But not peace.  Presley found that through other music.  Presley’s roots ran deep into black gospel music, and he sang it whenever he could, sometimes all night long.  It touched his soul.  In his 1969 release, In the Ghetto, Presley sang about the cycle of poverty and the difficulty in breaking free.  A boy is born in poverty.  Unable to get help, he tries to steal and shoot his way free.  He becomes the ghetto’s next victim.  His mother is left to grieve, and as she does, another poor child is born.

Jesus told us that the poor would always be with us.  We need not be believers to believe it.  The poor have been there throughout history.  They are with us now.  They live in our cities, suburbs, and rural areas.  And just as the young man in Presley’s song could not break free, our country has been unable to break the cycle of poverty.  With the best intentions we have tried many things, but with only partial success.

There is now an alarming body of evidence that a new way of decreasing poor populations has emerged: legal abortion.  It is killing minority children in numbers vastly disproportionate to minority populations.  The CDC reports that in 2008, black women, who account for about 12-13% of the female population, had 40.2% of all abortions. Hispanic females comprise 15% of the population but obtained about 21.1% of all abortions.  In New York City, about 60% of black unborn babies and over 41% of Hispanic unborn babies were aborted in 2009. In black communities, abortion is the leading cause of death.

Why?  Some believe that it’s the result of eugenics, the effort to purify bloodlines and weed out “inferior” people. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s roots were deeply entangled in eugenics.  She argued that organized charity bred “defectives, delinquents and dependents.”  She encouraged government bonuses for voluntary sterilizations of “obviously unfit parents.” She believed that birth control could eliminate the “scourges of transmissible disease, mental defect, poverty, lawlessness, crime since these classes would no longer be breeding like weeds.”  As part of her 1939 Negro Project, Sanger wrote to an aide that it would be good to have black ministers involved in the project.  “We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

What Sanger meant by those words may remain a secret of history. But the 2011 study Racial Targeting and Population Control demonstrates that racial targeting through abortion is very real.  Working with Planned Parenthood’s website and other data, researchers obtained the ZIP codes for abortion facilities.  Using U.S. census data, they established the percentages of blacks and Hispanics in each zip code and in the entire state.  That allowed them to determine those ZIP codes with disproportionate percentages of minorities.  Researchers found that every state had at least one abortion facility in zip codes with a disproportionate minority population.  In Texas, facilities are located in 94 zip codes, 74% of which are disproportionately black or Hispanic.  In Connecticut, almost 75% of its 21 zip codes having abortion facilities are in disproportionate areas.  In 42 states, facilities were located in zip codes where minority populations exceeded 200% of the state average.  Some zip codes had multiple facilities.

These statistics should be enough to trigger a federal investigation into the problem.  If blacks or Hispanics were being kept from voting booths, there would be action. But when the issue is the use of abortion to target minority communities, the silence of the Obama administration has been deafening. And the Government Accountability Office has found that the Obama administration violated federal law by funding lobbying to legalize abortion under the Kenyan constitution.  That’s sadly ironic.  The President’s father was Kenyan.

Perhaps the problem is not about race but about money. Planned Parenthood’s 2009-10 report discloses total assets of $1.04 billion and a net profit of $18.5 million.  Planned Parenthood performed 329,445 abortions.  Using the Guttmacher Institute estimate of $468 per abortion, PP made $154 million from abortions.  According to former PP clinic director Abby Johnson, abortion is so lucrative that PP is requiring all facilities to perform abortions by 2013.

There may be yet another reason why legal abortion has hit the minority communities so hard.  It’s the notion that abortion is a compassionate alternative to the cycle of poverty.  Presley’s song touched on it:  “Cause if there’s one thing that she don’t need, it’s another hungry mouth to feed . . ..”  But we may never assume what we cannot know: God’s plan for His children.  Rich or poor, each human being is not a potential life but a life with potential. A child may be the one who keeps his family together or who is a help to others in need.  A great saint, Martin de Porres, spent his life helping the poor in his native Peru.  He was a mulatto, the illegitimate son of a nobleman and a former slave.  He was a blessing to others because he was given a chance at life.  His story can be repeated millions of times through millions of poor.

We may disagree about how to help the poor. We should never disagree about their right to life.  Why does God permit poverty?  Maybe it’s to let us see His goodness at work through the poor.

We’ll never see it unless we give life a chance.

Paul V. Esposito is a Catholic lawyer who writes on a variety of pro-life topics.  He and his wife Kathy live in Elmhurst, Illinois and have six children.

©  Paul V. Esposito 2012.  Culture of Life.  Permission to copy and distribute for pro-life purposes is granted.  Comments?  Visit us at http://www.the-culture-of-life.com/

Stephen Ambrose was one of America’s best storytellers.   He wrote for the common man.  Ambrose took particular interest in World War II.  In Band of Brothers, Ambrose told the story of Easy Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Army Airborne Division, from the unit’s formation, parachute landing into Normandy, and fight eastward into Germany.  Often outnumbered, the unit suffered 150% casualties.  But Easy held the lines at Bastogne, where its men battled a heavily fortified enemy and a brutally cold winter.  Easy liberated the Dachau concentration camp and eventually reached Hitler’s mountain quarters. Though from diverse backgrounds, the men of Easy had a common bond. They were citizen soldiers willing to join arms in just battle. With their sacrifice, America triumphed.

America is no stranger to war, and today it is engaged in a bloody war here at home.  It’s a fight as old as good versus evil. When God gave us free will, He set His law deep within our hearts so that we would make loving choices to serve God and neighbor.  But we have demanded license to do things our own way, to live for self as the highest good of all.  The desire to play God became so overwhelming that in January 1973 our highest court legalized the killing of unborn babies.  For women, Roe v. Wade promised total control over their bodies, regardless of who gets hurt in the process.  For men, it promised freedom from the responsibility of raising the children they father. For helpless unborn babies, Roe only promised death. Since Roe, over 54 million have been slaughtered under the guise of “freedom,” many only moments and inches from natural delivery.  And because of Roe, we are locked in a battle for the soul of our nation.

The polls now show that a majority of Americans, sickened by the killing, want it stopped or greatly restricted.  But it’s not happening, and for a reason.  Like the fight over legalized slavery, the fight over legalized abortion is a moral battle being waged in a political theatre.  And there, power is everything.  In a democratic society, retaining power means pleasing constituencies.  As to abortion, politicians seek to please two: the minority of voters wanting unrestricted abortion, and the businesses profiting from the killing.  The first group provides the votes; the second provides the campaign funds to go after those votes.  President Obama and many in Congress understand the power principle only too well.  By all objective measures, the Obama administration has been the most pro-abortion in history.  Its actions have gone beyond supporting the so-called notion of “choice.” Instead, it is removing choice in every way available and actively imposing a pro-abortion culture.

The administration’s actions start with the top, and that means the Supreme Court.  Roe was a shock not only because of its substance but also because the Court stole a power belonging to “we the people.”  In a country of over 308 million, the continued right to abortion rests with the votes of five judges.  The President has already appointed two judges hell-bent on keeping the decision from the people’s control.  Right now, they are the controlling votes. He is also filling the lower courts with judges expected to further his pro-abortion agenda.

It’s a huge agenda.  For example, two years ago the President spoke of the need for a “sensible” federal regulation protecting the rights of conscience of health care workers.  But his idea of “sensible” is to limit their protections.  Although protected from performing or assisting with abortions, health care workers must prescribe and deliver Plan B contraceptives, even those that can cause an abortion. He also seeks to force most employers to provide mandatory insurance coverage for contraception.  The exceptions are so narrow that 60 leaders of various faiths have now written the President in protest.  Increasingly, “choice” is available only to those supporting legalized abortion, not to those opposing it.

The administration is also trying to expose our youth to abortion at virtually any age.  The FDA recently recommended the over-the-counter sale of Plan B contraceptives to children as young as eleven.  Though overruled, the mere recommendation shows the administration’s mindset.  Planned Parenthood and others unhappy with the current restriction just need to wait.  The administration has already stated, “Subsequent discussions can take place.”  They probably will, right after the November election.  To date, PP and the administration have been best friends.  President Obama threatened to shut down the federal government if Congress ended Planned Parenthood’s $363 million annual taxpayer subsidy.  The pro-abortion lobby has returned the favor by giving millions to the President and his allies.

But a grassroots pro-life pushback has been building for years. On January 22, 1974, former World War II corporal Nellie Gray joined arms with her 20,000 comrades at the U.S. Capitol steps.  That first March for Life has been repeated annually come rain, shine, even snowstorm.  The march has swelled; last year’s estimate reached 400,000.  The marchers reflect the diversity of the nation yet share a common bond.  They seek life for the unborn and release for women victimized by a false notion of freedom.  They seek a return to God’s way.

Now it is our turn to join arms with them.  We need not march in Washington to set our sights on Washington.  If we are to reverse the insanity, this may be most crucial election ever.  Another Supreme Court seat will probably open after the election.  The President nominates; the Senate confirms.  Both are pro-abortion.  But that can change come November.  Our cause is just: life.  With God’s help and our efforts, this chapter of history will end in triumph.

We are the band of brothers.

Paul V. Esposito is a Catholic lawyer who writes on a variety of pro-life topics.  He and his wife Kathy live in Elmhurst, Illinois and have six children.

© Paul V. Esposito 2012.  Culture of Life.  Permission to copy and distribute for pro-life purposes is granted.  Comments?  Visit us at http://www.the-culture-of-life.com/

For the last fourteen Octobers, our parish has placed a display on its front lawn.  It’s made of about 8,000 sticks first cut to size and then painted white.  They’re assembled into almost 4,000 crosses standing in neat rows.  The finished display looks like a military cemetery, and that’s the point.  The display symbolizes the unborn victims of a raging culture war.  Why almost 4,000?  It approximates their death toll.  Not yearly or monthly.  Daily.

This year our local online newspaper reported on the cross display. Unlike most local stories, this one drew over 100 comments, many hostile.  ”Hypocritical.”  “Holier than thou.”  “Annoying and unsightly.”  The parish should display a cross “for every child ever sexually abused by a priest.”  The Catholic Church “supported the Nazis” and “turned its back” on six million Jews.  The Crusades were evil.   Even Mother Teresa came under fire.  One comment was pulled as too offensive.  The more respectful comments were still pointedly against the display.  God gave women a free will to choose, and “even God is pro-choice.” Life begins when a baby is delivered; a woman is free to choose abortion until that moment.  God forgives and may have come to an understanding with a woman.  Catholics should be less judgmental and more understanding of experiences.  But even though negative, the comments were welcome.  They are barometers of attitudes that we must shift.

Contrary to popular myth, pro-life morality is not a Catholic invention.  Abortion is not an evil merely because the Catholic Church says so.  Abortion is an evil because it violates the most fundamental of all human rights: the right to life.  When Cain killed his brother Abel, Cain knew he did wrong even though he did not have the benefit of Catholic moral teaching or even the Ten Commandments.  He knew his sin because of the law God had written deep in his heart.  It’s the natural law ¾ the moral sense that allows us to discern through reason what is good and evil, truth and lie.  It is written in the hearts of all people regardless of religious affiliation, if any.  The natural law tells us that it is wrong to kill an innocent human being.

But what of free will and God’s being pro-choice?  In God’s love, He has given us a free will so that without compulsion we can choose to seek Him.  Freedom is God’s gift by which we choose to seek what is good and holy.  But freedom is not an end in itself, a license to do whatever we wish.  If it were, then we should repeal not only anti-abortion laws but also all laws restricting us.  We should be legally free to steal, cheat, lie, abuse drugs and alcohol, and engage in sexual conduct when, where, how, and with whom we please.  Of course, that misguided view leads to anarchy and to oppression, as history readily proves.  Was a slaveholder exercising freedom or oppressing slaves?   Was Hitler exercising freedom or killing millions?  Both were acting within their country’s laws.  As to abortion, so are we.

Are Catholics being judgmental towards people whose experiences we do not know?  No one is judging the women and men involved in the decisions to abort.  That is for God.  Instead, we are merely saying that their personal situations do not justify abortion.  May out-of-marriage sex justify killing a human being?  May we kill in order to improve prospects for a job promotion or to save a job? Is it permissible to kill a developing baby because we have too many other children or too little money?  What we judge is the existing attitude that abortion be used to solve a personal problem.

Some say that because God forgives, we have no right to speak about legal abortion.  God certainly forgives all sin, even abortion.  But we may never use God’s willingness to forgive as a justification for committing sin.  When Jesus saved the adulteress from a stoning, He told her to sin no more. Likewise, we are calling women (and men) to make the better choice: life.

That choice helps women.  It comes back to the natural law.  Almost 40 years ago, six Supreme Court justices erased the country’s abortion laws.  But they could not erase God’s law.  After two generations of being told that abortion is a right, women still know in their hearts that it is a wrong.  Today many post-abortive women lead shattered lives, unable to calm minds and souls filled with the regret and guilt from killing their own children.  They face higher suicide rates.  Post-abortion depression is common and long lasting.  Women become filled with anger and lose trust in people.  Abortion is a significant cause of breakdowns in marriages, friendships, and relationships of all kinds.  Post-abortive women often resort to drugs and alcohol abuse to mask their pain.  Legal abortion has itself been the cause of death or physical injury to countless women.  After all, nothing that has death as its object can ever be safe.

We have the truth that will debunk the lie of legal abortion.  We must be willing to say it.  When we do, we can be assured of stone-throwing in return.  There will always be people who don’t understand or don’t want to understand.  That must not deter us from speaking the Truth. We need not be perfect in order to do God’s work.  Jesus chose twelve nobodies to be the Church’s first leaders.  His apostle to the Gentiles had been complicit in the murder of one of his first saints.  Yet they succeeded because they remained faithful to Jesus, the One Who died on the real cross.  The One born of Mary.

Imperfect though we are, we have been called. Imperfect though we are, we will speak.

Merry Christmas!

Paul V. Esposito is a Catholic lawyer who writes on a variety of pro-life topics.  He and his wife Kathy live in Elmhurst, Illinois, where they are raising their six kids.

© Paul V. Esposito 2011.  Culture of Life.  Permission to copy and distribute for pro-life purposes is granted.  Comments?  Visit us at http://www.the-culture-of-life.com/

In 1997, an archeological team dug into a Bible story we learned as kids: the fall of the fortress city of Jericho. As Joshua led the Israelites into Canaan, God ordered an unusual battle plan.  Every day for six days, the warriors, priests, and people marched once around Jericho’s walls.  On the seventh day they circled seven times.  On Joshua’s signal, horns sounded and the people raised a mighty shout.  The walls came tumbling down.  Plausible?  The team thinks so.  They found a series of walls that would have protected the city.  But they also found rubble from a collapsed mudbrick wall forming a ramp up and over the retaining wall. Within the city were stores of unused grain, evidence that the siege was relatively quick.  And there was earthquake activity in the area; God’s timing is impeccable.  Whatever way Jericho fell, the lesson of Joshua is that God will find a way to reward His faithful people people.

Cities are no longer built as fortresses.  But fortresses aren’t merely the stuff of brick and mortar.  One of our biggest fortresses in our culture is the abortion industry. Led by Planned Parenthood, which alone does one quarter of all U.S. abortions, the abortion industry sells death.  In 2008-09 PP collected almost $115 million in abortion revenue, about 33% of its annual income. During that the same period, Planned Parenthood received $363 million in federal and state grants, more double what it received in 1998.  Legal abortion’s position within our culture is heavy guarded. Last year President Obama threatened to shut down the entire federal government if Congress refused to fund Planned Parenthood.  And after promising that no taxpayer money would be used to fund abortions under his healthcare bill, the President now promises to veto legislation that would hold him to it.  The walls of Jericho had nothing on the walls protecting Planned Parenthood.

But those walls aren’t impregnable.  This past July, pro-life organization Americans United for Life issued a blistering report documenting a multitude of abuses by Planned Parenthood.  Combing through 20 years of records, AUL found that PP has overbilled millions to the Medicaid program.  In California alone, there were $180 million in excess billings over six years.  Planned Parenthood has been repeatedly stung in videotaped undercover operations showing how it hides the sexual abuse and sex trafficking of minors.  It refuses to comply with, and actively lobbies against, parental involvement laws.  It opposes as too expensive legislative efforts to provide medical safeguards for women.  It overprescribes the dangerous abortion drug RU 486 and misleads women about so called-emergency contraception medication.  Based on the AUL report, the U.S. House has begun an inquiry of Planned Parenthood’s operations, and states have started to defund it.

But far more than financing and politics are at work.  Unwilling to remain part of the death machine, in 2009 Abby Johnson stunned Planned Parenthood by resigning as director of a Texas clinic.  Planned Parenthood sued to keep her quiet.  It lost, and since then Johnson has been anything but quiet.   Now a pro-life activist, she has identified Planned Parenthood’s Achilles heel: clinic workers who desperately want out.  Slowly but surely, it is happening.  In May, Ramona Trevino resigned as manager of now-closed Planned Parenthood abortion-referral center in Texas.  In Boston, Catherine Adair has resigned as a PP clinic worker.  Their compelling stories are bound together by a common thread.  They could no longer stand their complicity in the lies and the death.  Two more clinic workers have now resigned in Texas.

These women had help in leaving, help of a spiritual kind.  In 1998, David Bereit organized a group of churches protesting the coming of a Planned Parenthood facility in his town.  By 2004, he founded 40 Days for Life, a coordinated effort of prayer, fasting, peaceful vigils at clinics, and community outreach.  Today, 40 Days for Life conducts spring and fall campaigns in 337 cities across all 50 states as well as in Canada, England, Australia, Northern Ireland, and Denmark.  Over 400,000 people from 13,000 church congregations of all denominations have participated.  The campaign is credited with saving over 4,300 lives, closing fourteen clinics, and empowering 53 clinic workers to quit their jobs.

The 40 Days campaigns are well organized, but in a way they are nothing new.  For years, warriors have taken to the sidewalks to do battle against the madness of legal abortion. Their ages span the decades of life.  Their weapons are Bibles and rosaries.  Their tactics are basic: they walk, stand, and kneel.  They counsel women.  But mostly, they pray.  Their efforts speak to the power of direct communication with God.  Abby Johnson and Ramona Trevino felt the power of prayer coming from those who stood outside their facilities.  In time, they realized that those prayer warriors, not Planned Parenthood, had their best interests at heart.

Abby Johnson recently said: “It isn’t just enough to pray at home anymore.”  We must go to the clinics, “even at night,” because “you never know whose life you’re going to touch.  You never know who is waiting to hear those words of hope from you, that life-saving message.”  Legal abortion is not just a spring and fall evil.  We must be year-round warriors, circling the walls as long as it takes.   We all have clinics near us. And we have time enough to pray. We need to provide help.  We need to provide hope.  We need to provide the shout.

God’s timing is impeccable.  Maybe we’ll be there when the walls come tumbling down.

Paul V. Esposito is a Catholic lawyer who writes on a variety of pro-life topics.  He and his wife Kathy live in Elmhurst, Illinois, where they are raising their six kids.

© Paul V. Esposito 2011.  Culture of Life.  Permission to copy and distribute for pro-life purposes is granted.  Comments?  Visit us at http://www.the-culture-of-life.com/

If those Madison Avenue television execs are good at anything, it’s playing the culture for profit.  During the ’60s America’s baby boomers were becoming teenagers. Their heads were into the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys, and anyone else who rocked. A sitcom about a rock band could attract lots of audience, and sell lots of advertising. For NBC, it was a no-brainer. In 1966 the Monkees, band and show, were born.

The Monkees’ music was mostly fluff stuff. But their 1967 cut Pleasant Valley Sunday, named after a street in West Orange, NJ, offered a timely commentary about comfort and the complacency that follows. Another Pleasant Valley Sunday, charcoal burning everywhere. Rows of houses that are all the same, and no one seems to care.  See Mrs. Gray she’s proud today because her roses are in bloom; and Mr. Greene he’s so serene, he’s got a TV in every room. Meanwhile, Mrs. Gray and Mr. Greene were perfectly oblivious to what was happening off Pleasant Valley Way.  Streets across the country were exploding in war protest and literally aflame in racial violence.

It would be marvelous if our most demanding tasks were sitting on patio chairs watching the roses bloom. With Adam’s sin, we lost that gig. Our lives are physically, mentally, and emotionally burdensome. But our greatest burden is dealing with the effect of sin on our weak natures.  Life is often a battle between good and evil, a battle we often lose.  That may not change any time soon.  But mindful of our needs, Jesus instituted His Church and established as its ultimate mission the salvation of all people.

That mission won’t be easy. Jesus’ assurance that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church portends battle against an enemy hell-bent on driving us into hell.  Knowing that he cannot prevail against God, Satan’s plan is simple: to bring with him as many souls as possible.  Misery loves company.   Satan understands our weaknesses, and he knows how, when, and where to attack.

Throughout human history, the master of deceit has successfully used every trick in the book to capture souls. The 20th century saw the rise of Communism, a political system that viewed God and Church as unwanted competition.  The once “Holy Russia” became atheistic Russia.  The Soviet state forced the closure of churches and indoctrinated the people in the ways of godless life.  Many gave up their faith, and many others never came to know it.

But God has his warriors. A teenage bully in a Shenandoah, PA street gang, in 1928 Walter Ciszek surprised family and friends with his plan to become a priest.  While a Jesuit novitiate, God’s called him to accept Pope Pius XI’s request for missionaries to flood Russia, where thousands of priests had been killed.  In 1940, he and two others slipped through Poland into Russia to begin their religious ministry. One year later, Soviet police arrested Ciszek for espionage. He was thrown into solitary confinement for five years at the infamous Lubianka prison.  There he was beaten, repeatedly threatened, starved, drugged, and ultimately coerced into giving a false confession.  Convicted as a “Vatican spy,” Ciszek was shipped to Siberia for fifteen years to provide slave labor in oppressive work camps.  He was once made to stand in front of a firing squad, rifles aimed at his head.

For Fr. Ciszek, life was not meant for complacency.  He understood that God had called him to carry the cross for the oppressed souls of Russia.  In imitation of Jesus, he brought Christ’s light in the midst of the darkness.  Ciszek’s love for God intensified his love for his fellow man.  He ministered to the spiritual needs of the oppressed even at great personal risk.  The salvation of their souls was worth more than his life.

Today, the great battle in human history may be here at home.  We have been willing to sacrifice anything at the altar of personal convenience, gain, and pleasure including the unborn, who are dying by the millions with no end in sight.  Like an unchecked cancer, the evil of abortion has spread throughout our culture.  We give school children condoms and teach how to use them.  Abortions follow.  We fund organizations that kill but refuse funding for those teaching abstinence. We create life only to destroy it in mindless experiments.  We deny people the right to object and jail people who do.  We even seek to re-program genes to create designer children, as if God doesn’t matter.  By removing God’s way from our way of life, we are losing our fellowship with man.  And we are plunging into deep spiritual and cultural darkness.

Yet we can be so indifferent to it.  All too often we live as Catholics in name only.  On Sundays we are more mindful of sports, parties, or shopping than of the cross that Jesus carried to save our souls.  Not seeing Him, we fail to see the need to minister to others.  We choose complacency over involvement.  We’d rather watch television, do something easy, or just do nothing.  We are content that abortion is “not my issue,” convinced that “I’m not the problem here.”  Another Pleasant Valley Sunday, this time on our street.

None of us get to choose the time and place of our birth.  We don’t choose the world problems that we will face.  Those choices belong to God, and He undoubtedly has His reasons for them.  But we can choose how we will respond.  October is Respect Life Month.  For Catholics, it must be more than the general remembrance of an issue that we will promptly push aside.  Instead, it must be a call to all Catholics to see the darkness and ask God how He wants us to shine His light.  He may call us to act out of our comfort zones.  But then, it couldn’t have been easy to stare into the business end of a firing squad.  Or carry a cross up a hill.

God’s Church will prevail.  Will we be able to count ourselves among the victors?

Paul V. Esposito is a Catholic lawyer who writes on a variety of pro-life topics.  He and his wife Kathy live in Elmhurst, Illinois, where they are raising their six kids.

©  Paul V. Esposito 2011.  Culture of Life.  Permission to copy and distribute for pro-life purposes is granted.  Comments?  Visit us at http://www.the-culture-of-life.com/

After years of light movies, Rooney’s breakout dramatic role came in 1938 when he co-starred with Spencer Tracy in Boy’s Town. But it was Tracy who won the best actor award for his portrayal of Fr. Edward Flanagan, an Irish priest who in 1921 established a home for boys outside Omaha, Nebraska. Fr. Flanagan’s work was grounded on a simple rule: “There are no bad boys. There is only bad environment, bad training, bad example, and bad thinking.” No boy was unwanted, and Fr. Flanagan spent his life seeking a place for every one.

Children have not always been spared from man’s inhumanities.  In fact, they have even been the targets. The ancient Spartans, a warrior people, would throw unhealthy looking infants off Mt. Taigetos. In Nazi Germany, the Reich separated orphans, children with disabilities and behavior problems, and other “imperfect” kids from their families. The Nazis wanted to purify the bloodline of the master race. Just days after the war’s start, Hitler issued a decree authorizing doctors to kill children. And they did, but not before subjecting many to experimentation. Brokenhearted parents were told that their murdered children died from flu.

Doctors here received their licenses to kill not by a dictator’s decree but by a court’s judgment. Since 1973, over 53 million unborn babies have been legally dismembered, scalded, crushed, and trashed. But we don’t claim to do it for harsh sounding reasons like strengthening our military or purifying a bloodline. We mask our brutality with notions of fairness and compassion. It’s only fair, we say, that a woman be allowed to take the life of a baby she chooses to not carry.  It lacks compassion, we maintain, to make a woman bear a child suffering from disabilities or conceived out of rape or incest.  We even claim that abortion can be a compassionate alternative to birth.  Back in my college days, a professor invoked the Bible in suggesting that it would be better that a baby “not be born” than to be born unwanted.  Ironically, that Bible verse warns that it would be better to not be born than to betray the Son of Man (Mk: 14:21). It’s amazing how far we can wander off script.

By definition, every aborted child is unwanted. But we need to be honest about why most are unwanted. Only about six percent of all abortions are performed for reasons of rape, incest, or the mother and child’s health combined. Most babies are aborted because they are inconvenient for one reason or another. The parents wanted the sexual relationships. What they didn’t want is the responsibility to abstain out of marriage or naturally plan during marriage. Sadly, we are killing babies for our own comfort.

But what about babies conceived out of rape or incest? Another Bible verse reminds us that we must not punish a child for the sins of his father. But Bible aside, killing a baby is unjust under any civilized standard. Abortion is not an act of self-defense; the crime is over long before the abortion occurs. Besides, we do not allow victims to take the law into their own hands in dealing with criminals. Why should a mother be allowed to kill an innocent unborn baby? Children can be placed for adoption; countless couples would gladly adopt children conceived in rape or incest. And in the end, abortion only harms women more. They must live not only with pain as victims of crime but also with guilt for causing the death of their own children.

Aborting an unwanted baby is a very one-sided affair. We never get to hear from the baby, and that’s wrong because an abortion involves two humans. But just how do we give voice to the unborn?  Perhaps by listening to the voices of abortion survivors.  Gianna Jensen, now 24, was in the process of dying by saline abortion. She survived because the abortionist was late for work. She remained in the hospital for months and was diagnosed with cerebral palsy caused by the abortion. “I am happy to be alive. I almost died. Every day I thank God for life.”  Sarah Smith, now 31, survived because the abortionist didn’t realize that Sarah’s mother was carrying twins. Born with bilateral, congenital dislocated legs and many other handicaps, Sarah still thanks God that she survived abortion.  And then there was the mother chose life even though told that her son would likely be disabled. He was born with severe glaucoma. By age twelve he was blind. But God had gifted tenor Andrea Bocelli with a voice and a will to use it for good. It’s been said that if God sings, He sounds like Bocelli.

There lies our greatest mistake: we have tried to switch places with God.  All life comes from Him, not us; we only cooperate in the process. Saying that it would be better that an unwanted child be aborted speaks not of our compassion but of our arrogance. It is saying that God made a mistake. It is saying that we know better than God, and we must correct His error by killing an unwanted unborn baby. We have thrust ourselves onto center stage, somehow thinking that we have a right to play God with another’s life. But we don’t get it.

Truth be told, every child is a wanted child, wanted by God. He allows bad things to happen so that good can come from them and His greatness may be revealed. A child can bring comfort and healing to a victim of rape or incest. A child can bring fulfillment and indescribable joy to a couple longing for family. A child can uplift the heart of every person watching him overcome a disability. A child can let us hear how God sings. That’s God’s plan, and it will work for the good of all if trust in Him. It can be difficult. But that’s why God gives us each other.

God belongs on center stage, not us. He’s a whole lot better in the starring role.

Paul V. Esposito is a Catholic lawyer who writes on a variety of pro-life topics.  He and his wife Kathy live in Elmhurst, Illinois, where they are raising their six kids.

© Paul V. Esposito 2011.  Culture of Life.  Permission to copy and distribute for pro-life purposes is granted.  Comments? Visit us at http://www.the-culture-of-life.com

For ten years Mariana was a member of Anima, a young people’s chorale. Since 1964 Anima has been helping choristers experience the wonder of music and song. Their repertoire varies from the most profound sacred music to the funkiest rock n’ roll. No language is off limits. They have sung all over the world, premiered children’s music, and accompanied professional orchestras, ballet troupes, and theatre companies. Led by gifted and dedicated instructors, the choristers celebrate the highs and lows, joys and sorrows of life through God’s gift of music. They leave their audiences smiling, sometimes crying, and by concert’s end almost always standing and cheering. Anima is truly one of Chicagoland’s best-kept secrets.

Over a half-century before Anima was born, an immigrant was writing. For Lebanese-born Kahlil Gibran, life was a struggle.  Born in 1883 during his mother’s third marriage to an irresponsible man, Gibran was homeless by eight years old. He suffered a childhood accident that weakened him for life. His only early education came from a Marionite priest who saw something special in him. In 1895, Gibran’s strong-willed mother brought them to the U.S., where Gibran developed his skills as both artist and writer. In 1923, he published The Prophet, a collection of Gibran’s writings as told through Al Mustafa, a chosen one about to return home after years of exile. Unheralded at first, The Prophet became wildly popular during the counter-cultural ’60s.  By the ’70s, it had become a staple of Catholic weddings.

This past season the Anima choristers, swinging and swaying in a church sanctuary, breathed life into one of Gibran’s most cherished passages. Asked to “speak to us about Children,” Al Mufasta said:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts.

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

It was a glorious moment as the kids joyfully proclaimed their dignity and value.

Yet many in our culture reject their words. Through you but not from you? With you but not belonging to you?  Our culture treats the unborn as mere pieces of personal property, stuff we own and can junk up to the moment of birth. According to our Supreme Court, liberty is the right to define our own concept of the mystery of human life.  It sounds nice, but there is a world of difference between defining and acting. It’s the difference between philosophers and madmen. The right to think does not beget us the right to kill.  But in our me-first culture, that distinction is largely lost. Wrong time, financial worries, health concerns, unmarried, embarrassing, inconvenient?  They all work, for life is all about us.

Anima’s singers, like all other children of our day, are not ordinary kids. They are the survivors of an unholy culture war two generations old. The Supreme Court took away their right to be born. They survived legal abortion by the luck of the draw. Of course, this is not the first time that we have put ourselves before others, for we are a fallen people. But the stakes have never been higher. We are killing our present and our future, Life’s longing for itself.

Something was obviously missing from that stage: more choristers. If we really believed the words, just think how many more choristers would have graced that church. How many more would be adding joy and beauty to this world.  How many more would become the role models and heroes that our culture desperately needs. We have silenced the music of life.

As for the parents, Gibran had these words:

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The Archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness;

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

In our futile search for self-fulfillment, we forget that by serving God’s purpose rather than our own, we find the fullness of life’s meaning. Life is not about self, for self dies when we die. Life is about God’s Plan to bring all creation back to Him. We are part of the continuum of life, not its summit. He calls us to cooperate with His gift of life, not discard life when it fails to serve our interests.  When the circumstances of new life are most difficult for us, He will reward us for our fidelity. We can count on His help. We can count on His love.

After all, His bows were once His arrows.

Paul V. Esposito is a Catholic lawyer who writes on a variety of pro-life topics.  He and his wife Kathy live in Elmhurst, Illinois, where they are raising their six kids.

© Paul V. Esposito 2011.  Culture of Life.  Permission to copy and distribute for pro-life purposes is granted.  Comments? Visit us at http://www.the-culture-of-life.com

Many of Rockwell’s illustrations were produced during one of America’s most difficult times. Hitler’s juggernaut had overrun Europe, subjecting all in its cruel path to suffering and death. In early 1941, as the prospect of U.S. involvement grew, President Franklin Roosevelt rallied Congress and the people to the cause of freedom. In his mind, four freedoms were essential: freedom of worship, freedom of speech, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Two years later, Rockwell set those freedoms to oil on canvas. Rockwell’s Four Freedoms, exhibited throughout the country and reproduced on posters and postage stamps, helped to raise about $132 billion for the cause. A reviewer said that Fours Freedoms was received more enthusiastically than possibly any other paintings in American history.

That reaction was not just a testament to America’s love of Rockwell’s works. It was a testament to our love of freedom. We cherish our liberty as an inalienable right. But we have lost sight of its meaning and source. In our blindness we are treating the killing of innocent human beings as freedom, something it is not.

Thirty years after Four Freedoms, the Supreme Court claimed to have discovered a fifth freedom, one supposedly hidden in the shadows of the Constitution. It is the so-called right of reproductive freedom, better known as legal abortion. It has become so woven into the fabric of our culture that those who oppose it are even seen as unpatriotic. Recently, Frank Lautenberg, a U.S. senator from New Jersey, spoke at a rally of Planned Parenthood supporters seeking to retain PP’s federal funding. Met with resistance from pro-lifers, Lautenberg shouted, “These people don’t deserve the freedoms in the Constitution.” As an afterthought he added, “But we’ll give it to them anyway.”

The Supreme Court and the senator have highlighted our misunderstanding of the nature and source of freedom. We easily confuse the concepts of freedom and license. Freedom is the ability to act on one’s own, the power to direct and control one’s own life. But freedom is only a means to an end. It implies the responsibility to pursue good. True freedom exists only when it brings us to the objectively good. Authentic freedom drives us to seek God, our greatest good. That’s why the catch phrase “freedom of choice” is misleading. It begs the question: free to choose what? By contrast, the perversion of freedom is license, which acts for its own end unrestrained by any moral sense or right or wrong. Reason gets tossed out the window. A person does what, when, and how he wants, regardless of its effect on self or others. Just as true freedom ultimately liberates, license ultimately enslaves.

Legal abortion is a not freedom at all. At its core is an evil act. What other freedom seeks to kill an innocent human being? Or put another way, why don’t abortion advocates ever fully answer that question: choose what? People may have various reasons to seek abortions, but the object of the “choice” is always the same: the intended death of an unborn baby.

We have also misunderstood the source of our freedom.  We see government as its source, and worse yet, so does government. Just ask Frank Lautenberg. But our freedoms don’t come from senators, or judges, or even the Constitution. Our freedoms are a gift given by our Creator, and if we forget that truth we will surrender them. Ironically, we may have already started the process through the decision legalizing abortion. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruled that the unborn are not persons. By default, they become property. The Constitution authorizes the government to take property provided that it pays just compensation.  Down the road, a government wanting to control population may use that power to force abortions. It’s happening now in China. This June, Al Gore called for the limiting of family sizes to protect the environment. Gore was one vote away from the Presidency.

In 1863, we warred over whether a class of human beings legally could be treated as property. Six years earlier, the Supreme Court had said yes. In three July days at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, about 8,000 soldiers were killed. As the war moved elsewhere, their rotting bodies littered the field. Local officials created a cemetery, and as an afterthought asked President Lincoln to offer “a few appropriate remarks” at its dedication.  We know the remarks. Our nation was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Lincoln’s memorable words recognized the connection between life and freedom. Our founding fathers conceived a country in which the right to life served as the basis of freedom and the pursuit of happiness. They understood that the right to life was God’s gift meant for all, not just the privileged and powerful. And for his part, Lincoln confirmed the truth that government’s purpose is to preserve the freedom of all, not to take it away.

Lincoln believed that if the living dedicated themselves to the unfinished work of the dead, our country would at last experience a “new birth of freedom.”  Today we are fighting another war. We have our own dead, 53 million and counting, lost to another false notion of freedom. Our women and men, young and old, are being enslaved by the license of legal abortion. It is our turn to dedicate ourselves to the task ahead.

A new birth of freedom. Authentic freedom. For all. It’s worth the fight.

Paul V. Esposito is a Catholic lawyer who writes on a variety of pro-life topics.  He and his wife Kathy live in Elmhurst, Illinois, where they are raising their six kids.

© Paul V. Esposito 2011.  Culture of Life.  Permission to copy and distribute for pro-life purposes is granted.  Comments? Visit us at http://www.the-culture-of-life.com

Done right, a Scout troop is boy-led. Adults are only there to provide safety and basic structure.  Putting boys in the lead can make things rather interesting, especially on camp-outs.  Boy Scouts are usually no more interested in reading maps than are their dads. They have that innate male sense that they know where they’re going: “Maps? We don’ need no stinkin’ maps!” Once a Scout had us hiking an extra three miles. We realized that we were off the trail when we finally figured out that we were hiking a dry creek bed.

Our culture sees abortion as a women’s issue, one about the right to control their bodies. Years after Roe v. Wade was decided, authoring justice Harry Blackmun claimed it was about the emancipation of women. But the involvement of men in the abortion tragedy has been significant. Those nine justices deciding Roe were all men. And legal abortion still exists largely because of men. More precisely, it still exists largely because men got lost.

God has given men instincts and drives. Men are dreamers, and they are driven to achieve their dreams. Those dreams often involve others. Just as God knew that it was not good for man to be alone, men instinctively seek companionship. They desire wives. Men have an instinctive desire to create, and that includes the creation of family. They take great pride in knowing that their wives are with child. And that triggers two drives. Men will provide mother and child with all that they can. They work harder and longer. They sacrifice more. And they protect. Men stand in the way of all that might harm their families. Done right, the drives to create, provide, and protect fill men with great pleasure. As did their own Creator, men can look back at what they have done and say that it is very good.

Men are instinctively pro-life. Ted Kennedy once wrote, ” . . . the legalization of abortion on demand is not in accordance with the value which our civilization places on human life. Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized - the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.” He believed that children must be protected “from the very moment of conception.” But by his death Kennedy was a pro-abortion lion who even opposed laws that would outlaw partial-birth abortions. He was not the only man who did. Why did men abandon what came so naturally to them?

In part, it’s because many men have chosen what is easy over what is right. Rather than creating life in the proper context of marriage and family, men bought into the contraceptive mentality of the sexual revolution. They could have the pleasure they sought without the responsibility that should come along with it.  Why buy a cow when milk is so cheap?  Lacking any lasting commitment to the women they unexpectedly impregnated, many men abandoned them. Many other men participated in decisions to abort their children. In both cases, men overrode their basic instincts to create, provide, and protect.

And men abandoned their instincts for another reason: power. A man’s instinct to protect requires him to hold power over others. Once gained, power is not readily surrendered, and that often leads to abuse. When the Supreme Court authorized abortion on demand, the men in power knew that the decision was morally and legally wrong. But they saw a way to turn abortion to their own advantage. They backed a woman’s so-called right to “choose,” even though it really meant a right to kill, in exchange for the support of the women’s voting block. Today, legal abortion is the elephant in the closet of national politics. Supreme Court justices are selected not because of legal ability but because of their stand on abortion. And although men have retained political power, in the process they institutionalized evil.

Ironically, men have become victims of the immoral acts they have perpetuated. Many post-abortive men carry deep-seated anger over their involvement in abortions.  For some, the anger comes from the guilt of encouraging women to abort. Guilt can be enormous when it involves a decision to kill a man’s own child. For others, it comes from the inability to change a woman’s decision to abort. Under our legal system a man’s desires are irrelevant, which leaves him full of anger over his inability to reach a better outcome.

Problems follow under either scenario. The rock group Aerosmith’s book Walk This Way recounts Steven Tyler’s experience. Tyler reflects, “You go to the doctor and they put the needle in her belly and they squeeze the stuff in and you watch.  And it comes out dead. I was pretty devastated.  In my mind, I’m going, Jesus, what have I done.” Tyler turned to alcohol and barbiturates to dull the pain. Many others have done likewise. Relationships with the women shatter, as was true with Tyler. Some become workaholics hoping to bury their mistake. Others cannot hold a job. They distrust women, suffer sexual dysfunctions, and turn to pornography or masturbation. They live with nightmares and panic attacks. They are deeply troubled.

As any Scout knows, camping can be terribly unforgiving.  Make a mistake, and a high price often must be paid. So it is with legal abortion. Like women, men are paying a tremendous price for ignoring what God has placed inside them. For the good of all, males must become the men God calls them to be. Night is falling.

And that’s a very bad time to be lost in the woods.
Paul V. Esposito is a Catholic lawyer who writes on a variety of pro-life topics.  He and his wife Kathy live in Elmhurst, Illinois, where they are raising their six kids.

© Paul V. Esposito 2011.  Culture of Life.  Permission to copy and distribute for pro-life purposes is granted.  Comments? Visit us at http://www.the-culture-of-life.com

The Stooges filmed during the 1930s Depression, and they made it part of their movies. In their 1936 short, Ants In The Pantry, the Stooges were one afternoon away from being fired as exterminators.  Desperate to drum up business, they secretly crashed a high-society party, planting ants, mice, and moths throughout a mansion. Later appearing at the front door as Heaven-sent helpers, they made a mess of the party as only the Stooges could.

Today’s business-getting techniques are tamer, albeit not as funny.  Perhaps the most tried-and-true way is the loss leader.  A business owner might sell a product at an incredible discount, even a loss, to attract customers to buy other goods.  Those electronics and computer hardware gizmos in the kids’ hands and ears are relatively cheap; the big money lies in the software.  Successful businesses understand that a little loss can produce huge profits.

By any business standard, the abortion industry is highly profitable.  Industry leader Planned Parenthood has net assets of almost $1.0 billion.  About eleven percent of PP’s non-duplicate clients are abortion patients.  Since 1970, it has performed at least 5.3 million abortions, the population of Colorado.  In 2009 alone, it performed a record 332,278 abortions, the population of Cincinnati.  It doesn’t do them for free.  Each costs between $350-950. You do the math. Planned Parenthood won’t, at least not for public consumption.  And remember, Planned Parenthood does only one-quarter of the nation’s abortions. The annual revenue from abortions nationwide is in the hundreds and hundreds of millions.

How does the industry sustain and even grow those profits? It has a very effective business plan.  The industry uses a loss leader: the sex education.  In the video exposé Blood Money, former provider Carol Everett described how it’s done. Abortion providers break down children’s natural sense of modesty, cut their connection to parents and appropriate authority figures, and sell themselves as experts. Sexually active youngsters are fed a diet of free or cheap birth control. Cheap means more than inexpensive. A 2005 Consumer Reports survey ranked Planned Parenthood’s condoms as the worst.  Everett said that girls are given a low dose birth control that must be taken at exactly the same time daily to be effective.  When a girl suspects a pregnancy, trained abortion counselors swoop down for the kill. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Everett said that if a girl has an abortion by age sixteen, she’ll have 3-4 more. She ought to know: Everett holds herself accountable for 35,000 abortions.

The lust for money is so insatiable that PP even promotes sex among young people with HIV.  International Planned Parenthood’s guide, Healthy, Happy and Hot tells infected youth that they have a right to “decide if, when, and how to disclose their HIV status.”  They have a “right to sexual pleasure.” It encourages the young to “[j]ust have fun, explore and be yourself!” “Masturbation is a great way to find out more about your body and what you find sexually stimulating.” “Talk about or act out your fantasies.  Talk dirty to [your partner].  Tickle, tease and make them feel good.” It mentions condom use but fails to mention that according to PP’s own research arm, condoms have a 17.4 percent failure rate.  The CDC considers them virtually worthless in preventing sexually transmitted diseases. Yet PP vice-president of medical affairs Dr. Vanessa Cullins declares on YouTube: “Expect to have HPV [a cancer causing virus] once you become sexually intimate - all of us get it.”  For PP, getting an STD is like getting a zit.

In 2008-09, PP claims to have spent $52 million on sex education.  That’s chump change compared to what it expects to reap.  For the abortion industry, sex education is designed for sex, not for education. So sex education is pushed far and wide, even to ten-year olds.  It leaves our kids deprived, in a different way. Deprived of their innocence, sometimes their health, and often their future happiness. They are the real loss in loss leader.

International Planned Parenthood has stated that religion is a major obstacle to implementing its sex agenda for the young. That should tell us where we must focus our efforts. They must start with the truth that God has given us our sexuality to be used for good consistent with our stations in life. Our sexuality allows for human attraction, friendship, and ultimately for loving commitment that cooperates with God’s creative plan for the next generation.  The pleasure obtained from our sexuality is meant to be the reward for the good ways we use it.

Like our other desires, our sexual desire must be controlled. It is no easy task for young people living in a culture that waves sex in their faces.  They need our help. We must guide and guard our young from the sexual sights and sounds that constantly bombard them. We must speak out against those who would profit at their expense.  Most of all, we must teach them the meaning of real love. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is pure. Love is about virtue, not about self-pleasure. Those are good words. Too bad we’ve been afraid to teach and model them.

A stooge is the butt of a comedian’s joke. Our reluctance to give our young needed guidance in God’s way has turned them into stooges, the butt of the abortion industry’s cruel joke. Planned Parenthood and the other predators are the ones doing the laughing.

All the way to the bank.

Paul V. Esposito is a Catholic lawyer who writes on a variety of pro-life topics.  He and his wife Kathy live in Elmhurst, Illinois, where they are raising their six kids.

© Paul V. Esposito 2011.  Culture of Life.  Permission to copy and distribute for pro-life purposes is granted.  Comments? Visit us at http://www.the-culture-of-life.com

Turns out that it was all about a sign on their front lawn.  It wasn’t big or graphic.  Its message was simple: “Abortion stops a beating heart.” Although claiming to agree “100 percent,” the neighbor (and supposedly others) didn’t like the message being “thrown in [their] faces” and  “shove[d] . . . down everyone’s throat.”  Proclaiming it in the neighborhood was “[un]reasonable” and “gross.” Twice more the note repeated the shame theme.  Good thing that neighbor agreed 100 percent.  The note would have been really nasty otherwise.

Recently, a much bigger sign found its way into a much bigger neighborhood.  The pro-life organization Life Always paid to display a four-story billboard in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City.  It showed a beautiful six-year old black child, above whom was another simple message: “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.”  The sign caused a firestorm.  Pro-abortion Rev. Al Sharpton said the sign “sends a message of racial profiling and discourages a woman’s right to choose.” Planned Parenthood, which in 2010 did 17,000 abortions in New York City alone, called the sign “an offensive and condescending effort to stigmatize and shame African American women . . ..”  But two black pastors head Life Always.  PP also claimed that the sign seeks to “discredit the work of Planned Parenthood,” a telling statement about PP’s real mission given that the sign does not mention PP.  Uncomfortable about the controversy, Lamar Advertising took down the sign.

When the subject is abortion, reactions to a pro-life message are often fierce.  Walter Hoye knows that truth only too well.  Hoye, age 54, is a black pastor in south Berekley, California.  In 2009, Rev. Hoye went to abortion clinics in Oakland to pass out pro-life literature on the sidewalk.  He carried a sign: “Jesus loves you and your baby.  Let us help you.”  He was prosecuted for violating an Oakland ordinance requiring abortion protesters from approaching within eight feet of women, staffers, and escorts entering clinics.   Clinic staffers would surround him, block his signs with large pieces of cardboard, and make loud noise to block out his words.  At trial the defense produced video evidence that the prosecution conjured up phantom victims.  In the end, it didn’t matter.  Hoye was sentenced to 30 days in jail.

The battle to rebuild a culture of life is no picnic.  It will not be won by a slick slogan or by yet another parish program.  It cannot be won with just a small cadre of pro-life warriors.  The battle for the culture is a battle for the hearts and minds of people in our homes, schools, workplaces, and parishes.  It is often waged house-to-house, face-to-face.  And as any war veteran will agree, those close-in battles are the worst.  There will be casualties.

That’s what makes us afraid to join the fight: it could be us.  Will my spouse and kids roll their eyes at me if I say “no” to the wrong television shows or movies?  Will my boyfriend stop liking me if I tell him that I want to wait?  Will word spread around the office if I tell a colleague that I’m pro-life or if I challenge a colleague’s pro-abortion views?   What if clients see me holding a sign or praying near an abortion clinic?  Do I dare vote against a pro-abortion candidate from my lifelong party?  What will my pastor say if I pass out pro-life literature?  Should I preach about the unborn more than once a year, if that much?  Fear can be very real.

As Jesus moved from town to town His popularity grew, and why not.  He healed the sick, chased out demons, and fed 9,000 hungry people with just a few loaves and fishes.  But He had a more important mission to accomplish.  He had to repair a breach caused by Adam’s willful disobedience.  That breach could only be fixed by His obeying the Father’s will, wherever that would lead him.  Jesus knew just where it would lead Him.  The thought made Him sweat blood.  Yet He obeyed.  He carried the Cross to His death, but not before He was betrayed, denied, unjustly accused, slapped, scourged, whipped, spit on, mocked, and pierced with thorns and nails.  How did He overcome the fear of all that?  In a word, Love.  He loved His people so much that He could endure whatever came His way.  Jesus’ love even allowed Him to die for the people who were killing Him.  That includes us.

Jesus told us that if we want to be His followers, we must carry the cross of insult and ridicule, rejection and even persecution.  Christianity is not for the faint of heart.  Ask any martyr.  But we can do it if we remember that love overcomes fear.  Rev. Hoye did not need to go to jail.  The judge offered him a different sentence if he would stay 100 yards from a clinic, about over 37 times the required distance.  Love for the unborn and their mothers would not allow him to do so.  He chose the Cross.  It was his sign of love.

In love we must speak the truth, come what may.  Abortion does stop a beating heart.  The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.  In New York City, where about 41 percent of all babies are aborted, the rate for African Americans is about 60 percent.  More black babies are killed than see the light of day.  But those messages must not just come from signs.  The pro-life message must come from each of us.  Face to face, heart to heart.  Will it be a struggle? Sure, for love does not end fear.  But love overcomes fear. Love will help us to speak about the things that need to be heard to those who may not want to hear it.  Love will help us to witness in ways that fear would otherwise cause us to reject.  We just need to remember what perfect Love did for us.  On the Cross.  That is our sign.

The only sign that matters.

Paul V. Esposito is a Catholic lawyer who writes on a variety of pro-life topics.  He and his wife Kathy live in Elmhurst, Illinois, where they are raising their six kids.

© Paul V. Esposito 2011.  Culture of Life.  Permission to copy and distribute for pro-life purposes is granted.  Comments? Visit us at http://www.the-culture-of-life.com

Secondhand smoke, the mixture of smoke from burning tobacco and a smoker’s exhale, contains 7,000 chemicals.  Of them, 250 are harmful and at least 69 cause cancer.   Living with a smoker increase the chances of cancer and heart disease by 20-30%.  Annually, about 3,400 nonsmokers in the U.S. die from cancer and another 46,000 from heart disease. Children are at increased risk for SIDS, ear infections, colds, bronchitis pneumonia, and severe asthma. As the smoke cloud grows, so does the destruction.

There is another kind of secondhand smoke. When King David took Uriah’s wife Bathsheba, she became pregnant with his child. Needing Uriah dead, David ordered him to the front of a fierce battle where he was killed. David then took Bathsheba as his wife. More death followed, but in David’s own house.  Years later, there was Herod.  His pride so overwhelmed him that he could not bear the thought of a rival.  To ensure that he had none, he wiped out Bethlehem’s innocents.  Evil begets evil. Sin begets sin.

Last year, federal and Pennsylvania authorities raided a West Philadelphia clinic run by Dr. Kermit Gosnell.  They expected to find illegal drug activity.  But as recently detailed by a grand jury, they found a horror house filled with animal feces, bloodstained blankets and furniture, unsterilized instruments, and broken equipment. Moaning semi-conscious women were lying in waiting and recovery rooms.  Bags and boxes of unborn babies were scattered throughout the clinic.  One shelf contained bottles of severed feet.

Gosnell and his unlicensed staff performed abortions on babies far later than allowed by Pennsylvania law. Gosnell joked about aborting a baby so big that he could “walk me to the bus stop.” He did the “really big ones” on Sundays, when no one else was present.  Rather than just partially delivering a late-term baby, he would completely deliver the newborn, and then cut the child’s spinal cord with scissors. He probably killed “hundreds” of babies that way. A woman who changed her mind was tied down; women who screamed were drugged into a stupor.  He botched numerous abortions, leaving bleeding and butchered women to fend for themselves.  One woman died at his hand.

All of this could have been prevented. State health officials inspected his clinic only once during its first ten years. In 1993, the state stopped checking abortion clinics to avoid “putting up a barrier to women” seeking abortions. When complaints came about Gosnell’s illegal later-term abortions, the transmission of venereal disease from his clinic, and even a wrongful death, the state did nothing.  State medical licensing officials were handed evidence about Gosnell yet ignored it.   A local hospital treating the women whom he injured only once complied with its legal duty to report the problems.  And when Gosnell sought certification from the National Abortion Federation, its inspector saw the substandard conditions but failed to report him.

Then there is Planned Parenthood, which claims to be “America’s most trusted provider of reproductive health care.” In taped stings, student-led Live Action members posing as pimps and prostitutes spoke to PP staffers about testing and birth control for underage sex slaves.  Both sex trafficking and aiding and abetting it are federal crimes.  In New Jersey, a PP staffer told them to lie about the slaves’ ages and student status: “[W]e want it to look as legit as possible.”  Asked what the minors could do while recovering from abortions, the staffer responded: “Waist up, or just be that extra action walking by.”  In Virginia, PP told a Live Action couple how to avoid judicial bypass rules meant to protect minors.  It didn’t get better for PP in New York City and D.C.

We should be outraged but not surprised by these events.  They are the secondhand smoke of abortion. If we can legally kill an unborn baby, there is no floor to what we can do.  Ironically, Gosnell has exposed the charade of partial-birth abortion.  As he showed, it doesn’t matter if a baby’s head is in or out of a mother’s birth canal.  Abortion is about killing, not location. Sadly, pro-abortion public servants called to be watchdogs allowed it all to happen. As for Planned Parenthood, sex slaves are good business at whatever age.  Sooner or later, they’ll become diseased, pregnant, or both. And PP will be waiting for them. Who are the victims of the spreading smoke cloud?  Butchered women, vulnerable children, and an ever-sinking culture, that’s who. We’re all its victims.

God wrote His Law on our hearts for our protection. It provides the fence that keeps us from falling headfirst off a physical, moral, emotional, and cultural cliff. We have allowed that fence to badly deteriorate.  But we can mend it.  People like Gosnell and his staff should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.  And Planned Parenthood should no longer be given an annual $350 million taxpayer gift to accomplish its dirty work.  Bills are pending in Congress to de-fund PP.  Let your voice be heard.

Notice how silent pro-abortion politicians and the mainstream media have been about Gosnell and PP.  For reason after reason, we can’t afford to be.

The smoke is killing us.

Paul V. Esposito is a Catholic lawyer who writes on a variety of pro-life topics.  He and his wife Kathy live in Elmhurst, Illinois, where they are raising their six kids.

© Paul V. Esposito 2011.  Culture of Life.  Permission to copy and distribute for pro-life purposes is granted.  Comments?  Visit us at http://www.the-culture-of-life.com/