On this day after Martin Luther King Day, pro-lifers speculate on whether Reverend King was pro-life or not. The Martin Luther King quote below is worthy of contemplation:
“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
Think about the quote in the context of human abortion and paraphrase:
‘I cannot be what I ought to be if I abort you.”
Planned Parenthood embraces King as a supporter of abortion rights. Two years ago, they tweeted:
“We honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life & legacy as the fight for racial justice, economic equity, & reproductive freedom are undeniably intertwined. This fight is one we cannot do alone, & we are proud to stand w/ our partners who are on the frontlines of this fight.”
Alveda King lashes back
Reverend King’s niece, Alveda King, lashed back, characterizing the Tweet as “inhuman” and “inhumane:”
“To dishonor a prophet by raising a political banner which supports killing innocent babies on MLK’s birthday is so inhuman. To dishonor a prophet by raising a political banner on his birthday is so inhumane.”
Reverend King observed:
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
That’s why Pulse Life Advocates makes another pilgrimage to the March for LIFE in Washington DC tomorrow. We are part of a movement that demands freedom for the oppressed in the womb who have no voice. Planned Parenthood and their Big Abortion cronies and politicians will not voluntarily give back the freedom they have usurped from the vulnerable.
Pulse will pray for the vulnerable at the March for Life this Friday
Pulse Life Advocates will pray at the footsteps of the Supreme Court this Friday with Martin Luther King’s words in mind. ‘Each abortion affects us all indirectly.’ Reverend King may not have explicitly stated a pro-life position, but he came close with his observation on how African-Americans will ultimately lose their demands for freedom:
“The Negro cannot win if he is willing to sacrifice the futures of his children for immediate personal comfort and safety. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
That sounds pretty pro-life, don’t you think?
Two men of God quoted St. Thomas Aquinas as a guide to making moral decisions. Reverend Martin Luther King, whose legacy we honor today, wrote from a Birmingham jail the following in 1963:
A Baptist quotes St. Thomas Aquinas
“One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”
Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”
A Jesuit quotes St. Thomas Aquinas
In contrast, Fr. Pat Conroy, a Jesuit priest and former chaplain for the U.S. House of Representatives, quotes St. Thomas Aquinas to rationalize an unjust law:
“How do we, within our constitutional system, how do we get to our Catholic value in this case, [when women have] the right to choose. By the way, I want to know the American who thinks the government should take away their choice in any area of their life — any area of their life. It’s an American value that each one of us can choose where our life is going. That happens to be a Catholic value, too. That we should all use our gifts and our talents and our intelligence as best we can to make the best choices we have the freedom to make.
Sometimes we don’t have the freedom to make really important choices because of fear, because of oppression, because of poverty, because of all kinds of things. Choice is a highly American value and it’s a church value. [Twelfth-century Italian priest and Catholic philosophical giant] Thomas Aquinas says if your conscience says to do something the church says is a sin, you are bound to follow your conscience. That’s Thomas Aquinas!
A good Catholic in our system could be saying: Given women in our system have this constitutional right, our task as fellow Christians, or as Catholics, is to make it possible for her to optimize her ability to make the choice.”
These are profoundly different takes on Aquinas’ teachings.
Clarification and corrections
John Huynh, Director of the Catechetical Institute for the Catholic Diocese of Des Moines (and a member of Pulse Life Advocate’s board), weighed in with some clarifications and corrections directed at Fr. Conroy’s interpretation of Aquinas:
John Huynh, Director of the Catechetical Institute for the Catholic Diocese of Des Moines
“Aquinas sees the goal of government legitimate only if it works to promote the common good in accordance with natural, divine, and eternal law.
We make many good laws that constrict people’s freedom to protect them and the common good. For instance, seat belt laws take away one’s choice to whether or not to put on a seatbelt when one drives.
Closer to the point about “this is my body and my freedom” are current laws prohibiting prostitution. In this sense, one of the government’s important goals is to protect and promote human life for the sake of the common good. Thus, the government does not diminish an individual’s freedom by promulgating laws which protect human life; in fact, it is doing the exact opposite: it promotes human flourishing for the human person in his/her journey towards a relationship with Jesus Christ who is Truth and who will set him/her free.”
Eternal and Natural Law have been violated
Clearly, laws that discriminated against people on the basis of race violated “eternal and natural” law, as King states. (These laws were overturned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, thanks in part to Reverend King’s social activism.)
Clearly, laws that discriminate against the unborn person in the womb also violate these same eternal and natural laws. And yet Fr. Conroy stakes out a slippery position, as Huynh points out:
“I should observe that Father Conroy seems to argue here that even if abortion is a sinful choice that we should still let the woman make it since it’s her right.
So it seems like he is conceding to the position that the choice to abort is a wrong one, but that we should still allow people to make the wrong choices.
Yet, when it comes to matters of life and death, I do not think most people take lightly a choice that leads to murder, even if the choice was made in ignorance (hence involuntary manslaughter is still a felony).”
To reiterate Reverend King:
“Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”
The principle applies to the abortion debate. Although King didn’t directly address the issue of abortion, he acknowledged that sacrificing black children was self-defeating:
“The Negro cannot win if he is willing to sacrifice the futures of his children for immediate personal comfort and safety.”
Sounds pretty pro-life, doesn’t it? St. Thomas Aquinas would approve.
In a 6 to 3 decision, the Supreme Court blocked President Biden’s vaccine mandate. The mandate compelled employees at business with one-hundred or more employees to be vaccinated against COVID, or submit a weekly negative COVID test before being allowed to return to the workplace.
The Court wrote:
“Although Congress has indisputably given OSHA the power to regulate occupational dangers, it has not given that agency the power to regulate public health more broadly.
Requiring the vaccination of 84 million Americans, selected simply because they work for employers with more than 100 employees, certainly falls in the latter category.”
Why this matters to pro-lifers
The Court’s decision is relevant to the pro-life movement. The party of abortion is the same party that views climate change as an “existential threat” to mankind.
As we wrote yesterday, they view overpopulation as a driver of a potential climate apocalypse: The more people, the more carbon emissions; the more carbon emissions, the more likely the earth warms.
As we wrote last year, an increasing number of men and women are choosing not to have children due to climate change concerns. Some women are choosing voluntary sterilization.
What if sterilization wasn’t voluntary?
This is the question posed by Terry Jeffrey, editor-in-chief of CNSNews:
“Can President Joe Biden order your employer to make sure you are sterilized?”
Don’t scoff. Our country has a history of forced sterilization over the past hundred years or so. Although it pales in comparison to China’s, prisoners, the mentally ill, and African Americans have suffered the inhumanity of forced sterilizations.
As vice president, Mr. Biden worked with John Holdren who served as President Obama’s Director of the Offices of Science and Technology Policy. Holdren holds views which are mainstream with the party of abortion.
He asserts that “our planet is grossly overpopulated.” His solution: political pressure. Writing in “Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions,” which he co-authored with Paul and Ann Ehrlich he emphasized the role of coercive government action:
“Political pressure must be applied immediately to induce the United States government to assume its responsibility to halt the growth of the American population. Once growth is halted the government should undertake to influence the birth rate so that the population is reduced to an optimum size and maintained there.”
Population alarmists favor coercion
Holdren’s co-author, Paul Ehrlich, championed governmental coercion:
“We must cut out the cancer of population growth. Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause [population control] … We must be relentless in pushing for population control.”
He advanced solutions which included putting birth control in our water supply, forced abortions, coercive sterilization, punitive taxes on people who have children, and other heavy-handed government solutions that violate civil liberties and human dignity.
What if a future vaccine mandate called for sterilization?
This brings us back to Terry Jeffrey’s question above. Jeffrey asks:
“Now, suppose in America we were able to develop the technology to sterilize someone simply by giving them two shots in the arm three weeks apart — just like getting the COVID-19 vaccine.
Could some future president, given the environmental threat to our planet that some scientists believe is driven by population growth, order that every American who has had two or more children get these two shots?”
Jeffrey develops his thesis in a piece published at Townhall. It’s worth a read. Suffice it to say, if an administration tries to impose a vaccine mandate to eradicate a serious virus, what might a future administration do that views population growth as a “cancer.”?
Today’s Supreme Court decision makes such action more difficult.
Two prominent celebrities had competing views on our country’s low fertility rate. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is okay with it due to climate change concerns:
“Our planet is going to hit disaster if we don’t turn this ship around and so it’s basically like, there’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, ‘Is it okay to still have children?’”
Tesla and Space X CEO, Elon Musk, pushed back in an interview with the Wall Street Journal:
“I can’t emphasize this enough, there are not enough people. And I think one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low birth rate and the rapidly declining birth rate. And yet, so many people, including smart people, think that there are too many people in the world and think that the population is growing out of control.
It’s completely the opposite. Please look at the numbers. If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble. Mark my words.”
The data supports Elon Musk
Pulse Life Advocates looked at the numbers. Musk is right. The fertility rate is below replacement in every state, but South Dakota.
Since the turn of the century, the international rate has dropped nearly eleven percent. Ninety-five countries have a total fertility rate below replacement level.
Two of the three largest population countries in the world, China (1.7) and the United States (1.8) have fertility rates below the replacement rate of 2.1 children born over a woman’s lifetime.
The world’s second largest country in terms of population, India, has a falling fertility rate that has just dipped below replacement levels.
A low fertility rate affects Iowa
Here in Iowa, our fertility rate has been below replacement levels since 2009. In 2020, 36,054 babies were born in Iowa, the lowest number in a century. In response, Maggie DeWitte, Pulse Life Advocates’ Executive Director, said:
“The fertility rate in Iowa dropped more than eight percent since 2009. Iowa is dying a slow demographic death unless we do something about it. The first place to start is to ban abortion. Abortion isn’t just evil, it is suicide.”
And yet as Elon Musk pointed out, the consensus among left-leaning politicians and our cultural elite is just the opposite: they say we have too many people, and that people hurt the climate. Bill Gates expressed it like this:
“Crucially, one of the factors pushing carbon emissions to an unsustainable level is population growth.”
The same people who tout overpopulation concerns also tend to look to abortion as one of the solutions.
Abortion is never the solution. And in the case of overpopulation, the so-called problem has been misrepresented in the media and by our elites, as the data shows. A decline in population leads to worker shortages, a drop in innovation, economic stagnation and overall civilizational decline.
Sixty-one million Americans have been aborted since Roe v Wade. Imagine how much better off we’d be if they had been born.
[How do the politics of climate change and the pro-life movement intersect? Read “The Anti-Life Politics of Climate Change.”]
Shawn Carney and Sue Thayer
The passing of our dear friend and 40 Days for Life Outreach Director, Sue Thayer, has left a huge hole in our hearts.
Sue was the first former abortion worker to lead a 40 Days for Life campaign–and remains the only Planned Parenthood manager to ever organize a 40 Days for Life vigil in front of her former workplace.
Exposes webcam scheme
After closing the Planned Parenthood facility in Storm Lake, Iowa, Sue went on to expose Planned Parenthood’s webcam abortion scheme in state capitols across the country–and in countries around the world!
Funeral arrangements
Many have asked about funeral arrangements. Sue’s life and legacy will be honored at a Celebration of Life this Saturday, January 8 at 10:30am Central at Summit Evangelical Free Church (1000 S. Main Street, Alta, Iowa). No livestream details are available yet.
GoFundMe page
Many people have also asked about supporting Sue’s surviving five children. Loved ones have set up a Go Fund Me page to provide for Sue’s family: gofundme.com/f/sue-thayer-family
Shawn Carney & friends share favorite memories of Sue
On this week’s episode of The 40 Days for Life Podcast, Dr. Haywood Robinson, Steve Karlen, and I share our favorite memories of Sue:
We also discuss how Sue:
• Faced–and overcame–her fears to become one of the most impactful pro-life advocates in the world;
• Is responsible for states across the country restricting and banning webcam abortions;
• Saw reason to hope that every abortion worker would join her in standing up for life.
Please continue to keep the Thayer family in prayer.
For Life,
Shawn Carney
Any honest conversation on abortion includes two important issues, both of which have something to do with the Catholic celebration of the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, which occurs New Year’s Day.
More than one life is at stake
Regarding abortion, our national dialogue has to acknowledge that more than one human life is involved in abortion. A young woman in an unplanned pregnancy has a young child in her womb from the instant of fertilization.
Two lives (or more) are at stake, not one. Scientists universally acknowledge that human life begins at fertilization, not viability or birth. Most theologians agree. About half of politicians don’t.
Pregnancy isn’t an accident
In addition, even if a pregnancy wasn’t planned, it wasn’t an accident. Pregnancy is always a possibility when a man and woman engage in sexual relations. Contraception that is 99% effective may fail the one-hundredth time a woman engages in intercourse.
Who should be responsible when it ‘fails’? The person who made the choice to engage in sex or the person who is the fruit of that union?
In this political and cultural climate, these are tough questions that need sincere conversations. Abortion rights advocates shouldn’t duck them, because the dignity of our human experience hinges on the answers.
Mary’s answer
Mary certainly didn’t duck them, as St. Luke indicates in the Gospel reading for January 1st (2:16-21):
“And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.”
The official title of New Year’s Holy Day in the Catholic Church is: the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God.
Mary lived chastely. When presented with the opportunity to bear God’s Son, she responded with the most important words ever spoken:
“May it be done.”
The gates of heaven opened
Dr. Peter Kreeft reflected on the profundity of Mary’s words in this excerpt from “Food for the Soul:”
“All three divine persons conspired together to save us. The Father saved us by giving up his son for us. The Son saved us by doing the Father’s will when he was sent — the work of his Passion and death. And the Spirit saved us by being the cause of his Incarnation.
All three persons depend on Mary’s cooperation with their work of redemption. When Mary said her fiat, her “may it be done” to God’s angel at the Annunciation (Luke 1:38), she said the single most important word any human being ever spoke in all of human history, for the word allowed Christ to come and open the gates of heaven to us.”
Mary had a choice. She said yes.
The Solemnity of Mary is an encouragement to modern couples to reflect on the dignity and beauty of God’s creation growing in the womb, a very small, vulnerable human life made possible by their collaboration, by their ‘choice.’
They are not alone. Millions of couples are on their knees praying for the health and safety of this child in the womb, a child they fervently want to adopt.
They are not alone. Mary and Joseph want them to ask for their prayers.
They are not alone. The most Holy Trinity, with whom Mary cooperated, loves them and loves their vulnerable child, planned or unplanned.
Thanks to Mary’s openness to unplanned life, the gates of heaven are open to us all.
On this Solemnity of Mary, let us learn from her witness:
“May it be done.”
Pulse Life Advocates published 74 blogposts this year (including this one). Be sure to subscribe if you haven’t done so yet. In case you missed any, here are some highlights. Click on the dates to read the entire blogpost:
“During the following weeks, I had four acquaintances tell me about their abortions. Two were contrite, sorrowful over decisions made in youth and of fear. One was defiant and defensive of her right to abort. The last was conflicted, caught between the public, political answer, and the private grief. I don’t recall what I said to each of them. I hope it was, “ I’m sorry for your loss”. And, “God never stopped loving you.”
What kind of people #CelebrateAbortionProviders? Three kinds:
- The misguided. Oftentimes, these are future pro-lifers. How many women have been hurt by abortion? Millions. Many don’t realize what they are doing until the physical, emotional, and spiritual reality kicks in. Sometimes it takes decades for that to happen. Sometimes minutes.
- The financial profiteers. There’s money in Big Abortion. These are the people who actually create such silly hashtags as #CelebrateAbortionProviders, because it is in their financial self-interest to ameliorate the stigma attached to infanticide.
- The political profiteers. These people are funded by the financial profiteers (who are also effective at turning out the vote). They will, and have, sold their souls to the devil to #CelebrateAbortionProviders. (See Joe Biden.
“Up until now, Planned Parenthood has failed to own the impact of our founder’s actions. We have defended Sanger as a protector of bodily autonomy and self-determination, while excusing her association with white supremacist groups and eugenics as an unfortunate “product of her time.” Until recently, we have hidden behind the assertion that her beliefs were the norm for people of her class and era, always being sure to name her work alongside that of W.E.B. Dubois and other Black freedom fighters. But the facts are complicated.”
Abortions rarely take place due to rape. According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, less than half a percentage point of abortion victims had an abortion due to rape. Both sides of the debate agree it’s a rarity. And yet Ms. Obradovich spent half of her column scolding pro-lifers for regulations that don’t allow abortion due to rape. Why doesn’t she address the other ninety-nine percent of abortions?
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Even if Iowa eventually passes the Protect Life Amendment (2 more steps to go), the dishonestly named Women’s Health Protection Act would gut current laws on the book, such as our ban on 20 week abortions, and shut the door on future regulation.
This law would leave the U.S. with one of the most permissive abortion climates in the world, surpassing even that of dictatorial nations such as China and North Korea. At least China has banned sex-selective abortions.
For the record, Iowa has an excellent track record when it comes to adoption. According to the National Council for Adoptions:
“In 2014, four states had Adoption Option Indexes three or more times higher than the national average-Utah (36.3), Arkansas (26.8), Montana (23.1), and Iowa (21.4). There were two to four adoptions for every 100 abortions plus births to unmarried women in these states. This suggests that in these states women may have more extensive counseling, services, and facilities to orient pregnant women towards adoption-among other factors.”
Climate hysteria breeds contempt for humanity. Talk show host and columnist, Dennis Prager, wrote about a recent New York Times piece. The Times asked for feedback from readers about their reactions to the “existential” threat of climate change.
Here are a few responses, beginning with a woman from Maine named Sophia …
“I have one child, a daughter, who told me age 8 that she would never have a child because of global warming. She’s now 34 and has never changed her mind. So I will not experience a grandchild. For her wisdom, I am grateful. I would be heartsick if I did have a grandchild who would have to experience the onslaught of changing climate.”
What did Roe v Wade do to America?
“America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men.”
“One of the biggest myths is that pro-lifers only care about the baby and they don’t do anything for the mothers. If anyone who believes that would take one step into a pregnancy resource center, they would realize how wrong they are. They are on the front line, day in and day out counseling woman who feel that they have no choice but to end the life of their unborn child.
Holy families are built on a foundation of faith with God at its center. The commitment of a sacramental marriage is its bricks and mortar, leading to more fulfilling long term family-life than the other options mentioned above. By any metric, whether financial, health, or child-rearing, the holy family model produces dramatically better outcomes.
“We are incarnation. We want to unite the tangible to the intangible. We want this life we’re living to be beautiful in a deeper way. There’s a reason people write songs and make movies about going home. It’s a universal longing, which also means it’s a universal access point. It’s a force for evangelization. When I first realized I was going to marry my husband, I started to feel he was my home. The language of the home is universal. A deeper meaning of home is about longing and relationship. We find our home in God, which is a foretaste of what heaven will be like.”
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Why is the family important? Dr. Peter Kreeft reflected on this question in this excerpt from “Food for the Soul: Reflections on the Mass Readings:”
“The family is the single most important institution on earth. All the happiest, most peaceful, and most enduring societies in history have had a deep respect for the family. It is the first place where we learn life’s most important lesson: unselfish love, the love that consists in the gift of your very self and life to others. Each of us came into this world only because two other persons did that: laid down their lives for us. The family is the “pay it forward” system. No can possibly give their parents the gift their parents gave them — the gift of life. We cannot pay back that debt, so we pay it forward to our children. That is the rationale behind God’s invention of the family.”
Dr Kreeft is a professor of philosophy at Boston College and author of over 80 books on Christian philosophy, theology, and apologetics. Pulse Life Advocates is struck by his reflection and its unspoken relevance to abortion. Love is unselfish. Abortion is selfish. Love wills the good of the other. Abortion wills the misguided love of the self at the expense of the other.
Dr. Kreeft continues:
“The family is the first school, where we learn genuine, honest love and care for the good of others. Everywhere else, you are loved for what you can do, for your performance, whether in the workplace or in the entertainment industry or in sports. But in your family, you are loved for yourself; you are loved simply because you belong to them, and they belong to you. Outside the walls of your home, you are loved because you perform; inside, you are loved just because you exist.”
This is a big idea. Married family life works much better than unmarried family life at conveying a sense of self-worth in children. It seems to be a much, much better ‘school’ than other competing models, according to sociologists. Married fathers particularly are important to the outcomes of children, according to fathers.com, which sites data from the Census Bureau and the HHS, as well as other sources.
Poverty, abuse, drug use, behavior issues, and suicide all plummet in children living in homes with married moms and dads. At the same time, academic achievement soars.
Dr. Kreeft identifies four elements that seem to be key in holding families together and producing the outcomes described above:
“Honor and authority, piety and respect are the glue that holds a family together, and therefore a whole society together. The family is even more basic than the Church because it came before the Church; the God who designed the Church first designed families in the Garden of Eden.”
Just how important are honor, authority, piety, and respect? Kreeft provides an interesting answer:
“The five societies that have had the longest and most successful life span in human history have all had a high regard for the family: Jewish, Christian, Confucian, Islamic, and ancient Roman.”
Married family life has an incredible track record. Talk about a “pay it forward” system! Why is its popularity in such sharp decline? Why do so many women and their mates reject parenting and choose abortion instead? There are many reasons. Dr. Kreeft provides one:
“Parenting is the most demanding job in the world. It is at once the most joyful and the most heartbreaking because the more you invest your love in another person the more that investment is returned with life’s deepest joys and life’s deepest sorrows. If you want to avoid a broken heart, you must not give your heart to anyone. There is a condition that fits that description. It is called hell.”
Pulse Life Advocates understands that marriage, children, and a beautiful home life creates a slice of heaven on earth. That’s why we have created The Holy Family Project, which makes the case for life, marriage, and family. This 4-part webinar will launch in early 2022. We encourage you to register today to be notified with details.
Help us promote the ultimate “pay it forward” system in history. Register now.
[Here’s another way to pay it forward: Support Pulse’s pro-life outreach. Donate today.]
What do you want for Christmas? According to troubadours down through the ages, it is to be home with your family and enjoy some family time.
Michael Bublé expresses the sentiment so tenderly in the classic Christmas song, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.” Watch:
The song’s final line says it all:
“I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.”
We long for family. We dream about them. There is something special about them, something mystical, something sacred. Pulse Life Advocates has created a 4-part webinar that explores the beauty and power of family in a series titled, “The Holy Family: The ‘soul’ solution for a wounded world.”
4 Episodes
The Holy Family Project explores what modern families can learn from the Holy Family itself. How did Joseph, Mary, and little Jesus do family? The series is broken into 4 episodes:
- Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life), with special guest, Bishop William Joensen of the Diocese of Des Moines.
- Fruitful Mothers, with special guest Bill Donaghy of the Theology of the Body Institute.
- Fearless Children, with special guest Dr. Ray Guarendi, host of the EWTN radio show, “The Doctor is In.”
- Faithful Fathers, with special guest Joe Stopulos, host of the Man Up radio show on Iowa Catholic Radio.
Each episode begins with a talk by Msgr. Frank Chiodo, who helped us create the framework for the series. Here’s a preview of the series:
Why would Pulse Life Advocates, a pro-life group, take on such a project? Because the incidence of abortion plummets in a holy family. Some 87% of abortions occur with unmarried women.
Abortion separates us from God. And yet, as Dr. Carrie Gress says:
“Our goal is to get home to heaven.”
Dr. Gress is co-author of “Theology of the Home” with Noelle Mering. Holy Families help us keep on the right path in our journey through life to our heavenly home. In fact, Gress and Mering tell us that family time actually gives us a foretaste of heaven:
“Homes can evangelize … Catholic living, with all its imperfections and struggles, its mercy and its joy, not to mention aesthetic and hospitable beauty and nourishing food, can be an intoxicating inducement to the reality that life is fuller, more secure, more exciting, and more fulfilling when lived in the context of the divine.”
The language of the home is universal
“To step inside this context is a foretaste of heaven, and sometime, mysteriously, the Christian home can be even more profound for a stranger than being inside a church. For in the liturgy he may not know the ‘language,’ but the language of the home is universal.”
Ultimately, family time and life is a universal longing, which is why so many songs are written about, it according to Gress and Mering:
“We are incarnation. We want to unite the tangible to the intangible. We want this life we’re living to be beautiful in a deeper way. There’s a reason people write songs and make movies about going home. It’s a universal longing, which also means it’s a universal access point. It’s a force for evangelization. When I first realized I was going to marry my husband, I started to feel he was my home. The language of the home is universal. A deeper meaning of home is about longing and relationship. We find our home in God, which is a foretaste of what heaven will be like.”
Family life is in disarray, though, as fewer couples bother to marry. A quarter of adults are child-free by choice. The desire to have children since the pandemic hit last year has declined by 17% according to the Institute of Family Studies.
The Holy Family Project makes the case for marriage and family. Three of the four episodes are completed. And the final one on fatherhood is being edited. Pulse hopes to launch the webinar series in late January. Subscribe to our blog to be notified when the official launch date is announced.
In the meantime, Happy Advent from Pulse Life Advocates. We hope you make it home for Christmas.
The Biden Administration permanently lifted restrictions on receiving abortion pills by mail. Formerly, the FDA temporarily lifted-in person requirements for accessing mifepristone, the first of a two-pill process for aborting babies, due to the pandemic. The lifting of restrictions means mail order medical abortion will proliferate more than ever.
Pulse Executive Director, Maggie DeWitte, reacted:
“The mail order abortion pill program is shocking. Ru-486 is a dangerous medication that kills unborn children in the womb and harms women both physically and emotionally. The idea that girls and women across Iowa could receive this dangerous drug through the mail without ever seeing a physician in person is appalling. And, what about minor girls? Will 14 year olds be able to obtain this drug without their parents even knowing about?
Women who have taken this drug report back the enormous physical implications including an extreme loss of blood and severe cramping, many thought they would die. And, that this is done in their home, alone, often in their bathroom. The isolation these women feel is something not easily dealt with. And they are faced with the harsh reality of what they did when they see their dead baby in a toilet. Because, let’s be clear- that is the reality of medical abortion through the mail.
Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University, said:
“It’s really significant. Telehealth abortions are much easier for both providers and patients, and even in states that want to do it, there have been limits on how available it is.”
The Susan B. Anthony List echoed both DeWitte and Ziegler’s sentiments:
“The Biden administration today moved to weaken longstanding federal safety regulations against mail-order abortion drugs designed to protect women from serious health risks and potential abuse. The Biden administration policy allows for dangerous at-home, do-it-yourself abortions without necessary medical oversight.”
Young women in particular are often oblivious to just how traumatizing a chemical abortion can be. Abby Johnson had a chemical abortion when she was twenty-three. A counselor for Planned Parenthood described the effects like this:
“You will have some heavy bleeding and period like cramps. None of it should last too long. You will be back to normal in a couple days.”
Ms. Johnson described the reality of the procedure like this:
“Ten minutes later, I started to feel pain in my abdomen unlike anything I had ever experienced. Then the blood came. It was gushing out of me. I couldn’t wear a pad…nothing was able to absorb the amount of blood I was losing. The only thing I could do was sit on the toilet. I sat there for hours…bleeding, throwing up into the bathroom trashcan, crying and sweating.”
It got worse:
“After several hours on the toilet, I desperately wanted to soak in the bath tub. I was hoping that would make me feel better. Maybe the warm water would help the cramping. Certainly it would make me smell better. I had vomit all in my hair and on my legs, not to mention how sweaty I was. I filled the tub and climbed in. It actually did feel pretty good. I remember closing my eyes and leaning my head back. I felt exhausted. The cramps kept coming, but the water helped soothe them somewhat. I opened my eyes after 15 minutes and was horrified. My bathwater was bright red. It looked like I was sitting in the middle of a crime scene. And I guess it was …I had murdered my child.”
This is why Pulse’s Executive Director characterizes the Biden Administration’s decision as shocking. Not only will mail order medical abortion increase the number of abortions in the U.S., it will subject unsuspecting young women to horrific emotional and physical injury.
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