This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

The Church Fathers and Ancient Councils on Abortion

[Note: This is also posted here.]

The Canons of the Council of Ancyra (which canons were accepted and received by the ecumenical synods)
Canon XXI.
Concerning women who commit fornication, and destroy that which they have conceived, or who are employed in making drugs for abortion, a former decree excluded them until the hour of death, and to this some have assented. Nevertheless, being desirous to use somewhat greater lenity, we have ordained that they fulfil ten years [of penance], according to the prescribed degrees.

The Constitution of the Holy Apostles
Book VII.
Concerning the Christian life, and the Eucharist and Initiation into Christ
Sec. I
III. Thou shall not slay thy child by causing abortion, nor kill that which is begotten; for "everything that is shaped, and has received a soul from God, if it be slain, shall be avenged, as being unjustly destroyed."

The Didache
(The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles)
CHAP. II.--The Second Commandment: Gross Sin Forbidden
And the second commandment of the Teaching; Thou shalt not commit murder, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not commit paederasty, thou shalt not commit fornication, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not practise magic, thou shalt not practise witchcraft, thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.

Athenagoras of Athens
Apology for the Christians
Chap. XXXV.--The Christians Condemn and Detest All Cruelty
What man of sound mind, therefore, will affirm, while such is our character, that we are murderers? For we cannot eat human flesh till we have killed some one. The former charge, therefore, being false, if any one should ask them in regard to the second, whether they have seen what they assert, not one of them would be so barefaced as to say that he had. And yet we have slaves, some more and some fewer, by whom we could not help being seen; but even of these, not one has been found to invent even such things against us. For when they know that we cannot endure even to see a man put to death, though justly; who of them can accuse us of murder or cannibalism? Who does not reckon among the things of greatest interest the contests of gladiators and wild beasts, especially those which are given by you? But we, deeming that to see a man put to death is much the same as killing him, have abjured such spectacles. How, then, when we do not even look on, lest we should contract guilt and pollution, can we put people to death? And when we say that those women who use drugs to bring on abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God s for the abortion, on what principle should we commit murder? For it does not belong to the same person to regard the very foetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God's care, and when it has passed into life, to kill it; and not to expose an infant, because those who expose them are chargeable with child-murder, and on the other hand, when it has been reared to destroy it. But we are in all things always alike and the same, submitting ourselves to reason, and not ruling over it.

The Epistle of Barnabas
Chap. XIX.--The Way of Light
The way of light, then, is as follows. If any one desires to travel to the appointed place, he must be zealous in his works. The knowledge, therefore, which is given to us for the purpose of walking in this way, is the following. Thou shalt love Him that created thee: thou shalt glorify Him that redeemed thee from death. Thou shalt be simple in heart, and rich in spirit. Thou shalt not join thyself to those who walk in the way of death. Thou shalt hate doing what is unpleasing to God: thou shalt hate all hypocrisy. Thou shalt not forsake the commandments of the Lord. Thou shalt not exalt thyself, but shalt be of a lowly mind. Thou shalt not take glory to thyself. Thou shalt not take evil counsel against thy neighbour. Thou shalt not allow over-boldness to enter into thy soul. Thou shalt not commit fornication: thou shalt not commit adultery: thou shalt not be a corrupter of youth. Thou shalt not let the word of God issue from thy lips with any kind of impurity. Thou shalt not accept persons when thou reprovest any one for transgression. Thou shalt be meek: thou shalt be peaceable. Thou shalt tremble at the words which thou hearest. Thou shalt not be mindful of evil against thy brother. Thou shalt not be of doubtful mind as to whether a thing shall be or not. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain. Thou shalt love thy neighbour more than thine own soul. Thou shalt not slay the child by procuring abortion; nor, again, shalt thou destroy it after it is born. Thou shalt not withdraw thy hand from thy son, or from thy daughter, but from their infancy thou shalt teach them the fear of the Lord.

St. Basil the Great
Letter CLXXXVIII.: (Canonica Prima.) To Amphilochius, concerning the Canons.
VII. On the other hand acts done in the attacks of war or robbery are distinctly intentional, and admit of no doubt. Robbers kill for greed, and to avoid conviction. Soldiers who inflict death in war do so with the obvious purpose not of fighting, nor chastising, but of killing their opponents. And if any one has concocted some magic philtre for some other reason, and then causes death, I count this as intentional. Women frequently endeavour to draw men to love them by incantations and magic knots, and give them drugs which dull their intelligence. Such women, when they cause death, though the result of their action may not be what they intended, are nevertheless, on account of their proceedings being magical and prohibited, to be reckoned among intentional homicides. Women also who administer drugs to cause abortion, as well as those who take poisons to destroy unborn children, are murderesses. So much on this subject.

The Canons of St. Basil
Canon II
Let her that procures abortion undergo ten years' penance, whether the embryo were perfectly formed, or not.
Canon VIII
But the man, or woman, is a murderer that gives a philtrum, if the that takes it die upon it; so are they who take medicines to procure abortion; and so are they who kill on the highway, and rapparees.

St. Jerome
Letter XXII: To Eustochium
13. Some go so far as to take potions, that they may insure barrenness, and thus murder human beings almost before their conception. Some, when they find themselves with child through their sin, use drugs to procure abortion, and when (as often happens) they die with their offspring, they enter the lower world laden with the guilt not only of adultery against Christ but also of suicide and child murder.

St. John Chrysostom
Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans
XXIV: You see how drunkenness leads to whoredom, whoredom to adultery, adultery to murder; or rather to a something even worse than murder. For I have no name to give it, since it does not take off the thing born, but prevent its being born.(2) Why then dost thou abuse the gift of God, and fight with His laws, and follow after what is a curse as if a blessing, and make the chamber of procreation a chamber for murder, and arm the woman that was given for childbearing unto slaughter?

Tertullian
Treatise on the Soul
Chap. XXXVII.--On the Formation and State of the Embryo. Its Relation with the Subject of this Treatise
Now the entire process of sowing, forming, and completing the human embryo in the womb is no doubt regulated by some power, which ministers herein to the will of God, whatever may be the method which it is appointed to employ. Even the superstition of Rome, by carefully attending to these points, imagined the goddess Alemona to nourish the foetus in the womb; as well as (the goddesses) Nona and Decima, called after the most critical months of gestation; and Partula, to manage and direct parturition; and Lucina, to bring the child to the birth and light of day. We, on our part, believe the angels to officiate herein for God. The embryo therefore becomes a human being in the womb from the moment that its form is completed. The law of Moses, indeed, punishes with due penalties the man who shall cause abortion, inasmuch as there exists already the rudiment of a human being, which has imputed to it even now the condition of life and death, since it is already liable to the issues of both, although, by living still in the mother, it for the most part shares its own state with the mother.

The Canons of the Council in Trullo (The Quinisext Council)
Canon XCI.
Those who give drugs for procuring abortion, and those who receive poisons to kill the foetus, are subjected to the penalty of murder.

The Amicus Curiae Submitted to the Supreme Court by the Holy Orthodox Church

An Orthodox View of Abortion:

The Holy Orthodox Church respectfully submits this brief amicus curiae on behalf of itself and its members.

INTEREST OF AMICUS CURIAE

The Holy Orthodox Church was founded by Jesus Christ and the Apostles, and bears witness to that continuous and unbroken faith. The precepts of the Orthodox Christian faith mandate the protection of innocent human life, especially that of unborn children. The Church regards abortion as murder, and as such, takes a very active role in opposing legalized abortion. That the issue of abortion has both a moral and a legal dimension to it, is indisputable. However, this cannot in any way be equated to an assertion that the two aspects are disparate, or unrelated. Rather, the two have historically been intertwined; it must be recognized that laws have traditionally been positive expressions of moral norms.

The Framers of the Constitution discerned a divine presence not only in daily living, but as reflected in the Constitution itself. "It is impossible for any man of pious reflection not to perceive in it a finger of that Almighty hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolutionary." That is, a law must of its very nature have a moral component to it, which cannot be divorced from the law itself.

Legal precepts, particularly those of constitutional proportions, simply cannot be judged in a vacuum. This notion not only predates the Constitution; it is at the very heart of our civilization. The foundations of our morality can be found in the dawn and early morning light of the Judeo-Christian tradition, of which the Orthodox Church is a unique custodian. From its inception nearly two thousand years ago, it has never deviated from its condemnation of abortion, based on numerous scriptural references and the teaching of the Holy Fathers of the Church. The Church regards the Roe v. Wade decision as a gruesome turn on the road of judicial activism, having resulted in a holocaust which has claimed at least twenty million innocent lives.

STATEMENT OF THE CASE AND STATEMENT OF FACTS

Amicus curiae adopts the statement of the case and the statement of the facts as set out in the Appellants’ Brief.

SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT

In this case, the Holy Orthodox Church seeks to restore to our nation's law the highest principle which a civilized society can espouse—the recognition that all human life is sacred. In Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), the Supreme Court relied heavily upon its presentation of historic Christianity's teaching and practices. The assertions made in Roe were erroneous, and have no foundation in the church's traditions. Rather than being ambivalent, or even condoning abortion, as suggested by the Roe Court's opinion, historic Christianity has always condemned abortion as murder, without regard for any distinctions as to fetal development or viability.

The Roe Court also blurred the factual question of when life begins with the distinct legal question of what constitutional value attends to that life. The resulting confusion has tied the hands of legislators, and elevated abortion to the status of a near-absolute right. Unless this Court takes judicial notice, the factual question of when life begins is properly a subject for legislative findings. The strictly legal question of a life's constitutional value is the clear issue before this Court, as the State of Missouri has made an appropriate factual determination.

Science and history both mandate a conclusion that human life and constitutional personhood are coextensive, and any other result is without foundation in American jurisprudence. Consequently, the Holy Orthodox Church urges this Court to overrule Roe v. Wade, and accord full constitutional protection to all human life beginning at conception.

Read it all at the link above.

Office for the Victims of Abortion

The Order of the Office of Prayer and Supplication for the Victims of Abortion
Prayed to our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ

(The Priest and Deacon take their places before the Icon of Christ placed in the center of the Temple or other suitable place. The Priest is vested in Riassa and Epitrachilion and the Deacon in Sticharion and Orarion.)

Priest:
Blessed is our God always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.

People:
Amen.

Reader:
Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.
Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.
Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
Now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

All-Holy Trinity, have mercy on us. O Lord, cleanse us from our sins. O Master, pardon our transgressions. O Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Thy Name's sake.

Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
Now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Priest:
For Thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory: of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.

Reader:
Amen.
Come, let us worship God, our King.
Come, let us worship and fall down before Christ, our King and our God.
Come, let us worship and fall down before the very Christ, our King and our God.

Psalm 143

Reader:
Hear my prayer, O Lord; give ear to my supplications. In Thy faithfulness answer me in Thy righteousness. Enter not into judgment with Thy servant; for no man living is righteous before Thee. For the enemy has pursued me; he has crushed my life to the ground; he has made me sit in darkness like those long dead. Therefore my spirit faints within me; my heart within me is appalled.

I remember the days of old, I meditate on all that Thou hast done; I muse on what Thy hands have wrought. I stretch out my hands to Thee; my soul thirsts for Thee like a parched land. Make haste to answer me, O Lord! My spirit falls! Hide not Thy face from me, lest I be like those who go down into the pit. Let me hear in the morning of Thy steadfast love, for in Thee I put my trust. Teach me the way I should go, for to thee I lift up my soul.

Deliver me, O Lord, from my enemies! I have fled to Thee for refuge. Teach me to do Thy will, for Thou art my God! Let Thy good spirit lead me on a level path! For Thy Name's sake, O Lord, preserve my life! In Thy righteousness bring me out of trouble! And in Thy steadfast love cut off my enemies, and destroy all my adversaries. For I am Thy servant.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit:
now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Glory to Thee, O God.
Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Glory to Thee, O God.
Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Glory to Thee, O God.

The Great Litany

Deacon:
In peace, let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
For the peace from above, and for the salvation of our souls, let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
For the peace of the whole world, for the good estate of the holy churches of God, and for the union of all, let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
For this holy temple, and for those who with faith, reverence, and the fear of God enter herein, let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

(The following two petitions for the Orthodox Episcopate and the civil authorities are general petitions. These might be appropriate to use at a pan-Orthodox service where various Ecclesiastical jurisdictions are represented, and for services within the United States. Otherwise, the petitions commonly utilized by the officiating clergy to commemorate their ruling hierarchs and their civil government would more correctly be inserted here and substituted for those which appear below)

Deacon:
For the holy Orthodox Patriarchs, and for all Orthodox Bishops; for the venerable Priesthood, the Diaconate in Christ; for all the clergy and the people, let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
For the President of the United States and for all the civil authorities, and for our armed forces in defence of peace and freedom everywhere, let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
That He will aid them and grant them victory over every enemy and adversary, let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
For this city, for every city and country, and for the faithful who dwell therein, let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
For seasonable weather, for abundance of the fruits of the earth, and for peaceful times, let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
For travelers by land, by sea, and by air; for the sick and the suffering; for captives and for their salvation, let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
For our deliverance from all affliction, wrath, danger, and necessity, let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
That He will not remember the transgressions of His people, but will turn away all His righteous wrath which He has stirred up against us, let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
That He will bless the good intentions of His servants who strive to rescue His children from violent death, and allow them to begin successfully and to finish without obstacle, through the power and grace of the most Holy Spirit, let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
That He will guide the hands of His servants to complete their work successfully, let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
That He will bless His servants with the grace of the most Holy Spirit, and make their efforts well pleasing in His sight, let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
That He will assign a guardian angel to banish from this effort every enemy and obstacle, whether visible or invisible, let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
That this work may be ordered in wisdom and may end in perfection, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
Help us, save us, have mercy on us, and keep us, O God, by Thy grace.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
Calling to remembrance our most holy, most pure, most blessed and glorious Lady, the Birth-giver of God and ever-virgin Mary, with all the saints, let us commend ourselves and one another, and all our life unto Christ, our God.

People:
To Thee, O Lord.

Priest:
For unto Thee is due all glory, honor, and worship: to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.

People:
Amen.

God Is the Lord (in the Second Tone)

Deacon:
God is the Lord and has revealed Himself to us! Blessed is He that comes in the Name of the Lord.

O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good; for His mercy endures forever.

People (in Tone 2):
God is the Lord and has revealed Himself to us! Blessed is He that comes in the Name of the Lord.

Deacon:
All nations surrounded me, but in the Name of the Lord I destroyed them.

People:
God is the Lord and has revealed Himself to us! Blessed is He that comes in the Name of the Lord.

Deacon:
I shall not die, but live; and recount the works of the Lord.

People:
God is the Lord and has revealed Himself to us! Blessed is He that comes in the Name of the Lord.

Deacon:
The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone; this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.

People:
God is the Lord and has revealed Himself to us! Blessed is He that comes in the Name of the Lord.

Troparion (in Tone 2)

People:
We bow before Thy most pure image, O Good One, Begging Thee to forgive us our sins, O Christ our God. Thou willingly didst ascend the cross in the flesh, To free us from Satan's snare.
For this we thank Thee Lord, and we cry to Thee: Thou hast filled all things with joy, O Saviour, When Thou camest to save the world.

Psalm 51

Reader:
Have mercy on me, O God, according to Thy loving kindness; according to the multitude of Thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Wash me throughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin, for I acknowledge my transgression and my sin is ever before me: against Thee, Thee only have I sinned and done that which is evil in Thy sight; that Thou might be justified in Thy word, and prevail when Thou art judged. For behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.

Behold, Thou hast required truth in the inward parts; the unclear and hidden things of Thy wisdom Thou shalt reveal unto me. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Make me to hear of joy and gladness, that the bones which Thou hast broken might rejoice. Turn away Thy face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from Thy presence, and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation, and guide me with a princely spirit. Then shall I teach transgressors Thy ways, and sinners shall be converted unto Thee. Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God, Thou God of my salvation, and my tongue shall sing aloud of Thy righteousness.

O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall show forth Thy praise. For if Thou hadst desired sacrifice, I would have given it, but Thou dost not delight in burnt offerings. The sacrifice of God is a contrite spirit, a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou shalt not despise. Do good, O Lord, in Thy good will unto Sion, and build Thou the walls of Jerusalem. Then shalt Thou be pleased with the sacrifice of righteousness, with burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings. Then shall they offer bullocks upon Thine altar.

(The Canon may be sung here, followed by the Refrains. Or the Refrains alone are sung three times. The Deacon censes before the Icon during the Refrains:)

Priest:
Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee!

Choir:
Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee!

Priest:
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.

Choir:
Now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.

(The Priest and Choir sing the Refrains three times.
The Third Ode of the Canon follows, and then the following hymn.
If there is no Canon, the hymn follows the singing of the Refrains.
The Deacon censes at the Icon during the Refrains.)

Choir:
Deliver us from evil O Merciful One For we run to Thee in our afflictions. O Lord Jesus Christ, save our souls.

(Following the hymn, the Priest and Choir repeat the Refrains three times as above. The Deacon censes before the icon.)

Litany

Deacon:
Let us say with our whole soul and with our whole mind, let us say:

People:
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
O Lord Almighty, the God of our fathers we beseech Thee, hearken and have mercy.

People:
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
Have mercy on us, O God, according to Thy great mercy, we beseech Thee, hearken and have mercy.

People:
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

(The following is a general petition for the Orthodox Hierarchs, and should be modified as needed to reflect local usage.)

Deacon:
Again we pray for the holy Orthodox Patriarchs and for all Orthodox Bishops; for Priests, Deacons, and all other clergy, and for all our brotherhood in Christ.

People:
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
Again we pray for mercy, life, peace, health, salvation, and visitation for the servants of God who strive against the evil of abortion, and for the pardon and remission of their sins.

People:
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
Again we beg Thee, O Lord, to hear our prayer, and have mercy on Thy servants who strive to save the lives of Thy innocent children. In Thy grace and bounty, fulfill their petitions and forgive all their transgressions, whether voluntary or involuntary. Accept their sacrifice of praise upon Thy heavenly altar; protect them from every visible and invisible enemy; deliver them from all misery, sickness, and affliction; grant them health and length of days, we pray Thee, O Lord, hearken and have mercy.

People:
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

For Children in Danger of Death by Abortion

Deacon:
Again we pray for the children of God condemned to death by the unjust judgement of men: that the Lord our God would soften the hearts of those who seek their violent destruction, and rescue those who are being led forth to the slaughter, we diligently pray Thee, O Lord, hearken and have mercy!

People:
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

For Rescuers Who Have Been Imprisoned

Deacon:
Again we pray for all who have fallen into the hands of the godless civil authority for the sake of God's children, and who languish in courts and prisons: that the Lord our God may look upon them with compassion; that He may comfort, strengthen and preserve them; and that He may deliver them speedily from bondage and oppression, let us all say: O Lord, hearken and have mercy.

People:
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
By Thine infinite power, O Lord, our God, move to compassion and mercy the hearts of those who hold Thy servants in cruel captivity; restrain them from doing harm or permitting evil to befall Thy servants, but rather cause them to relent and to release them; free the captives whole and unharmed, O Lord, and bestow Thy mercy upon them, let us all say: hearken quickly and graciously have mercy!

People:
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
Thy vile enemies, O Lord, have annihilated Thy children and defiled Thy churches, and have imprisoned Thy faithful servants. Look down from heaven, therefore, and behold, and forsake us not utterly, but quickly cleanse the land of Thy people of the wickedness of those who oppose Thee, with humble heart we entreat Thee, our God Who art mighty in strength and wondrous in wisdom: O Compassionate One, hearken and have mercy!

People:
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
Again we pray for all those here present, who await from Thee Thy great and abundant mercy.

People:
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Priest:
For Thou art a merciful God, and lovest mankind, and unto Thee do we send up glory: to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.

People:
Amen.

(If the Canon is being sung, it continues now. After the Sixth Ode the Refrains are repeated. If the Canon is not sung, the Refrains alone are repeated by Priest and Choir as before, again three times. The Deacon censes as before.)

Priest:
Glory to Thee, our God, Glory to Thee!

Choir:
Glory to Thee, our God, Glory to Thee!

Priest:
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.

Choir:
Now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.

(The Priest and Choir sing the Refrains three times, and the Deacon censes. The Akathist Hymn may be sung at this time, if desired. At the completion of the Akathist, or following the Refrains if there is no Akathist:)

The Prokeimenon

Deacon:
Let us attend

Priest:
Peace be unto all.

Deacon:
Wisdom! Let us Attend!
The Prokeimenon in the fourth tone:
Lord, we will walk in the light of Thy countenance and exult in Thy Name forever.

Choir:
Lord we will walk in the light of Thy Countenance and exult in Thy Name forever.

Deacon:
I will sing of Thy mercy, O Lord, forever; with my mouth I will proclaim Thy faithfulness to all generations.

Choir:
Lord, we will walk in the light of Thy Countenance and exult in Thy Name forever.

Deacon:
Lord, we will walk in the light of Thy countenance.

Choir:
And exult in Thy Name forever.

Deacon:
Let us pray to the Lord,

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Priest:
For holy art Thou, O our God, who rests in the saints, and unto Thee do we send up glory: to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.

People:
Amen.

Deacon:
Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!

Choir:
Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!

Deacon:
Praise God in His sanctuary; praise Him in His mighty firmament.

Choir:
Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!

Deacon:
Let everything that has breath.

Choir:
Praise the Lord.

The Gospel Reading

Deacon:
And that we may be accounted worthy to hear the Holy Gospel, let us pray to the Lord, our God.

People:
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
Wisdom! Let us attend! Let us hear the Holy Gospel!

Priest:
Peace be unto all.

People:
And to thy spirit.

Priest:
The reading is from the Holy Gospel according to St. Luke.

People:
Glory to Thee, O Lord, Glory to Thee.

Deacon:
Let us attend!

Priest:
At that time, Jesus told them a parable, to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. He said, "In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor regarded man; and there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, `Vindicate me against my adversary,' For a while he refused; but afterward he said to himself, `Though I neither fear God nor regard man, yet because this widow bothers me, I will vindicate her, or she will wear me out by her continual pleadings.'

And the Lord said, "Hear what the unrighteous judge says, And will not God vindicate his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will vindicate them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of man returns, will he find faith on earth?"

People:
Glory to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee.

(If the Canon is being sung, the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Odes are sung, along with the refrains as the Deacon censes. If the Canon is not being sung, the Refrains are repeated again three times by the Priest and Choir.)

Priest:
Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee!

Choir:
Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee!

Priest:
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.

Choir:
Now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.

(As the Deacon censes, the Priest and Choir sing the Refrains three times. And then all sing the Hymn to the Theotokos in Tone 6:)

People:
It is turly meet to bless you, O Theotokos,
Ever blessed and most pure,
And the Mother of our God.
More honorable than the Cherubim,
And more glorious beyond compare than the Seraphim:
In virginity you gave birth to God the Word.
True Theotokos, we magnify you.

Reader:
Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.
Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.
Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
Now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

All-Holy Trinity, have mercy on us. O Lord, cleanse us from our sins. O Master, pardon our transgressions. O Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Thy Name's sake.

Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
Now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Priest:
For Thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory: of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.

People:
Amen.

The Augmented Litany

Deacon:
Have mercy on us, O God, according to Thy great goodness, we pray Thee, hearken and have mercy.

People:
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
Again we pray that the Lord our God will hear the voice of us sinners and protect His servants from all tribulation, wrath, danger, necessity, and from every ill of soul and body, and grant them health and length of days: we beseech Thee, O Lord, hearken and have mercy.

People:
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
Again we pray that the Lord our God will preserve this city and this holy habitation and every city and country from pestilence, famine, earthquake, flood, fire, the sword, the invasion of enemies, civil war, and sudden death and that our good God, who loves mankind, will be graciously favorable and easy to be entreated and will turn away from us all the wrath stirred up against us, and deliver us from all His righteous chastisement which impends against us, and have mercy on us.

People:
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:
Again we pray that the Lord will hearken unto the prayers of us sinners, and have mercy on us.

People:
Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Priest:
Hear us, O God our Saviour, the hope of all the ends of the earth and of those far off upon the sea, and show mercy, show mercy O Master, upon us sinners. For Thou art a merciful God, and lovest mankind, and unto Thee do we send up glory: to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.

People:
Amen.

Deacon:
Let us pray to the most holy Theotokos.

People:
Most holy Theotokos, save us!

Priest:
O Mother of God, our queen and our hope, the refuge of the abandoned and the intercessor for those who have gone astray; the joy of all who sorrow and the protectress of the needy; you see our poverty, our affliction and misery. Help us who are weak; feed us who are hungry; intercede for us with your Son and our God, and may He deal with us as He pleases. For we have no other hope, no other intercessor, no other consolation except you, O Virgin Theotokos. Protect us beneath your veil, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.

People:
Amen.

Deacon:
Let us pray to the Lord.

People:
Lord, have mercy.

Priest:
O most merciful, all gracious and compassionate Lord Jesus Christ our Savior, Son of God: we entreat Thee, most gracious Master: look with compassion upon Thy children who have been condemned to death by the unjust judgement of men. And as Thou hast promised to bestow the heavenly kingdom on them born of water and the Spirit, and who in blamelessness of life have been translated unto Thee; and Who said, "Suffer the little children to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven" - we humbly pray, according to Thy unfailing promise: grant the inheritance of Thy kingdom to the multitude of spotless infants who have been cruelly murdered in the abortuaries of this land; for Thou art the resurrection and the life and the repose of all Thy servants and of these innocents, O Christ our God.

Turn the hearts of those who seek to destroy Thy little ones. We beseech Thee to pour forth Thy healing grace upon them, that they may be convicted in their hearts and turn from their evil ways. Remember all of them that kill our children as on the altars of Moloch, and render not unto them according to their deeds, but according to Thy great mercy convert them: the unbelieving to true faith and piety, and the believing that they may turn from evil and do good.

O Holy Master, Almighty Father and pre-eternal God, Who alone made and directs all things; Who rises up quickly against the evil of the impious ones; who, by providence, teaches Thy people preservation of justice and the obliteration of evil on earth; Who condescends to raise up warriors for the protection of the people of God: we entreat Thee with compunction, that as Thou didst give David power to defeat Goliath, and as Thou didst condescend through Judas Maccabeus, to seize victory from the arrogant pagans who would not call on Thy Name; so too, grant protection to us, Thy servants against the enemies rising against us as we go forth to do spiritual battle against the evil one and those who do his will rather than Thine.

For Thou art a merciful God, and lovest mankind, and unto Thee do we send up glory: to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.

People:
Amen.

The Dismissal

Deacon:
Wisdom!

Priest:
Most holy Theotokos, save us.

Choir:
More honorable than the Cherubim,
And more glorious beyond compare than the Seraphim.
In virginity you gave birth to God the Word.
True Theotokos, we magnify you.

Priest:
Glory to Thee, O Christ, our God and our hope, glory to Thee.

Choir:
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit:
now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.

Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Master (Father), bless!

Priest:
May (He Who rose again from the dead,) Christ our true God, through the prayers of His holy, immaculate, and all blameless Mother, (.......), and of all the saints, have mercy on us and save us.

People:
Amen.

Blogs4Life Conference

Check 'em out!

Where's the Baby? (Or How to Make an Entire Baby Disappear in the Space of a Sentence)

The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (those folks ECUSA's Executive Council are ga-ga over) has a link on its home page titled "If you are pregnant." Once you get to the page, the title becomes "Considering Abortion? Clarifying What You Believe"

Their opening paragraphs runs thusly (see if you can follow the disappearing baby):

There is no doubt that a welcomed, loved child is a gift from God and a blessing to a joyful family. Yet, not every pregnancy is welcomed. Women and their families who are dealing with unwelcome or problem pregnancies often have religious, spiritual, and theological questions. If you are pregnant or think you are facing an unintended pregnancy and have spiritual concerns you want to address as you consider your options, please consider reading the following: . . .

That was pretty fast. You may have missed it.

Sentence 1:
"There is no doubt that a welcomed, loved child is a gift from God and a blessing to a joyful family."

Now watch carefully as the baby disappears.

Sentence 2:
"Yet, not every pregnancy is welcomed."

Whoops. There she went. And the baby never returns.

Sentence 3:
"Women and their families who are dealing with unwelcome or problem pregnancies often have religious, spiritual, and theological questions."

Sentence 4:
"If you are pregnant or think you are facing an unintended pregnancy and have spiritual concerns you want to address as you consider your options, please consider reading the following: . . ."

How to make a baby disappear in the space of a sentence.

Amazing.

ECUSA Advocates Abortion

In a single sentence in this summary of what happened at the recent meeting of the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church in the USA, is noted that Executive Council

Approved the Episcopal Church's membership in the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.

This report gives a fuller account.

The Executive Council of the Episcopal Church has approved the Church’s membership in the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), an organization whose literature states its “primary role is educating the public to make clear that abortion can be a moral, ethical, and religiously responsible decision.”

The vote during the Jan. 9-12 meeting held in Des Moines, Iowa, came upon a recommendation from the Executive Council’s Committee on National Concerns. John Vanderstar, an Executive Council member from the Diocese of Washington who proposed the resolution, said it was intended to clarify the Church’s relationship to the organization. . . .

At the 2003 General Convention, resolution D045 asked that the Church withdraw from the RCRC. The House of Deputies in Minneapolis voted to refer the resolution to the Standing Commission on National Concerns, but the House of Bishops did not act, effectively killing the proposal. [nice metaphor that! cdh] . . .

Mr. Vanderstar noted the vote by Executive Council did not change the Church’s position on abortion, which has been an “unequivocal opposition to any federal or state legislation that would interfere with a woman's right to make a decision on terminating a pregnancy.” He said the vote to approve membership in the RCRC was taken “so as to lay to rest any suggestion that [Executive Council’s] 1978 action tainted that membership.”

Given that the historic Church has always condemned abortion and places those who practice or procure it under heavy penance (see here), it seems clear that from the perspective of the historic Church ECUSA endorses sin and murder.

Further implications are likewise as clear.

Pro-Choice Criticisms of Roe

Timothy P. Carney is compiling Pro-choice Criticisms of Roe.

Interesting.

A Revealing Look at Abortion

I'm a little slow on catching up to current events, I realize, but in a late-November article in the L. A. Times, Stephanie Simon gives an incredibly revealing and insightful article on an abortion clinic in Arkansas: Offering Abortion, Rebirth (link requires free subscription). (See also Simon's commentary giving a behind the scenes account of the article here.)

After a brief biographical introduction to the abortionist (his own term for himself), Dr. Harrison, Ms. Simon gives an account of the days activities, the patients, and the views of the doctor and one of his nurses.

It is a few minutes before 11 a.m. when Harrison raps on the door of his operating room and walks in.

His Fayetteville Women's Clinic occupies a once-elegant home dating to the 1940s; the first-floor surgery looks like it was a parlor. Thick blue curtains block the windows and paintings of butterflies and flowers hang on the walls. The radio is tuned to an easy-listening station.

An 18-year-old with braces on her teeth is on the operating table, her head on a plaid pillow, her feet up in stirrups, her arms strapped down at her sides. A pink blanket is draped over her stomach. She's 13 weeks pregnant, at the very end of the first trimester. She hasn't told her parents.

A nurse has already given her a local anesthetic, Valium and a drug to dilate her cervix; Harrison prepares to inject Versed, a sedative, in her intravenous line. The drug will wipe out her memory of everything that happens during the 20 minutes she's in the operating room. It's so effective that patients who return for a follow-up exam often don't recognize Harrison.

I find it telling that Versed is administered and that patients rarely have substantive recollections of the abortion. I'm not implying that their decisions to have abortions are not free and informed. I just find it telling that it is apparently necessary to wipe out the patient's memory of the abortion.

The account Simon gives of the abortion is disturbing by very virtue of its stark and unadorned telling.

Harrison glances at an ultrasound screen frozen with an image of the fetus taken moments before. Against the fuzzy black-and-white screen, he sees the curve of a head, the bend of an elbow, the ball of a fist.

"You may feel some cramping while we suction everything out," Harrison tells the patient.

A moment later, he says: "You're going to hear a sucking sound."

The abortion takes two minutes. The patient lies still and quiet, her eyes closed, a few tears rolling down her cheeks. The friend who has accompanied her stands at her side, mutely stroking her arm.

When he's done, Harrison performs another ultrasound. The screen this time is blank but for the contours of the uterus. "We've gotten everything out of there," he says.

As the nurse drops the instruments in the sink with a clatter, the teenager looks around, woozy.

Absolutely chilling.

Next Simon begins to give a recounting of the reasons and motivations of some of the patients for their decisions to abort their unborn children.

"It was a lot easier than I thought it would be," she says. "I thought it would be horrible, but it wasn't. The procedure, that is."

She is not yet sure, she says, how she is doing emotionally. She feels guilty, sad and relieved, all in a jumble.

"There's things wrong with abortion," she says. "But I want to have a good life. And provide a good life for my child." To keep this baby now, she says, when she's single, broke and about to start college, "would be unfair."

The reasons and motivations, however, are not merely economic ones.

A high school volleyball player says she doesn't want to give up her body for nine months. "I realize just from the first three months how it changes everything," she says.

Kim, a single mother of three, says she couldn't bear to give away a child and have to wonder every day if he were loved. Ending the pregnancy seemed easier, she says — as long as she doesn't let herself think about "what could have been."

By law, Harrison's staff must offer patients two pamphlets from the state. One lists adoption services and groups that provide free diapers, day-care subsidies and other aid. The second contains photos of the fetus at various stages of development.

Patients don't have to accept either pamphlet. Most wave them away, their minds made up.

For the few women who arrive ambivalent or beset by guilt, Harrison's nurse has posted statistics on the exam-room mirror: One out of every four pregnant women in the U.S. chooses abortion. A third of all women in this country will have at least one abortion by the time they're 45.

"You think there's room in hell for all those women?" the nurse will ask.

Aside from the screwed up soteriology and metaphysics, it's clear that the nurse is not offering an unbiased and objective look at the facts and information. The nurse is clearly trying to override the patient's initial moral hesitations.

If the woman remains troubled, the nurse tells her to go home and think it over.

In other words: If the nurse's advocacy for abortion doesn't overcome the patient's moral hesitations, then they relent.

"If they truly feel they're killing a baby, we're not going to do an abortion for them," says the nurse, who asked not to be identified for fear protesters would target her.

Darn rigid moralists!

But notice the confused and casuistric rationale for when a baby becomes, well, a baby.

The 17-year-old in for a consultation this morning assures the nurse that she does not consider the embryo inside her a baby.

"Not until it's developed," she says. "That would be about three months?"

"It's completely formed about nine weeks," the nurse tells her. "Yours is more like a chicken yolk."

The girl, who is five weeks pregnant, looks relieved. "Then no," she says, "it's not a baby." Her mother sits in the corner wiping her tears.

I suspect the mother's moral compass has not been distorted and it is revealing itself to Simon.

Harrison draws his own moral line at the end of the second trimester, or 26 weeks since the first day of the woman's last menstrual period. Until that point, he will abort for any reason.

"It's not a baby to me until the mother tells me it's a baby," he says.

But Harrison refuses to end third-trimester pregnancies, even if the fetus is severely disabled. Some premature infants born at that stage, or even a few weeks earlier, can survive. Harrison believes they may be developed enough to feel pain in utero. Just a handful of doctors around the nation will abort a fetus at this stage.

"I just don't think it should be done," says Harrison, who calls the practice infanticide.

At least Dr. Harrison does agree that the sensation of pain equals sentience. But his anthropology is still severely confused.

There is another picture of moral rationalizing by one of the patients.

Amanda, a 20-year-old administrative assistant, says it's not the obstacles that surprise her — it's how normal and unashamed she feels as she prepares to end her first pregnancy.

"It's an everyday occurrence," she says as she waits for her 2:30 p.m. abortion. "It's not like this is a rare thing."

Amanda hasn't told her ex-boyfriend that she's 15 weeks pregnant with his child. She hasn't told her parents, either, though she lives with them.

"I figured it was my responsibility," she says.

She regrets having to pay $750 for the abortion, but Amanda says she does not doubt her decision. "It's not like it's illegal. It's not like I'm doing anything wrong," she says.

"I've been praying a lot and that's been a real source of strength for me. I really believe God has a plan for us all. I have a choice, and that's part of my plan."

God's plan is for her to kill her unborn baby.

But it gets worse.

His first patient of the day, Sarah, 23, says it never occurred to her to use birth control, though she has been sexually active for six years. When she became pregnant this fall, Sarah, who works in real estate, was in the midst of planning her wedding. "I don't think my dress would have fit with a baby in there," she says.

The last patient of the day, a 32-year-old college student named Stephanie, has had four abortions in the last 12 years. She keeps forgetting to take her birth control pills. Abortion "is a bummer," she says, "but no big stress."

The Contradictions Aren't Addressed

Have you seen the New York magazine's article, The New Underground Abortion Railroad: Destination NYC? It's meant to be a fluffy, warm-the-cockles-of-yer-liberal-progressive-heart story, a sort of abortion advocate pat-self-on-back memo, about a group of abortion advocates who provide overnight housing for girls and women seeking late-term abortions. But the contradictions come through in glaring technicolor.

Consider this paragraph giving a brief description of the group's origins. Don't miss that last sentence and its concluding parenthetical note:

Five years ago, Catherine Megill, a then-23-year-old counselor at a Manhattan abortion clinic, heard about a patient who couldn’t afford a hotel and was going to be sleeping on the street unless someone offered her a couch. Megill offered, and later she began asking friends to do the same. By mid-2001, her project had a name, Haven, and a half-dozen volunteers. It now has about 100 members and is the only group of its kind in the country. “You’ve heard of ‘armchair liberalism,’ ” goes the recruiting pitch. “But have you given any thought to ‘futon liberalism’?” Some 2,000 women have late-term abortions in New York City every year. This year, Haven members have opened their homes to 125 of them (including a 10-year-old).

Ten year old?! Late-term abortion?! Would this possibly involve a failure to report statutory rape? Perhaps someone did report the rape, and that's why the little girl was there. The article doesn't say anything more about it. But the article strongly gives the notion of a "don't-ask-don't-tell" policy among Haven volunteers. It also gives the strong impression that most clients want anonymity and secrecy.

There are more contradictions.

Late-term abortion is serious, hard-core. At 24 weeks, a fetus is at the same stage of development as those gruesome images shown on pro-lifers’ protest placards. “The last woman I hosted showed me her sonogram,” says Jennifer, a 26-year-old host who lives in Carroll Gardens. “Then she pointed out that the fetus was a boy. God! I didn’t know what to say.”

Every once in a while, after hosting a guest, I have bad dreams about sick babies. I have to remind myself that my dreams are just dreams, and that they’re less important than my guests’ realities.

I can only guess that both these Haven volunteers' reactions are nothing more than their consciences trying to force on their reason the reality of what is happening. The author of the article at least voluntarily stifles that stirring of conscience for rationalization.

She's right about one thing, though. Late term abortion is serious business. As is all abortion. We would do well to explore and exploit these existential contradictions so that the light of truth can expose the evil act that abortion is.

Study: Still a Statistically Significant Link between Abortion and Breast Cancer

In the Winter 2005 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons comes a controversial article: Induced Abortion as an Independent Risk Factor for Breast Cancer: A Critical Review of Recent Studies Based on Prospective Data (pdf).

Here's the abstract.

Although many case-control studies, based mostly on retrospective collection of data, have shown a statistically significant increase in breast cancer risk after induced abortion, especially before the first full-term pregnancy (FTP), this risk is denied by the National Cancer Institute and many researchers. The conclusions of ten recent studies based on prospective data collection are cited to buttress this position. These studies are examined in detail, with a focus on methodologic aspects. Collectively, these studies are found to embody many serious weaknesses and flaws, including cohort effects, substantial misclassification errors due to missing information in databases, inadequate follow-up times, inadequately controlled effects of confounding variables, and frank violations of the scientific method. These recent studies therefore do not invalidate the large body of previously published studies that established induced abortion as a risk factor for breast cancer.

Breast cancer incidence is increasing, as predicted from earlier studies. Disclosure of the probable contribution of induced abortion to the increase in risk should be part of the informed consent process for abortion.

According to a WND article discussing this study:

The basic biology underlying the ABC link boils down to the fact that breast cancer is linked to reproductive hormones, particularly estrogen. At conception, a woman's estrogen levels increase hundreds of times above normal – 2,000 percent by the end of the first trimester. That hormone surge leads to the growth of "undifferentiated" cells in the breast as the body prepares to produce milk for the coming baby.

Undifferentiated cells are vulnerable to the effects of carcinogens, which can give rise to cancerous tumors later in life. In the final weeks of a full-term pregnancy, those cells are "terminally differentiated" through a still largely unknown process and are ready to produce milk. Differentiated cells are not as vulnerable to carcinogens.

However, should a pregnancy be terminated prior to cell differentiation, the woman is left with abnormally high numbers of undifferentiated cells, therefore increasing her risk of developing breast cancer.

Spontaneous abortions, or miscarriages, are not generally associated with increased risk, since they generally occur due to insufficient estrogen hormones to begin with.

Although this basic biological explanation remains undisputed, establishment cancer organizations and the medical community at large continue to deny or downplay the ABC link, using studies such as those criticized by Brind.

Abortion provider Planned Parenthood claims on its website that there is no ABC link, stating, "Attempts to prove [the cell differentiation] theory … have failed."

None So Blind As Those Who Will Not See

From the UK Times this article: Fifty babies a year are alive after abortion.

A GOVERNMENT agency is launching an inquiry into doctors’ reports that up to 50 babies a year are born alive after botched National Health Service abortions.

The investigation, by the Confidential Enquiry into Maternal and Child Health (CEMACH), comes amid growing unease among clinicians over a legal ambiguity that could see them being charged with infanticide.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which regulates methods of abortion, has also mounted its own investigation.

Its guidelines say that babies aborted after more than 21 weeks and six days of gestation should have their hearts stopped by an injection of potassium chloride before being delivered. In practice, few doctors are willing or able to perform the delicate procedure.

For the abortion of younger foetuses, labour is induced by drugs in the expectation that the infant will not survive the birth process. Guidelines say that doctors should ensure that the drugs they use prevent such babies being alive at birth.

In practice, according to Stuart Campbell, former professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at St George’s hospital, London, a number do survive.

“They can be born breathing and crying at 19 weeks’ gestation,” he said. “I am not anti-abortion, but as far as I am concerned this is sub-standard medicine.”

There's a crease in the conscience there. Maybe the light of truth will one day shine through it.

The number of terminations carried out in the 18th week of pregnancy or later has risen from 5,166 in 1994 to 7,432 last year. Prenatal diagnosis for conditions such as Down’s syndrome is increasing and foetuses with the condition are routinely aborted, even though many might be capable of leading fulfilling lives. In the past decade, doctors’ skill in saving the lives of premature babies has improved radically: at least 70%-80% of babies in their 23rd or 24th week of gestation now survive long-term.

Did I really read that part in bold print? Do they not see the inherent contradictions?

Abortion on demand is allowed in Britain up to 24 weeks — more than halfway through a normal pregnancy and the highest legal limit for such terminations in Europe. France and Germany permit “social” abortions only up to the 10th and 12th weeks respectively.

Doctors are increasingly uneasy about aborting babies who could be born alive. “If viability is the basis on which they set the 24-week limit for abortion, then the simplest answer is to change the law and reduce the upper limit to 18 weeks,” said Campbell, who last year published a book showing images of foetuses’ facial expressions and “walking” movements taken with a form of 3-D ultrasound.

The Department of Health was alerted three months ago to the issue of babies surviving failed terminations. In August clinicians in Manchester published an analysis of 31 such babies born in northwest England between 1996 and 2001.

“If a baby is born alive following a failed abortion and then dies (because of lack of care), you could potentially be charged with murder,” said Shantala Vadeyar, a consultant obstetrician at South Manchester University Hospitals NHS Trust, who led the study.

A systematic investigation of data collected through the CEMACH indicated that there are at least 50 cases a year nationwide in which babies survive abortion attempts.

“First sight of our data suggests this is happening,” said Shona Golightly, the agency’s research director. She said official confirmation of the figures would be available next year.

It is not known how many babies who survive attempted abortions go on to live into adulthood.

The Roe Effect

James Taranto writes about The Roe Effect:

It is a statement of fact, not a moral judgment, to observe that every pregnancy aborted today results in one fewer eligible voter 18 years from now. More than 40 million legal abortions have occurred in the United States since 1973, and these are not randomly distributed across the population. Black women, for example, have a higher abortion ratio (percentage of pregnancies aborted) than Hispanic women, whose abortion ratio in turn is higher than that of non-Hispanic whites. Since blacks vote Democratic in far greater proportions than Hispanics, and whites are more Republican than Hispanics or blacks, ethnic disparities in abortion ratios would be sufficient to give the GOP a significant boost--surely enough to account for George W. Bush's razor-thin Florida victory in 2000.

The Roe effect, however, refers specifically to the nexus between the practice of abortion and the politics of abortion. It seems self-evident that pro-choice women are more likely to have abortions than pro-life ones, and common sense suggests that children tend to gravitate toward their parents' values. This would seem to ensure that Americans born after Roe v. Wade have a greater propensity to vote for the pro-life party--that is, Republican--than they otherwise would have. . . .

Critics of the Roe effect hypothesis point out that abortion does not necessarily diminish a woman's lifetime fertility. A woman may, for example, have an abortion while in college, but later marry and bear children--children she might not have had, had she been forced to carry her collegiate pregnancy to term. Yet it is not clear how much this might mitigate the Roe effect. Some women do abort their final pregnancy, and delayed childbearing is one manifestation of the Roe effect. If a woman has a child at, say, age 30 rather than 20, one additional census passes before the child counts toward his state's congressional and electoral college apportionment, and two or three presidential elections pass before he reaches voting age. The compounding element applies here as well; if a woman has a daughter at 30 rather than 20, the daughter reaches childbearing age a decade later than she otherwise would have. Moreover, attitudes about abortion and politics are subject to change with age and experience, and usually in a conservative direction. Thus, some women who delay childbearing contribute to the Roe effect on both ends: by having abortions when they are young, single, and pro-choice, and by bearing children when they are older, married, and pro-life.

Read the rest at the link above.

Abortion and the Crime Rate: Freakonomics Debunked

In his review, Pre-emptive Executions?, Steve Sailer takes on Freakonomics:

Since 1999, the University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt has been pushing his theory that legal abortion is responsible for half of the recent fall in crime. This assertion is the most prominent element in Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, the entertaining new book Levitt co-wrote with journalist Stephen J. Dubner. . . .

The theory that legalizing abortion cuts crime is hardly original to Levitt, but it has long been more whispered than printed. Levitt’s hypothesis embarrasses pro-choicers, who don’t want public discussion of how quite a few people, from crusading eugenicist and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger onward, have backed fertility control as a way to limit “undesirables.” Since blacks undergo about three times as many abortions as whites per capita, white liberals realize that endorsing Levitt’s reasoning could be politically disastrous. . . .

Levitt’s theory rests on two plausible-sounding statements. First, he claims that abortion lowers the number of “unwanted” babies, who would be more likely to commit crimes someday. Second, crime did fall. Levitt writes, “In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v. Wade was hitting its late teen years—the years during which young men enter their criminal prime—the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals.”

Although Levitt’s research has been praised by normally hardheaded gentlemen such as George Will and Robert Samuelson, few have probed its statistical complexities. Overall crime-trend data are frequently questionable. For example, the city of Atlanta long understated crime to attract the 1996 Olympics. The FBI’s homicide statistics, however, are more trustworthy because, as Arthur Miller might have said, attention must be paid to a dead body with a hole in it.

According to Levitt’s logic, murder should have declined first among the youngest and last among the oldest. Did it? Unfortunately for Levitt, the opposite is true. The murder rate for Americans age 25 and over started falling way back in 1981 (when the youngest person in this cohort was born in 1956) and fell fairly steadily for two decades. Indeed, in contrast to his theory about post-Roe individuals being especially law-abiding, the adult murder rate has only begun to creep back up now that people born after Roe have begun to make up a noticeable fraction of those 25 and up. From 1999 through 2002 (the latest year available, when a 25-year-old would have been born four years after Roe), the murder rate among 25- to 34-year-olds has risen 17 percent, while continuing to drop among the under-25s.

But the acid test of Levitt’s theory is this: did the first New, Improved Generation culled by legalized abortion actually grow up to be more lawful teenagers than the last generation born before legalization? Hardly. Instead, the first cohort to survive legalized abortion went on the worst youth murder spree in American history.

Abortion became legal in 1970 in California, New York, and three smaller states. Let’s compare the murder rate of 14- to 17-year-olds in 1983 (who were born in the last pre-legalization years of 1965-1969) with that of 14- to 17-year-olds a decade later in 1993 (who were born in the high-abortion years of 1975-1979). Was this post-Roe cohort better behaved than their pre-legalization elders? Not exactly. Their murder rate was 3.1 times worse.

In contrast, 18- to 24-year-olds in 1993—some born before legalization, some after—committed 86 percent more murders than a decade earlier, while people 25 and up—all born before legalization—were 18 percent less lethal. Back in 1983, 14- to 17-year-olds were barely more than half as likely as 25- to 34-year-olds to kill. In 1993 and 1994, however, this purportedly better-bred generation of juveniles was more than twice as deadly as 25- to 34-year-olds.

Although Levitt desperately wants to avoid talking about race in relation to abortion and crime, blacks make an ideal test case for his theory because, as Levitt himself has noted, black women have about triple the number of abortions per capita as white women. So Levitt’s theory suggests that black teens should have “benefited” more than whites from abortion. Instead, black 14- to 17-year-olds were an apocalyptic 4.4 times more murderous in 1993 than a decade earlier. The black-white teen murder ratio grew from five times worse in 1983 to 11 times worse in 1993, according to the FBI.

The embarrassing truth, as Levitt admitted to me when I debated him on Slate.com in 1999, is that when he dreamed up his theory with John J. Donohue, he looked at crime rates in 1985 and 1997 and paid little attention to the vast crack epidemic that laid waste to urban America in between.

It makes no sense to credit abortion for any subsequent improvement in the behavior of the first post-Roe generation, when abortion so dismally failed to keep them on the straight and narrow when they were juveniles. Instead, the most obvious explanation for the ups and downs of the murder rate is the ups and downs of the crack business.

Read the rest at the link above.

Your Largely Unregulated Abortion Industry at Work: Former Kansas Abortionist Update

I'm not a big fan of World Net Daily, given the site's propensity to publish sensationalized versions of various reports. One must take such things with a grain of salt. But WND's report of the abortionist who lost his license (from yesterday's post) is backed up by sworn testimony from a police officer and photos from the investigation. Indeed, the WND story largely draws from the officer's testimony. (Warning: The full WND report linked above contains graphic descriptions of violation of medical standards, some of which I did not see fit to excerpt here on my blog.)

[Abortionist Krishna] Rajanna first came to the attention of police in September 2003 when he called police to investigate alleged employee theft.

Detective William Howard of the Kansas City Police Department responded.

"I thought I had heard and seen every vile, disgusting crime scene, but was in for a new shock when I started this investigation," he would say later. Howard turned the matter over to the local district attorney and three state agencies. . . .

(Warning: The tesimony excerpted and linked below and the linked photos contain graphic depictions of violation of medical standards. Proceed only on your own discretion.)

Howard testified the clinic was dark, dingy, had poor lighting and smelled musty. There were dirty dishes in the break-room sink and on the table, trash everywhere, and roaches crawling on the countertops. Howard was afraid to sit down.

Howard noted there were no hazardous waste containers anywhere. (An employee later testified Rajanna took home all contaminated, medical and biohazard waste for residential trash pick-up.)

As for the "procedure room," Howard's partner spotted dried blood on the floor and said the room looked "nasty."

Two dishwashers located next to the staff toilet served as sterilizers, according to employee testimony. Photographs show the toilet was bloody and functioned as a human waste disposal in the literal sense.

(You can read this police officer's testimony (pdf file) for yourself.)

Below are links to the photos of the violations the clinic engaged in. All links open in a pdf file. (Warning: The photos contained in the documents below should be considered graphic.)

Office
Refrigerator
Biohazard Area
Fire Exit

You would think that confronted with this egregious failure, the state would be amenable to considering legislation to at least ensure that this and every abortion clinic was up to normal health care standards? You would be wrong.

With Rajanna's case pending, abortion opponents won legislative approval of a bill requiring abortion clinics to obtain an annual license from the Department of Health and Environment, hire surgeons as their medical directors and report patient deaths to the state within a day. The measure also mandated that the department set standards for equipment, medical screenings, ventilation and lighting.

But Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, an abortion-rights advocate, vetoed the measure, saying medical professionals – not legislators – should set standards.

That's the problem, though, isn't it? Medical professionals aren't setting the standards . . . or at least not enforcing them--until such grievious scenarios as this come to the public attention. But Rajanna had been practicing for ten years. How much longer would this have gone on were it not for Rajanna's own call to report a theft? Even if there is de jure regulation--which there is precious little of, nationally, and which the Kansas Governor seems afraid of--it all comes down to de facto enforcement.

The Need to Regulate the Abortion Industry

Just in case you weren't aware of the fact: abortion clinics are not regulated the same way that other medical facilities are regulated. In fact, they are largely unregulated. As noted in Citizen Magazine:

Twenty-three states have some kind of regulations for abortion clinics, each varying in degree of intensity and enforcement. Some of the strongest are found in South Carolina, Texas, Michigan and Arizona, where abortion facilities have to meet all or most of the health standards imposed by the state on hospitals and other freestanding clinics. Some were passed after reports of gross negligence; others have been around since Roe v. Wade, but have only recently been amended or enforced.

All that is background to note that it's a good thing Kansas is getting tougher on regulating abortion clinics. Note some of the details of this story: Kansas panel pulls license from doctor.

More than two months after disciplinary action forced him to close his Kansas City, Kan., abortion clinic, Krishna Rajanna has lost his license.

The State Board of Healing Arts voted unanimously yesterday to revoke Rajanna’s license.

A board inspector made two surprise visits in March to Rajanna’s clinic, reporting that the facility was unclean and that Rajanna and his staff kept syringes of medications in an unlocked refrigerator. The inspector also reported finding a dead mouse in the hallway. . . .

Board members also noted that Rajanna had been previously disciplined, in 2000 and 2001, for not properly testing his patients for their blood types and for improperly labeling medications.

After duly noting the abortionist's whining about not having adequate time to respond to the surprise visits, and then noting that his clinic operated in a low-income neighborhood and charged patients reasonably for services no one esle would provide, the article ends appropriately enough:

But board members concluded that Rajanna’s clinic represented a danger and said that as a doctor he shouldn’t have needed the board’s prodding to keep a clinic clean and safe. . . .

But board member Nancy Welsh, a Topeka-area doctor, said the board should not permit lesser standards of cleanliness and safety because a clinic’s patients are poor.

"Why do they deserve a dirty clinic?" she said.

I would argue no woman, including an unborn one, deserves an abortion.

Scientific Study Reveals the Danger a Previous Abortion Poses to Later Children

In a report, entitled, "Revealed: how an abortion puts the next baby at risk", a French study of more than two thousand abortions reveals some seriously disturbing facts about surgical abortion:

Having an abortion almost doubles a woman's risk of giving birth dangerously early in a later pregnancy, according to research that will provoke fresh debate over the most controversial of all medical procedures.

A French study of 2,837 births - the first to investigate the link between terminations and extremely premature births - found that mothers who had previously had an abortion were 1.7 times more likely to give birth to a baby at less than 28 weeks' gestation. Many babies born this early die soon after birth, and a large number who survive suffer serious disability.

The research leader, Dr Caroline Moreau, an epidemiologist at the Hôpital de Bicêtre in Paris, said the results of the study, which appear in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, provided conclusive evidence of a link between induced abortion and subsequent pre-term births.

Last night anti-abortion campaigners seized on the evidence to demand that all women seeking a termination be warned, routinely, that they are jeopardising the well-being of future babies. A series of earlier, smaller studies had failed to provide clear evidence of a link and so women currently opting for an abortion are not warned of the risk.

Dr Moreau said: "Clearly there is a link. The results suggest that induced abortion can damage the cervix in some way that makes a premature birth more likely in subsequent pregnancies."

Her study compared the medical histories of 2,219 women with babies born at less than 34 weeks with another 618 who had given birth at full term. Overall, women who had had an abortion were 40 per cent more likely to have a very pre-term delivery (less than 33 weeks) than those without such a history. The risk of an extremely premature baby - one born at less than 28 weeks - was raised even more sharply, by 70 per cent. Abortion appeared to increase the risk of most major causes of premature birth, including premature rupture of membranes, incorrect position of the foetus on the placenta and spontaneous early labour. The only common cause of premature birth not linked to abortion was high blood pressure.

Mr Peter Bowen-Simpkins, a spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and a consultant obstetrician at the Sancta Maria Hospital in Swansea, said the study revealed that abortion might not be as safe as previously supposed. "This study shows that surgical termination of pregnancies may have late complications and may not be without risk," he said.

I bet you won't find Planned Parenthood even acknowledging this study.

Folks, abortion cannot be justified on any grounds. Abortion not only kills the living baby in the womb, it also doubles the odds of the next baby dying. That's a pretty efficient killing mechanism; two babies for the price of one.

Another Thought Experiment

Many Christians oppose abortion but support its legalization. "I oppose the practice of abortion, but the choice to abort is between a woman and her God."

Let's see how that reasoning works with other things.

"I oppose the practice of child molestation, but the choice to molest is between the sexual predator and his god."

"I oppose the practice of suicide bombing, but the choice to kill dozens of people when one kills oneself is between the suicide bomber and his god."

"I oppose the practice of genocide, but the choice to kill off an entire group of persons is between the exterminators and their god."

Of course all of these are morally evil and repugnant, and legally prohibited to boot.

But how is the above sentiment with regard to abortion in any way objectively and metaphysically different from these obviously evil comments? If one is opposed to the practice is it on moral grounds? If it is on moral grounds, then one cannot condone it. If it is just on the grounds of preference and taste, then on what basis can one object to the heinous statements which follow?

Let's restate the abortion defense above in less euphemistic terms: "I oppose the practice of abortion, but the choice to kill her baby boy or baby girl in the womb is between a woman and her God."

No, the "personally opposed, but legally for" is an empty defense which makes no sense.

But of course!

Wanna know when a fetus becomes a person? Dr. Cullins tells ya (emphasis added):

All kinds of people--theologians, philosophers, scientists, lawyers, legislators, and many others--hold very different views about when life begins. In fact, both the egg and the sperm are living things before they meet and join. There's no real argument there.

The really hot question is, "When does being a person begin?" Most medical authorities and Planned Parenthood agree that it starts when a baby takes its first breath.

Some of our oldest religions have changed their views about this question many times over the centuries. Today, some people sincerely believe that being a person begins when the egg is fertilized. Some, just as sincerely, believe that it begins with birth. And lots of others believe it begins somewhere in between.

What we are all sure about is that a pregnant woman is a person. We know for sure that she has morals, feelings, human needs, and a conscience. Because of this, we know that she is the only one able to make a decision about her pregnancy options. She does it based on her own needs, ethics, and religious belief about when being a person begins. It would be wrong to force her to observe someone else's religious belief.

But is anyone really surprised? After all, how could PPFA, Inc. not assume that a fetus is not a person until he breathes, when they advocate and their clinics perform "dilation and extraction," aka partial birth abortion?

Monstrous.

[PPFA, Inc. link via Dawn Eden.]

Your Abortion Industry at Work

Caution: The testimony of what amounts to infanticide at an abortion clinic given here is wrenching, and if you've had a hard day or are emotionally drained, come back to this later.

Abortion staff ignores baby boy born alive?

Wrote Angele [the mother]: "He was perfect, slightly pale and a little translucent. His eyebrows were pale but wide and well-defined. You could see little hairs on his face and head. He had the tiniest little fingernails and toenails. I noticed they already had a little bit of growth. His mouth was lovely. He was this perfectly formed one pound, one ounce human being. He was beautiful. He had been so strong.

"I wrapped him in [a] blue pad instead of one of the wet blankets. I just kept kissing him and telling him I loved him so much. I told him I was sorry I couldn't get anyone to help us and I was so sorry for ever coming here." . . .

"I wondered if babies went immediately to heaven. Are they immediately given wisdom, perspective and understanding? Could Rowan see that I loved him? Could he see that I wanted him with me and that I tried to help him stay with me? Could he see everything that happened while he was here?"

Read the entire article at the above link.

[via Touchstone's Mere Comments]

Website of Testimonials of Parents of Babies with Anencephaly

Via a link in Dawn Eden's latest post, come the Carrying to Term Pages, a website collecting testimonials of parents of children with anencephaly who carried their babies to term and loved them for the short life they had together.

I only read Emily's story. If you can read it and not weep . . . well, I couldn't. Pretty embarrassing at work, too.

Abortion: Getting the Facts Straight

From the Allan Guttmacher Institute (props to Joshua for the link):

• 49% of pregnancies among American women are unintended; 1/2 of these are terminated by abortion.

• In 2000, 1.31 million abortions took place, down from an estimated 1.36 million in 1996. From 1973 through 2000, more than 39 million legal abortions occurred.

• Each year, 2 out of every 100 women aged 15-44 have an abortion; 48% of them have had at least one previous abortion and 61% have had a previous birth.

• 52% of U.S. women obtaining abortions are younger than 25: Women aged 20-24 obtain 33% of all abortions, and teenagers obtain 19%.

• Black women are more than 3 times as likely as white women to have an abortion, and Hispanic women are 2 1/2 times as likely.

• 43% of women obtaining abortions identify themselves as Protestant, and 27% identify themselves as Catholic.

• 2/3 of all abortions are among never-married women.

• On average, women give at least 3 reasons for choosing abortion: 3/4 say that having a baby would interfere with work, school or other responsibilities; about 2/3 say they cannot afford a child; and 1/2 say they do not want to be a single parent or are having problems with their husband or partner.

• 54% of women having abortions used a contraceptive method during the month they became pregnant. 76% of pill users and 49% of condom users reported using the methods inconsistently, while 13% of pill users and 14% of condom users reported correct use.

• 9 in 10 women at risk of unintended pregnancy are using a contraceptive method.

From a PowerPoint presentation from the AGI website comes the breakdown of the most important reasons given for obtaining an abortion:

Inadequate finances 21%
Not ready for responsibility 21%
Woman’s life would be changed too much 16%
Problems with relationship; unmarried 12%
Too young; not mature enough 11%
Children are grown; woman has all she wants 8%
Fetus has possible health problem 3%
Woman has health problem 3%
Pregnancy caused by rape, incest 1%
Other 4%

[Note: AGI is avowedly pro-choice, so these statistics are not from the "small and wacko fringe", that is to say, those of us who oppose the practice of abortion.]

Pro-Life in concretum

One of our parishioners, Jim Kushiner, is also executive editor of Touchstone. Yesterday he made comments ("Little Ones and Unity") thoroughly exhibiting our parish's commitment to an anti-abortion and pro-life conviction:

Abigail, 5, is someone whom the doctors at a local hospital recommended be "aborted" by her mother, because she was "50-50" for surviving after birth. (She had a herniated diaphram, which meant many of her vital organs were out of place). Our daughter-in-law would have none of the doctor's advice, went on-line, and discovered specialists at Philadelphia's Children's Memorial Hospital, where she delivered Abigail and where Abigail had surgery.

It's not as simple as this sounds, though. Many of the babies who come there for delivery and this surgery do not survive. But the point was not to kill the child in the womb, but give her every chance of success. She is now thriving and looks great.

On the same day this weekend that we will be going to St. John's to celebrate this birthday, my wife, later that day, will also be participating in a minstry of St. John's that she just found out about last week. They are sewing little white gowns for babies, mostly premature, who die after birth at Cook County's Stroger Hospital. I have no idea how babies like this die at County Hospital, but the provision of gowns for the burial of these littles ones strikes me as the very least we can do for the very least of these little ones.

It's a hidden, quiet work of mercy, upholding the dignity of all human life. When my wife shared this with the women at our Orthodox Church, there was a strong response, a serious interest in participating.

I am so grateful for All Saints. I grew up in conservative evangelical churches that were pro-life and anti-abortion, and these churches did work in concrete ways to counsel, comfort and aid mothers contemplating abortion. But mostly the actions these churches took amounted to political activism. This is not a bad thing, but it is a very limited thing.

All Saints embodies a pro-life conviction that is thorough and holistic, from the public exhortation to fulfill the creation mandate, to private counselling and prayer over matters involving the use of contraception, to support for our mothers, to visible tangible care for mothers considering abortion (financial support to crisis pregnancy centers, support to families who take in pregnant mothers to assist them in their struggles, and personal relationships with mothers considering abortion), to support for adoption, and extending to respect for and support of our elder members. It is manifestly beautiful and good, and by contrast shows abortion to be the hideous and ugly moral evil that it is.

UPDATE

Jim Kushiner adds comments today to his thoughts from yesterday (above):

As a follow-up on what I wrote yesterday about “Little Ones and Unity,” I report on a dinner held last night in Chicago on behalf of CareFirst Pregnancy Centers & Prevention Services. Christians are not just “pro-life” when they vote, but try to do something about the crisis by offering charitable works.

The caricature of pro-life as right-wing haters is quite unfair. Around 1,800 people gathered last night at the Hyatt Regency to support a ministry that reaches out to women and supports them through troubled pregnancies. There was no talk of politics, legislation, voting, candidates, protests, or judicial strategies. It was all about life, the babies, the mothers, the fathers, and how to support them. Those who wish to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare” should be supporting such ministries.

Another thing CareFirst does is teach abstinence in schools. The idea that sex is for marriage, or minimally that abstinence has significant benefits, is now being promoted in an increasing number of schools, and it is being supported with government funding.

Single-Issue Voting?

Walking about as I do, in academic settings, when I encounter thoughtful and conservative Christians, I sometimes find them apologetic about their pro-life/anti-abortion stance. They don't want to be known as "single-issue" voters. Because, among the intelligentsia--who graciously, and for the price of this semester's tuition, let an ignoramus like me walk among them--single-issue voting is soooooo "simple-minded."

But thanks to all that has come in the wake of Roe v. Wade, we pro-life/anti-abortion citizens find ourselves confronted with a whole host of issues related to our "single issue." Touchstone's Jim Kushiner in yesterday's "Mere Comments" makes a list of issues guiding his vote:

• Human embryonic experimentation and research.
• Human cloning.
• Euthanasia.
• Assisted suicide.
• Defense of marriage as a man-woman institution. With the acceptance of gay-marriage as a constitutional right, public schools eventually will have to accept this redefinition of marriage and teach it. The traditional view will be termed "religious doctrine" and ruled as unsuitable for public schools, and perhaps considered as "hate speech."
• The appointment of federal court and Supreme Court justices who respect the sanctity of life and marriage.
• The appointment of federal court and Supreme Court justices who respect freedom of religion in the public square.
• Rolling back the activist judicial state that is demonstrably increasingly anti-religious.

So much for single-issue voting. If you're pro-life/anti-abortion, I would wager the choice is fairly clear.

Is This Anything?

Right now, in the "Wearables w/a message" section of the Planned Parenthood Federation of American online webstore you can get your "I Had An Abortion" T-shirts.

And under the "Great Holiday Gifts" section you can get your "Choice on Earth" Unisex t-shirt.

So: you can proudly declare in public, for about $15, that you killed your baby in the womb.

Or: you can blaspheme the message of Christ during the Nativity Feast (or whenever you want), for about $10.

Is this anything?

[Hat tip to David Letterman and Michael Gowin for the title of the post.]

The Ends of Abortion

If you have the stomach for it, read this article from the NY Times, When One Is Enough. (Link requires free registration.)

My boyfriend, Peter, and I have been together three years. I'm old enough to presume that I wasn't going to have an easy time becoming pregnant. I was tired of being on the pill, because it made me moody. Before I went off it, Peter and I talked about what would happen if I became pregnant, and we both agreed that we would have the child.

But the point of legalized abortion, is that one can always change one's mind.

I found out I was having triplets when I went to my obstetrician. The doctor had just finished telling me I was going to have a low-risk pregnancy. She turned on the sonogram machine. There was a long pause, then she said, ''Are you sure you didn't take fertility drugs?'' I said, ''I'm positive.'' Peter and I were very shocked when she said there were three. ''You know, this changes everything,'' she said. ''You'll have to see a specialist.''

My immediate response was, I cannot have triplets. I was not married; I lived in a five-story walk-up in the East Village; I worked freelance; and I would have to go on bed rest in March. I lecture at colleges, and my biggest months are March and April. I would have to give up my main income for the rest of the year. There was a part of me that was sure I could work around that. But it was a matter of, Do I want to?

Note well her reason for aborting two of the babies: it would interfere with her lifestyle.

I looked at Peter and asked the doctor: ''Is it possible to get rid of one of them? Or two of them?'' The obstetrician wasn't an expert in selective reduction, but she knew that with a shot of potassium chloride you could eliminate one or more. . . .

On the subway, Peter asked, ''Shouldn't we consider having triplets?'' And I had this adverse reaction: ''This is why they say it's the woman's choice, because you think I could just carry triplets. That's easy for you to say, but I'd have to give up my life.'' Not only would I have to be on bed rest at 20 weeks, I wouldn't be able to fly after 15. I was already at eight weeks. When I found out about the triplets, I felt like: It's not the back of a pickup at 16, but now I'm going to have to move to Staten Island. I'll never leave my house because I'll have to care for these children. I'll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise. Even in my moments of thinking about having three, I don't think that deep down I was ever considering it. . . .

So, two of her babies are killed so that she doesn't have to buy big jars of mayonnaise at Costco.

The brevity of the NY Times account of the procedure makes it all the more chilling.

He told me that he does a detailed sonogram before doing a selective reduction to see if one fetus appears to be struggling. The procedure involves a shot of potassium chloride to the heart of the fetus. There are a lot more complications when a woman carries multiples. And so, from the doctor's perspective, it's a matter of trying to save the woman this trauma. After I talked to the specialist, I told Peter, ''That's what I'm going to do.'' He replied, ''What we're going to do.'' He respected what I was going through, but at a certain point, he felt that this was a decision we were making. I agreed.

When we saw the specialist, we found out that I was carrying identical twins and a stand alone. My doctors thought the stand alone was three days older. There was something psychologically comforting about that, since I wanted to have just one. Before the procedure, I was focused on relaxing. But Peter was staring at the sonogram screen thinking: Oh, my gosh, there are three heartbeats. I can't believe we're about to make two disappear. The doctor came in, and then Peter was asked to leave. I said, ''Can Peter stay?'' The doctor said no. I know Peter was offended by that. . . .

I had a boy, and everything is fine. But thinking about becoming pregnant again is terrifying. Am I going to have quintuplets? I would do the same thing if I had triplets again, but if I had twins, I would probably have twins. Then again, I don't know.

The narcissism of this account, is, frankly, mind-boggling. This young woman kills two of her babies because it would cause her to change her lifestyle (which is fully in line with 75% of the reasons given by women for having their abortion). Remember, she knowingly went off birth control. Her boyfriend wanted to keep the three babies, but she shut him out of the decision leaving him no choice but to acquiesce.

I am sincerely trying to have some compassion on this young woman. Anna and I have talked to parents of multiples. And as much as a single child really brings new challenges to your life, it is multiplied geometrically by multiples. I don't make light of that at all. The loss of income and the drastic rearrangement of one's lifestyle are not at all easy things.

But it's the simple disconnect between the choice to engage in behavior that brings known consequences and then to avoid the consequences of one's behavior by the killing two lives that she willingly helped to conceive(!) which just strikes me as terribly, terribly wrong.

[Props to Touchstone's Mere Comments for the link.]

Who's Right? (Your Answer Will Tell You What Your Presuppositions Are)

From Planned Parenthood, the leading abortion advocacy group in the U. S. comes this statement:

Research studies indicate that emotional responses to legally induced abortion are largely positive. They also indicate that emotional problems resulting from abortion are rare and less frequent than those following childbirth (Adler, 1989).

Anti-family planning extremists, however, circulate unfounded claims that a majority of the 29 percent of pregnant American women who choose to terminate their pregnancies (Henshaw & Van Vort, 1990) suffer severe and long-lasting emotional trauma as a result. They call this nonexistent phenomenon "post-abortion trauma" or "post-abortion syndrome." They hope that terms like these will gain wide currency and credibility despite the fact that neither the American Psychological Association nor the American Psychiatric Association recognizes the existence of these phenomena.

The truth is that most studies in the last 20 years have found abortion to be a relatively benign procedure in terms of emotional effect - except when pre-abortion emotional problems exist or when a wanted pregnancy is terminated, such as after diagnostic genetic testing (Adler, 1989; Adler et al., 1990; Russo & Denious, 2001). The many studies of the emotional effects of abortion, however, do not measure precisely the same variables in regard to culture, time, demographics, or the socioeconomic and psychological situation of women who seek abortion. Since the results of these studies cannot be combined or "averaged out," the following data illustrate, in general, the conclusions of the overwhelming majority of more than 35 of the worldwide studies that have measured the emotional effects of abortion since its legalization in the U.S. in 1973.

In 1989, a panel of experts assembled by the American Psychological Association concluded unanimously that legal abortion "does not create psychological hazards for most women undergoing the procedure." The panel noted that, since approximately 21 percent of all U.S. women have had an abortion, if severe emotional reactions were common there would be an epidemic of women seeking psychological treatment. There is no evidence of such an epidemic (Adler, 1989). Since 1989, there has been no significant change in this point of view.

In the face of that last claim, it would be important, then to actually see if it holds up. From the Project Rachel site, a pro-life Catholic organization comes this statement (note: bracketed footnote numbers have been replaced by the sources cited and comments in the footnote itself for ease of reference and to mirror the references given in the Planned Parenthood statement above):

In the words of the editor of the Journal of Social Issues, Gregory Wilmoth: "There is now virtually no disagreement among researchers that some women experience negative psychological reactions post-abortion. Instead the disagreement concerns the following: (1) the prevalence of women who have these experiences..., (2) the severity of these negative reactions..., (3) the definition of what severity of negative reactions constitutes a public health or mental health problem ..., [and] (4) the classification of severe reactions...."["Abortion, Public Health Policy, and Informed Consent Legislation," Journal of Social Issues, 1992; 48 (3): 1-17.]

A summary of the more significant and apparently uncontested findings:

3a. Grief after pregnancy loss: The medical community is coming to accept more generally that grief is a natural and expected reaction to the loss of a child through abortion, prematurity, stillbirth, etc. Hospital obstetrical units are developing teams of doctors, nurses and social workers to help parents deal with the issues of grief, anger and guilt raised by perinatal deaths.[Wathan, "Perinatal bereavement," British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1990; 97: 759-60. Michels, et al., eds. Psychiatry, vol. 1, Ch. 41, Philadelphia: B. Lippincott Co., 1990:8.]

3b. There is no single study examining all possible negative consequences for women, and the risk of each, from abortion. There are, however, a significant number of studies which show a substantial number of women, suffering moderate to severe negative psychological reactions, of a wide variety, as a consequence of their abortions. These are cited below. [i. e., in item six on the page linked above]

3c. Increased Usage of Psychiatry: A Canadian study found that 25% of women who had had abortions made visits to psychiatrists over a 5 year period, as compared to 3% of the control group.[Badgley, et.al., Report of the Committee on the Operation of the Abortion Law, Ottawa: Supply and Services, 1977: 313-21.]

In a widely respected Danish "register linkage" study -- i.e. one reviewing state records of women's lifetime medical histories -- researchers found that the rate of psychiatric admissions within three months after the end of a pregnancy was 53% higher among women who had aborted compared to women who delivered their children.[David, et al., "Postpartum and Postabortion Psychotic Reactions," Family Planning Perspectives, vol. 13, no. 2, 1981: 88-91, 89.]

3d. Suicide: In one of the most complete register linkage studies to date, researchers in Finland examined women's lifetime medical histories and discovered that women who had abortions had a rate of suicide in the year following their abortion three times greater than all women of reproductive age, and six times greater than women who gave birth. The researchers drew two possible conclusions: either abortion poses a risk to mental health, or there are common risk factors for both abortion and suicide.[Gissler, Hemminki, Lonnqvist, "Suicides after Pregnancy in Finland, 1987-94; Register Linkage Study," British Medical Journal, 1996; 313: 1431-34.]

A Welsh study which followed the Finnish study indicated that the former explanation is more likely. It looked at the medical records of women both before and after their abortions. It did not find any increased risk of suicide before abortion among women having abortions. But it did find that the rate of suicide among women after having induced abortions was twice the rate of women giving birth.[Morgan, et al., Letters, British Medical Journal, 1997; 314: 903. Another study that would indicate for the former explanation was published by L.G. Peppers, "Grief and Elective Abortion: Implications for the Counselor,"in Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow, ed. Kenneth J. Doka, Lexington Books: MA, 1989:135 (Grief measurements of the same women pre- and post-abortion showed that significantly different groups of women suffered high grief reaction scores at the two points in time.)]

3e. Research Generally Dismissing Negative Abortion Aftermath: Even researchers most reluctant to conclude the existence of any significant amount of post-abortion grief, write that some women experience severe psychological reactions following abortions. They seem satisfied that the percentages of women suffering negative reactions are, by their account, less than 50%. Considering that about 1.5 million abortions annually have been performed for more than 20 years, however, a finding that even a few percentage points of women suffer severe post-abortion reactions represents tens of thousands of women.[One researcher, cited regularly by supporters of legal abortion as determining conclusively the absence of significant post-abortion grief, found the following: two years post-abortion, 19% percent of women (this would translate annually to 260,000 women in the United States) reported that they would not do it again; 12% more were undecided. When asked if their decision was right or wrong two years later, 16% (208,000) said it was the "wrong" decision. This same researcher found that 1% (10,000 women per year) suffer symptoms meeting the clinical definition of post traumatic stress syndrome. Brenda Major, Ph.D. "Beyond Choice: Myths and Facts about Adjustment to Abortion," Oct 9, 1997 California Wellness Foundation Lecture, University of California Wellness Lecture Series:1-34.]

Understanding Abortion's Aftermath

From the Project Rachel (a Catholic Pro-Life organization) comes this summary of the after effects of abortion on the women who've had them:

Evidence of post-abortion trauma is increasingly attested to by psychologists, counselors and those involved in post-abortion ministry. We now know, for example, that women hurt by abortion may have some or many of the following symptoms:

*Low self-esteem

*Grief (mild to profound)

*Depression (sometimes to the point of suicidal thoughts and attempts)

*A sense of alienation from family and friends

*A feeling of being 'numb,' not able to feel joy from activities that used to be pleasurable

*Isolating self from others to avoid discussing the abortion experience with them

*Guilt and shame

*Difficulty concentrating

*Anger toward self, or the child's father, or others involved in the abortion decision

*Sleep disorders

*Abortion-related nightmares, flashbacks or even sounds of a baby crying

*Alcohol and drug problems, to dull the sorrow

*Desire for a 'replacement' baby

*Anniversary reactions of grief or depression on the date of the abortion or the baby's expected due date

*Problems bonding with her other children (being over-protective but emotionally distant)

*Fear that God will punish her, or is punishing her

Some, especially young girls, experience symptoms soon after the abortion. Counselors tell us, however, that it is more common for the symptoms to occur over the course of five to twelve years after the abortion before a woman seeks help.

Abortion's aftermath is largely ignored by the general public. Groups organized to protect the availability of abortion claim that abortion is no different from any surgical procedure and that pro-life groups are fabricating the existence of post-abortion suffering. Consequently, many women think that their grief reactions are somehow abnormal and believe that there is nowhere to turn for help.

The site also links to these important research articles:

Psychiatric Sequelae of Abortion: The Many Faces of Post-Abortion Grief
Adverse Psychological Reactions - A Fact Sheet

See also my post from last October, which references the article The Nightmares of Choice.

The Roe Effect: A Sociopolitical Hypothesis

Way back when (which is to say, about a year or more ago), Opinion Journal, the online editorial presence of WSJ, hypothesized on the effect of legalized abortion on the political arena. Using statistics from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, and their own political research, they theorized that abortion is killing potential liberal voters. Larry Eastland builds on that hypothesis in The Empty Cradle Will Rock:

More than 40 million legal abortions have been performed and documented in the 30 years since the U.S. Supreme Court declared abortion legal. The debate remains focused on the legality and morality of abortion. What's largely ignored is a factual analysis of the political consequences of 40 million abortions. Consider:

• There were 12,274,368 in the Voting Age Population of 205,815,000 missing from the 2000 presidential election, because of abortions from 1973-82.

• In this year's election, there will be 18,336,576 in the Voting Age Population missing because of abortions between 1972 and 1986.

• In the 2008 election, 24,408,960 in the Voting Age Population will be missing because of abortions between 1973-90.

These numbers will not change. They are based on individual choices made--aggregated nationally--as long as 30 years ago. Look inside these numbers at where the political impact is felt most. Do Democrats realize that millions of Missing Voters--due to the abortion policies they advocate--gave George W. Bush the margin of victory in 2000?

Eastland runs through the numbers (nine tables' worth). Some of his conclusions:

There were 105,405,100 votes cast for president in the 2000 general election, representing 51.2% of the Voting Age Population. The Missing Voters [i. e., babies aborted who would have been of eligible voting age] would have been 6,033,097 based on that portion of the 51.2% represented by (at their lower voting level) 18-24 year olds. This means that Missing Voters would have been 4.48% of all actual voters in 2000.

He goes on to run through some extrapolations from abortion data, surveys of Republican and Democratic views on abortion, and how that applies to the voters of the 2000 election. His conclusion:

In the actual popular vote for president in the 2000 general election in Florida, George W. Bush was declared the winner by 537 votes. But if the 260,962 Missing Voters of Florida had been present to vote, Al Gore would have won by 45,366 votes. Missing Voters--through decisions made in the 1970s and early 1980s, encouraged and emboldened by the feminist movement at the height of its power--altered the outcome of the U.S. presidency a generation later, in a way proponents of legal abortion could not have imagined.

Eastland asserts that this affect will continue:

Examining these results through a partisan political lens, the Democrats have given the Republicans a decided advantage in electoral politics, one that grows with each election. Moreover, it is an advantage that they can never regain. Even if abortion were declared illegal today, and every single person complied with the decision, the advantage would continue to grow until the 2020 election, and would stay at that level throughout the voting lifetime of most Americans living today.

He concludes:

Abortion has caused missing Democrats--and missing liberals. For advocates so fundamentally committed to changing the face of conservative America, liberals have been remarkably blind to the fact that every day the abortions they advocate dramatically decrease their power to do so. Imagine the number of followers that their abortion policies eliminate who, over the next several decades, would have emerged as the new liberal thinkers, voters, adherents, fund-raisers and workers for their cause.

The Inconsistency of Abortion as "Safe, Legal, and Rare"

[Note: the date stamp on this post has been changed from the original, so as to keep it on the main page and further enable the argument that has been taking place in the comments.]

The Washington Post highlights that Kerry Says He Believes Life Starts at Conception.

Presidential candidate, John Kerry, has, I believe, just put his foot in it again. As do many pro-abortion politicians, he tries to straddle the fence on the issue. Instead, all he does is show either the irrationality and inconsistency of the abortion advocacy argument or his own inconsistency on social policy. Perhaps both.

The WP notes:

But even as he tried to avoid making news Sunday, Kerry broke new ground in an interview that ran in the Dubuque, Iowa, Telegraph Herald. A Catholic who supports abortion rights and has taken heat from some in the church hierarchy for his stance, Kerry told the paper, "I oppose abortion, personally. I don't like abortion. I believe life does begin at conception."

I'm sure Kerry's campaign wishes he'd left off that last sentence.

First of all, Kerry clearly hasn't thought this through. His spokeswoman seems obviously surprised by his comment.

Spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said that although Kerry has often said abortion should be "safe, legal and rare," and that his religion shapes that view, she could not recall him ever publicly discussing when life begins.

If Kerry believes that life begins at conception, then he is saying that the ending, aborting, and killing of human life should be safe, legal and rare. Kerry, as an abortion advocate, wants every mother to have the legal right to kill (end the life of) the human being in her womb.

Furthermore, if Kerry really believes that the baby in a mother's womb is human from the time of conception, then what necessity is there to arbitrarily demarcate the time of birth as the cutoff point for when one can end that life "safely, legally, and rarely"? After all, on his own view, the fetus is a human life before and after birth. Let's say a mother has a month-old infant, but that it is interfering with her work, school, or other responsibilities, or that she can't afford her infant (three-fourths and two-thirds, respectively, of the reasons women have abortions). Why should she not be allowed to kill her baby, "safely, legally, and rarely"? On what principle can Kerry argue that to do this sort of "ending of a human life" is wrong? Why is it that some human beings can be killed legally, but the rest of us can't?

Kerry has made the mistake of paying attention to the fetus. He has allowed the argument to be taken to a focus on the baby in the womb. And every time--every time--the abortion argument gravitates to the nature of the life in the womb, the abortion argument will fail. Because the argument has to either deny the humanity of the unborn child--which then forces the question as to when do we become human--or argue for the right to kill a human being--which then forces the question of why those rights only apply in utero.

But then, of course, Kerry wants to shield himself from criticism, so he tries to take the high-minded route:

"I can't take my Catholic belief, my article of faith, and legislate it on a Protestant or a Jew or an atheist," he continued in the interview. "We have separation of church and state in the United States of America." The comments came on the final day of a three-state Midwest swing, during which Kerry has repeatedly sought to dispel stereotypes that could play negatively among voters there.

So, let me get this straight: Kerry believes in the separation of church and state, so he won't legislate his morals on someone else. But he will legislate somebody's morals on the rest of the country, even if they're not his own.

This "separation of church and state" notion is nothing but a canard. The fact of the matter is, lawmakers always legislate morality. The laws are always instruments of virtue and vice, and through them are shaped the character of a people. This has been recognized since the time of Plato and Aristotle, and was a matter of common understanding up until the twentieth century. One needs only read such things as the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the speeches of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and many of our other historical leaders. The law was not some neutral device, but was, rather, a highly influential device to reflect and to shape the moral beliefs and character of a people.

But even if today people attempt to understand the law and the state as somehow necessarily amoral, the fact of the matter is, it is a fantasy. The law is, by its nature, moral. The only question is, what sort of moral does it inculcate? In the case of abortion, it says to us, we may kill the unborn child in our womb if it gets in the way of what we otherwise want. And even though the instances of abortion in the cases of rape and incest are so rare (about 1% of all abortions) as to be exceptions to the normal rule of practice, even in those instances our laws tell us that the solution to a deeply personal trauma is to take another human life.

But more to the point, for Kerry to state that he opposes abortion himself, doesn't like it, in fact, but won't legislate his morals on others shows a remarkable lack of principle. Or rather, the principle it shows is that his personal beliefs can be violated for the sake of political principles. Presumably, then, Kerry's foundational beliefs are those of politics and not those of his Catholic faith.

Kerry garners no points here. He simply shows himself to be the secularist that he is in terms of the abortion debate. If he truly believed his Catholic dogma, then he would also know that such a thing as abortion cannot be trumped by politics. The "separation of church and state" canard cannot apply here. Kerry has claimed to be a good Catholic on this issue, that is, he still maintains his private beliefs. But his private beliefs (insofar as they actually line up with Catholic dogma) on this matter are being violated in point of fact by his actions in his advocacy of abortion. The fact of the matter is, Kerry cannot both claim to be a good Catholic on the matter of abortion and advocate for abortion rights. To do so is to serve two masters, or, rather, only one. To continue to claim his Catholic faith in this issue is sheer hypocrisy. For Catholics, as, I would argue, for all Christians, there is no such thing as private belief.

Why Abortion Advocates Necessarily Ignore the Humanity of the Unborn Baby

If you listen to, or read, the arguments for abortion (and an exemplary one from Judith Jarvis Thompson can be found here), you quickly find that the unborn baby (fetus, conceptus, fertilized human egg, or what have you) must be ignored if the argument is to have any hope of success.

In the aforelinked essay, Ms. Thompson does just that: ignores the baby. What? you say, having read the article, How can you say she ignores the baby? She spends nearly the entire essay on whether or not a fetus can reasonably and rightly be said to have a right to life. Is this not taking the baby into account?

Actually, no. It isn't.

In her essay, the fetus as such is not discussed, but rather the fetus as concept is discussed. How can the fetus have rights if it (and notice a fetus is most certainly "it") does not have interests wants and desires? And while it is not reasonable to assert that a fetus does not have rights, neither is it reasonable to assert that it does. A fetus has no more right to life than a piece of flesh from one's thumb. As Ms. Thompson puts it:

The stronger claim says that reason does not compel us to believe it more probable that an embryo is a human person than that any piece of human tissue is. If allowed to develop normally, an embryo will develop into a human person, whereas a cell in your thumb will not; it is not contrary to reason to think that that lends no weight at all to the idea that the embryo is a human person now.

But note, to accomplish her argument, she must do two things: focus on the earliest stages of fetal development (for the purposes of highlighting that opposition to abortion must include every moment of fetal life from conception and because to accept that earlier term abortions are somehow less evil than later ones forces the proponent of such a view to argue for why he makes such a distinction) and deny that this mass of cells has any intrinsic difference from any other mass of cells.

This only serves to show her hand. She knows that for an argument in favor of abortion to work, on her own terms, the fetus must be ahuman (that is, not fully human) and without legal status from the moment of conception until birth. However, just as she rightly criticizes abortion advocates who feel compelled to make a distinction in utero between what sorts of fetuses are okay to abort and what sorts not, so one must press Ms. Thompson to clarify her implication: if it is proper to deny the legitimacy of a right to life to a fetus on the grounds that a) a fetus has no interests, wants or desires and b) there is no reasonable necessity for assigning a right to life to a fetus, then on what grounds is it improper, indeed, murder, to kill a newborn infant, or, for that matter, a toddler?

Presumably, she might respond that newborns and toddlers clearly have interests, wants and desires, inarticulate though these may be. But the new technologies opening up to us also reveal behaviors in utero that similarly and clearly demonstrate interests, wants and desires that are inarticulate.

And to assert that a fetus is a mass of cells indistinguishable from any other mass of cells is just plain bad biology. It is well-known that the fetus (and I continue to use pro-abortion terminology for the sake of argument) is in no way simply another mass of cells belonging to the mother. The fetus has, from the moment of conception, a completely distinguishable DNA from its mother, frequently a different bloodtype, and so forth. Even the placental sac is technically an "organ" of the fetus' and not one belonging to the mother. Clearly the fetus is dependent upon the mother for nourishment, which it gets through the umbilical cord which attaches to the mother's uterine wall, but in all other respects, the fetus is a completely distinguishable biological entity. It is another mass of cells similar to the mass of cells of a thumb, alright, but the thumb of a completely different individual. And just as a person would reasonably object to some mother trying to sever his thumb (on the grounds that it is just another mass of cells), so it is reasonable to suppose would a fetus object to being aborted.

This is what I mean by ignoring the fetus. Abortion advocates cannot really and completely acknowledge the reality of who and what the fetus is--an unborn human child--because if they did so, their arguments for abortion would be seen to be as monstrous as they really are. Instead, who and what the fetus is must deliberately be clouded and concealed--it is a mass of cells; it has no desires, interests, or wants--so that the argument can seem to be "reasonable." But reason that ignores the reality with which it is confronted is not reason--it is madness.

One hopes that the reality of 45 million babies that have been aborted since 1973 would break through our society's insanity and bring us back to our senses.

The More You know . . .

. . . the less you can rationally defend the monstrous practice of abortion. This story (props to the Touchstone blog) on the BBC web page, highlights the 4D ultrasound technology that's now available and what insights it has given us of the life of the baby in the womb.

This video (requires Real Player) includes a clip that startled the peewadden out of me when it showed the footage of the baby suddenly smiling. And this series of pictures clearly shows how energetic and vibrant is the life of the unborn. The things we thought unborn babies didn't do have proven to be things that they, indeed, very much do, and the very things which display their humanity. "Fetuses" are more alive and aware, indeed, are much more human, than scientists have previously thought, but which pro-life/anti-abortion advocates have long argued.

How ironic that science, which pro-choice/pro-abortion advocates tout in their "arguments," so severely undermines their case that it is shown for the cruel hoax that it is.

Ronald Reagan: On Abortion

"Abortion is advocated only by persons who themselves have been born."

--Ronald Reagan, Fortieth President of the United States of America

Ronald Reagan also published "Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation" in the Spring 1983 issue of The Human Life Review. Here are two excerpts:

The 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade is a good time for us to pause and reflect. Our nationwide policy of abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy was neither voted for by our people nor enacted by our legislators— not a single state had such unrestricted abortion before the Supreme Court decreed it to be national policy in 1973. But the consequences of this judicial decision are now obvious: since 1973, more than 15 million [today more than 40 million] unborn children have had their lives snuffed out by legalized abortions. That is over ten times the number of Americans lost in all our nation's wars. . . .

The real question today is not when human life begins, but, What is the value of human life? The abortionist who reassembles the arms and legs of a tiny baby to make sure all its parts have been torn from its mother's body can hardly doubt whether it is a human being. The real question for him and for all of us is whether that tiny human life has a God-given right to be protected by the law— the same right we have.

So, This Is All About Choice?

Wonder how the "pro-choice" advocates will spin this one:

A 25-year-old Maryland woman, four months pregnant, changed her mind about having an abortion after being taken to the procedure room. She ran back to the clinic entrance where her boyfriend stopped her. You have to get an abortion, he told her. I've already paid for it. Three clinic workers and the abortionists surrounded the women, sedated her by injection, and then took her back into the procedure room. After the forced abortion, she awoke in a closet.

But the first account is even more horrific:

On 23 January 2004, in Jane Roe II vs. Aware Women Center for Choice, Inc., the Eleventh Circuit Court ruled that an expectant mother can be aborted by force if the abortionist argues that it is necessary to "protect the health of the mother."

The story begins on 29 March 1997, when a young, pregnant mother entered the Aware Women Center for Choice clinic in Florida. She was there for an abortion.

Awaiting her was the abortionist, William P. Egherman, who has committed over 10,000 abortions and who has, perhaps not surprisingly, been addicted to alcohol and opiates. He began the procedure by attempting to dilate the woman's cervix with a 12 millimeter dilator.

"My God, you're hurting me" the woman began to scream. "You're killing me, I'll never be able to have babies…. Stop!"

The woman had had a change of heart. She did not want an abortion. She wanted to keep her baby. And she wanted to leave. Immediately. "Stop. Let me out of here," she cried.

Instead of respecting the woman's wishes and stopping the procedure, Egherman called for assistance. Clinic workers held the woman down as Egherman, ignoring the woman's screams, continued to dilate her cervix. Then he entered the victim with a pair of forceps--"the bear" Ehgerman called them--and began probing and pulling. He mistakenly pulled out part of the woman's intestines. For the woman, said her attorney, Chris Sapp, it was like being drawn and quartered.

Realizing what he had done, Egherman heavily sedated the woman. Then he called for an ambulance. He instructed the ambulance to come slowly, without lights or sirens, in order to give him "time to pack the woman with gauze."

Egherman was also worried that his regular flow of business would be interrupted by "all the hoopla." "Saturday's our big day," he explained, "and I didn't want to generate a lot of… any more confusion, any more panic than was already present at the time. She was loud, and as I said, she was shrill, and there were a lot of patients who were hearing what was going on, and the normal rhythm of the day was interrupted. The other patients must have been terrified, and I didn't want the ambulance showing up with all the lights and sirens…"

At the hospital, the woman was operated on and the damage to her internal organs repaired. Her baby was found to be dead, and was removed.

Partial Birth Abortion Ban Declared Unconstitutional

In a recent ruling the Federal Abortion Ban Struck Down in Court, Judge in Planned Parenthood Lawsuit Declares Dangerous Law Unconstitutional.

One wonders how this can be given the biological facts of fetal pain, including the horrific testimony given in the trial documents. Clearly for secularist law, a woman's ability to kill the unborn child in her womb takes precedence over the indisuputable fact of the magnitude of pain and the length of time it takes to kill the child during the partial birth abortion.

Go on, read the testimony of the abortion doctors about what the "fetuses" do during a partial birth abortion. I dare you. Then tell me it's not a child it's a choice. Go on. I dare you.

On Personhood

I want to offer a thought or two on personhood. What got me thinking was the recent pro-abortion rally in Washington, D. C. Though it is tempting to rant on some of the excesses in evidence at the rally (not the least of which was not allowing the women who'd had had abortions and were now against abortion to have their own space to assemble), I'd really rather discuss the issue of personhood. I will make some connections to the matter of abortion, but I also want to speak about personhood in a way that goes beyond the abortion polemics.

My friend, Tripp, would want me to assert that the issue of abortion is more complex than any one aspect on which one might choose to focus. And while I admit that the issue of abortion is not a simple logical syllogism one can work out, I do think that the entire abortion question rests squarely on the question of personhood. Address the question of personhood adequately and appropriately, and you will then have a clear and immistakable response to the abortion question.

But of course, personhood is itself a very complex matter. (And Tripp, I think, would be glad to hear me say that.)

First of all, let it be noted that the question of abortion is fueled primarily by two notions: personhood as understood in fundamentally (though not necessarily exclusively) individual terms, and the mother-unborn child relationship as one of adversarial rights. But it seems to me that Christians cannot, due to the very nature of the Gospel, understand human persons or human relating on those terms.

For Christians, I do not think it can be the case that they view personhood primarily from the standpoint of the individual. I do not want to deny the uniqueness of each person--which uniqueness highlights a person's individuality--but I do want to say that individuality is not what primarily defines us. Rather, what primarily defines a human being is koinonia, or community.

We have this on good authority: Humans are made in the image of God. God, himself, is a Trinity of Persons, so God's unity is radically plural. Furthermore, it takes both male and female humans to adequately image God. And finally (to be brief), the standard unit of human relating has been, from creation, the procreative union of husband and wife. A man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife. And the two will become one flesh. So a baby is a sign and symbol, as well as the reality, of the union of two persons. And each person is a sign and symbol of the reality of the Triune God.

I am choosing to primarily orient myself around the the creational norms to indicate that this reality I'm describing is not merely one religious viewpoint among many--that is to say, if I have adequately represented the Scriptural and Traditional view on the matter--but is, in fact, a reality built into the very nature of the universe. It's not as though we can look at personhood and describe it in individualist terms or in communal terms, whichever one makes more sense to us. Rather, I am asserting that one cannot but view personhood in this way. Personhood is this reality, apart from whether we believe it or not.

And the Gospel understanding of personhood only intensifies and underlines this reality with the advent of the new community, the Body of Christ. Each unique member of the Body of Christ is indentifiable, but at the same time, no member of the Body of Christ is so in isolation. We are saved as persons, and we are saved together. There is no salvation outside the Church, because there are no Christians outside the Body of Christ (God knows who are his, and he calls them by name). We are one in Christ: we in him, just as he is in God. In other words, in Christian terms, there is no such thing as a human as only an individual. Even our individuality is communal, plural. Whether in terms of creational norms or in terms of Gospel truths, human personhood is radically communal.

So Christians must rightly reject the false dichotomy which pits an unborn child against its mother. This is what makes the abortion question--and it's presumed answer in arguing for abortion rights--so seductive: it purports to solve a complex and irresoluble problem with a false alternative; it makes the theoretically difficult, the theoretically easy (though clearly no one would argue that an abortion is an easy answer to anything).

Furthermore, the Christian paradigm is not one of rights. I do not want to deny the legitimate claims we have on one another as human beings, nor to deny the legitimate claims we have on one another in the Body of Christ. These claims, to the degree that they are legitimate, are binding and valid. But the Christian paradigm is not one of rights. Christians are forbidden to go to secular courts against one another (though presumably not forbidden to have their claims handled intra ecclesiam). More to the point, the Christian paradigm is Christ himself who did not hold on to his legitimate right to the privileges of the Godhead, but took the form of a servant, became man and died for us. The paradigmatic icon of the Christian husband--who, let it be noted, is given headship in the family--is not the Roman paterfamilias, who asserts his rights accountable only to himself or to the empire, but is again, the Christ who gave up his life to make holy his Bride. Thus to assert the mother's right to choose (to kill her unborn child) over the unborn child's right to live--or even vice versa let it be noted--is not the Christian mindset.

Rather the Christian notes that life is a gift given, not owed, to one. We neither assert any right to keep it beyond what God ordains, nor to give it up outside of what God wills. It is a gift to be treasured, so long as it is given to us. And given that we are a community of persons, we understand the gift of our own life to be a gift also given those to whom we have also been given in koinonia. Certainly the unborn child owes the gift of its life to God and its mother and father, and cannot assert that gift in such a way so as to deny the gift of life given its mother and father. But neither can mother or father deny their child that gift. All our life is a common gift given each of us uniquely, a treasure for which we are responsible to those with whom we are in koinonia. Similarly, as mother and father, the life we engender is not a gift we can return or ask to be returned. The life we engender is as much our gift to the child as the child's life is a gift to us. We are responsible one to another for this gift, and none has the right to demand that life from the other. We are all responsible to cherish that gift and ensure its growth.

There is no adversarial rights relationship. Rather it is a communal relationship suffused with humility and self-sacrifice.

Given that more than 95% of the stated reasons for abortion do not have to do with rape or incest or the health of the mother (note my earlier post), then clearly the Christian understanding of personhood sketched out above, would preclude almost any abortion decision. And even in terms of the very difficult cases of rape, incest, and mother's health, I think the Christian understanding I've outlined gives far more fruitful ground for considering the matter, than individuality and rights. Indeed, even in these cases, abortion (understood as an action intended to kill the unborn child) would not be a very viable alternative. Rather, birth and adoption (in the cases of rape and incest), or medical actions which intend to save the life of the mother (which, though it may also result in the death of the unborn child, is not abortion), would be the compassionate, life-affirming responses. Indeed, in the case of the health of the mother, the mother may also choose that which may well be life-endangering to herself as a gift of life to her unborn child. These considerations seem naturally to flow from the Christian understanding of personhood, but do not seem to follow from individuality and rights.

But let me also consider the mother in my paradigm. If we focus on the pregnant mother as primarily an individual with rights that are opposed to the individual within her and its rights, we put the mother in an untenable situation; essentially adding to the burden she already carries. She's "on her own" as an individual with this abortion decision. Listen to the rhetoric for proponents of abortion rights: no one can make this decision for a women; it's her decision alone. But how uncompassionate. In a moment such as this a woman, it would seem to this man, would need to know that she is in fact not alone. That this is not her decision, but is rather a decision shared by all those with whom she is in koinonia, including the unborn child in her womb. A woman faced with the choice of abortion is faced with a decision about death. Either she and her way of life "die" or the child itself (literally) dies. But a woman under the Christian paradigm that I've outlined, though faced with a most difficult decision and all its physical consequences, can affirm that whether she decides to parent the child herself or allow another loving couple to parent the child, she has made a decision of life. Of course, even in that decision, there are "deaths" to be experienced, but what a difference.

Consider also the father--the largely forgotten person in this conversation. In the abortion rights scenario of individuals and rights, he is completely cut off from any of the decision making. Indeed, though clearly the killing of the unborn child is the most tragic wrongs done, the condemnation of the father to moral and parental exile is a great wrong as well. If the father has no say in a life-and-death decision involving his unborn child, then why would we expect him to think he would have a role in raising the child? And if he himself would seem to prefer it this way, by abanding the mother and his own unborn child, then how do we remedy the situation by eliminating the reality of the gift for which he bears responsibility, and indeed, the gift of life that that unborn child will be giving back to him? It has not been unheard of in the history of the human male that otherwise self-centered automatons experience redemption through fatherhood. It's not a given. But do we dare deny a father-to-be the chance of salvation and life?

I hope I have described the Christian understanding of personhood well enough, and laid enough of a sketch of a proof as to assert its plausibility, such that it can clearly be seen that the consistent Christian stance with regard to abortion has to do with affirming life (and standing against the practice of abortion).

Now many will by now be almost unrestrainable in wanting to assert: But you haven't asked the most pressing question of all! When do fetuses become persons? I would hope that given the convictions outlined above, that this is understood to be a question without an answer, under the Christian paradigm, because it fails to understand the underlying reality. It's like asking your physician at your annual physical: But what about whether I should itemize on my taxes or not? It's a question that doesn't make sense because it asserts presuppositions the Christian doesn't accept. There is no point at which a fetus becomes a person, because in the Christian paradigm, we are always already born into community, and thus persons, and it is community that marks our personhood. When do we become a person? Precisely when we come to be. And we only come to be in the conjugal union of man and woman, who themselves were always already in community when they came to be, and so on back to Adam and Eve, and beyond them to the very life of the Trinity.

But this is the Christian conception--or at least I take it to be so. What about those who are not Christians? How can we persuade them to change their minds and accept our views, and--most importantly--get the laws changed? I would submit that, given the conception above, this, too, is a question that does not make sense. If one is not part of the Christan community, why would they want to accept its premises? Should Christians try to persuade them? Yes. Should Christians try to get the laws changed? Yes. Of course. But we must understand that this is a corollary of the premise: we must extend the life of God to those who are dead, so that they, too, may live. Changing laws can change people's hearts. But changing people's hearts is the fundamental task.

But more specifically, we need to reframe the abortion question in Christian terms. It will not do to stay within the paradigm of individuality and rights. We must put new wine into new wineskins. But of course, we must then live the life we talk. It will not do to talk life and live death--seeking affluence, shrugging off sexual immorality, accepting a divorce rate equivalent to those outside the Church. It's time to demand more of ourselves, and to live the humble sacrificial life we profess. We must take in women in crisis pregnancies into our own homes. We must pray for them. We must adopt their children. If all they know of us is our shouting and picketing, we are not preaching life to them. We must also stand alongside them before they get to the abortion clinic.

We must change our thinking on abortion to conform with the Gospel. Our words and our lives must image the life we have been given. We must show them what personhood in Christ really means. Some accept the life-giving Gospel. Some will not. We are only called to be faithful.

"The Nightmares of Choice"

What do abortion practitioners know that their supporters don't?

From The Nightmares of Choice

"I have fetus dreams, we all do here: dreams of abortions one after the other; of buckets of blood splashed on the walls; trees full of crawling fetuses," reported Sallie Tisdale of her time as a nurse in an abortion facility. Writing in Harper’s magazine, she told of dreaming that two men grabbed her and dragged her away.

"Let’s do an abortion," they said with a sickening leer, and I began to scream, plunged into a vision of sucking, scraping pain, of being spread and torn by impartial instruments that do only what they are bidden. I woke from this dream barely able to breathe and thought of kitchen tables and coat hangers, knitting needles striped with blood, and women all alone clutching a pillow in their teeth to keep the screams from piercing the apartment-house walls.

It is not joyful or easy work. "There are weary, grim moments when I think I cannot bear another basin of bloody remains, utter another kind phrase of reassurance," she wrote. ". . . I prepare myself for another basin, another brief and chafing loss. ‘How can you stand it?’ Even the clients ask. . . . I watch a woman’s swollen abdomen sink to softness in a few stuttering moments and my own belly flip-flops with sorrow."

What is the emotional impact of doing abortions on the people who do them? Those who do them have written and said enough to show that it is no ordinary medical procedure. Some, like Tisdale, suffer nightmares. Others suffer many of the other symptoms associated with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), once called "shell shock" and "battle fatigue." The practice of medicine, of healing, should not give you nightmares, should not leave you shell-shocked.

Though "The case that abortion practitioners suffer from PTSD because they perform abortions cannot yet be made", still:

Remarkably little study has been done of the doctors, nurses, counselors, and other staff in abortion facilities. Only two scientific studies that look at a large number of people have been done by researchers who did not work in the abortion field. One (by M. Such-Baer) appeared in Social Casework in 1974 and the other (by K. M. Roe) in Social Science and Medicine in 1989.

Both studies were done by people in favor of legal abortion, yet they both note the high prevalence of symptoms that fit the condition now called Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The study published in 1974, before the term was adopted, noted that "obsessional thinking about abortion, depression, fatigue, anger, lowered self-esteem, and identity conflicts were prominent. The symptom complex was considered a ‘transient reactive disorder,’ similar to ‘combat fatigue’."

The other study listed similar symptoms: "Ambivalent periods were characterized by a variety of otherwise uncharacteristic feelings and behavior including withdrawal from colleagues, resistance to going to work, lack of energy, impatience with clients, and an overall sense of uneasiness. Nightmares, images that could not be shaken, and preoccupation were commonly reported. Also common was the deep and lonely privacy within which practitioners had grappled with their ambivalence."

Indeed, in the words of the author, " the evidence so far accumulated shows that further research is certainly needed."

In the meantime, wouldn't it make sense that providers experiencing these severe emotional and psychological events ought reexamine what it is that they are doing?