the cream of the crop, or what? Look at their faces. Do these kids have their act together or what?

Why good people do evil things (like kill babies)

As some of you know, I used to be pro-choice, but now am pro-life. The blogger "Et tu?" also used to be pro-choice, and is now pro-life. Don't miss her post on what made her change her mind, and how hard it was to make the changeover. She brings some good insight to the discussion, I think. (And also some history.)

Changing attitudes about abortion

In Have your views on abortion changed? (Mommy Life, January 21, 2008), Barbara Curtis writes:

As someone who was in on the early days of abortion - and had one myself - I can say that never in our wildest dreams did we think that abortion would become a form of birth control ending up in 1.5 million deaths per year and wiping out 1/4 of the next generation. Why aren't feminists worried about the message that sends about women and children - that our lives and decisions are worth so little?

[...snip...]

What I'd really like to take to the Blogs 4 Life conference is a message of reality and hope. How are blogs affecting the way readers perceive abortion and other life-related issues? How has the Internet/how have blogs changed the way you think about abortion?

I'm asking because some of my readers have shared that they have been led by stuff they've read here to question their preconceived notions about abortion. Many were unaware of the number of babies aborted. Some had never considered the psychological implications for a generation growing up knowing that their parents had the power of life and death over them. Many are awakening to the fact that the Boomer Generation in its selfishness has created a huge societal problem as it grows to demand longer and better living - with Social Security benefits paid for by a population base shrunken - not by pestilence, famine or flood, but by their own hands.

Read the rest

Canada's cheap lives

January 28 marks the 20th anniversary of R. vs. Morgentaler, which struck down abortion laws in Canada. This week, National Post writers will be looking at the legacy of the ruling. In the first installment, The Day Humanity Became Cheap, "David Frum argues that the decision served to cheapen the value of human life."

hat tip: The Black Kettle

Men acknowleging their lost children

More and more men are calling themselves "post-abortive men," according to "We Had Abortions . . . . I've Had Abortions" -- A New Voice in the Abortion Debate at AlbertMohler.com.

Mohler's post has links to and excerpts from a January 7, 2008, article in The Los Angeles Times by Stephanie Simon, which ran under the title "Changing Abortion's Pronoun." (registration required).

Do you know Roe?

Here's a quiz on Roe v. Wade.

The sponsors are trying to gauge what the public thinks (or assumes) Roe v. Wade said and did, versus what the law does say and has done. So pop on over and take a few minutes. Results will be announced in eight days.

How did I do? I, ahem, needed the refresher course... Let's leave it at that, shall we? (One nice thing about this quiz is that after you finish, it gives you a chart showing not only what you got right and what you got wrong, but giving the correct answers. Run your mouse over the box to bring up whatever you want to read in more detail.)

January 22, 2008 marks the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

Refusing to fill a prescription (for death)

So, a couple Sundays back I was listening to a preacher talk about when his wife was carrying their first child. The doctor said she was likely to have a miscarriage, and if she didn't miscarry, the baby was going to be born blind, and so, he said, she should get an abortion. The preacher said he told his wife to tell her doctor to stick it in his ear. She must have done something of the sort, because she went on to give birth to a baby who has now grown into a lovely young lady of 18. The girl, by the way, wasn't born with any health problems, much less the blindness that was predicted.

Of course, if she had been born blind they would have loved her anyway. (BTW: Parents who don't run from their disabled children do tend to find them a blessing. Read this account of a young woman with Down Syndrome for yet another example of that. As her mother notes in the article, Hope taught her to slow down and smell the roses - not a bad thing, that. In the full disclosure department, I've met Hope and I like her.)

At any rate, I've been thinking. For one thing, I'm wondering if there's a person left in America who doesn't know someone who is alive today only because someone stood up to a doctor who prescribed giving up? Honestly? (Wouldn't it be better if we could trust doctors to admit when matters have gone past where they feel they can do anything useful, instead of making the mighty - not to mention arrogant - leap to declaring who should be allowed to live?)

For another thing, wouldn't it be better if more people learned to tell death-dealing doctors when and where to get off? Perhaps it's wild fantasy on my part, but I can't help wishing that more women, when advised to go get an abortion, would reply something along the lines of "You patronizing beast. Stop treating me like a child. I may not know exactly how to work my way out of this mess yet, but I refuse to be treated like an incompetent, cowardly, disloyal ninny, and beyond that, nobody treats my baby like garbage." Of course no one talks like that, but you get the idea.

Something similar goes for those of us who love anyone with disabilities. When my somewhat-crippled husband was critically ill a couple of years ago, I'm afraid I got a bit of experience with a couple of doctors who thought he ought to be reminded that assisted suicide is legal in Oregon. This was not a good move on their part. (My husband is doing fine these days, by the way, unless you count that he's down again with the flu or something like it. Ugh. We're having a month to forget, in the common winter ailment department.)

For the record, most of the people who were consulted during my husband's near-death experience were solidly on our side, and fought like crazy to save his life. Thank goodness. But the ones who weren't sure his life was worth living provided an extra layer of nightmares to the ordeal. To be fair, no one pushed the point after bringing it up, but then again, we didn't give them an inch.

Sigh. Do you remember the days when it was greedy heirs who had to get past a doctor to hasten Grandpa's demise, and not loving relatives who had to work around a doctor to save someone's life?

Should we have to put up with this?

Another Bella fan

Add Rebecca Hagelin to the growing list of people who recommend seeing the movie Bella. (But, she says, it's not for little ones.)