Abortion: Where Conscience Meets the Womb, Part II | Eastern North Carolina Now

    So, ladies and gentlemen, you have an opportunity. But for just one moment, I'd like to speak just to the men in this room: Men, you are made for greatness. You are made to stand up and be men. You are made to defend women and children and not stand by and turn your head when you know murder is occurring and do nothing about it. You are not made to use women and leave them alone. You are made to be kind and great and gracious and strong, and to stand for something. Men, listen to me... I'm too tired to keep doing your job.

    Women, you are not made for abuse. You are not made to deny your worth and your value. You are made to be fought for.. forever.

    So now is your moment.... What sort of people are you going to be? I trust incredible. I trust, men, that you will rise to the occasion. To the politicians listening, particularly to the men, I would say this: You are made for greatness. Set your politics aside. You are made to defend what is right and good. This fiery young girl will stand here and say: 'Now is your moment. What sort of man do you want to be? Are you going to be a man obsessed with his own glory or a man obsessed with the glory of God? It's time to take a stand, Victoria. This is your hour. God will assist you. God will be with you. You will have the opportunity to glorify and honor Him in 2008.'

    I will just end with this. Some of you might be slightly annoyed that I keep talking about God and Jesus. But how on earth can I walk about, limping, through this world and not give all my heart and my mind and my soul and my spirit and my strength to the Christ who showed me mercy and gave me life. So if you think I'm a fool, it's just another jewel in my crown. My whole intent in living here is simply to make God smile.

    I hope some of this makes sense. It just came from my heart. May God bless and keep you."

    Wow. Imagine living your life knowing you weren't wanted, and even worse, that of all the options available, death was the most convenient.

    Simply put, the abortion of a viable fetus is the thoughtful premeditated decision to take the life of another human being. Out on the streets we call it first-degree murder - a capital crime.

    God created us and gave us the gift of life. He gave us our free will and fundamental liberties yet set limits on them. We know these limitations from reading the Bible. We understand these limitations so that we can be a morally-upright, decent, stable, and compassionate people worthy of the dignity and humanity that God intended for us. We also understand these limitations so that we, as a people, can be assured of making laws and creating a society that value life and goodness, while punishing and preventing evil.

    In this country alone, we acknowledge that our fundamental rights and liberties derive from God and his benevolent nature. And only those fundamental rights are the ones protected by the Constitution. The right to take the life of a viable fetus would never be a right granted by our Creator.

    Instead of conforming their behavior to God's expectations, it is much easier to deny the role that God has played in our founding. It is much easier to take the watchful eye of God out of society and all reminders of his laws. Instead of people looking to God's law and conforming their behavior accordingly, they live their lives as a complete free-for-all and then seek to invalidate God's law to absolve themselves of their immoral acts.

   Mother Teresa once asked: "If we can accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?"

    I may not know the precise moment when life happens, but it is indeed miraculous --- that moment when the miracle of life occurs, like a switch being flipped, when life all of a sudden infuses a mass of cells. Unlike all other living things which man has been granted "dominion over," only man shares that special bond with God for he is blessed with a deep and quick intelligence, foresight, a complex memory, advanced reason, and profound wisdom. And so we know God loves us. This is why we are supposed to always respect and celebrate this bond we have with God.

    So what happens when a woman is carrying a viable fetus and wants to abort that unborn child? She presents quite a dilemma to God, doesn't she. On the one hand it is her body. Yet on the other hand, she was created to be able to bring children into the world. And still on the other hand, there is the fetus, the growing child, who, although has been miraculously infused with life only asks for a few short months of shelter and support in the mother's womb. While God indeed loves all his children, we know from the Bible that He has a particular bond to those who are helpless. He wants us to do what he would do.

    Mother Teresa once said: "There are two victims in every abortion: a dead baby and a dead conscience." She also commented: "It's a shame that a child must die so that you may live as you wish."

    One abortion provider provided this eye-witness account of working in an abortion clinic: "From May to November 1988, I worked for an abortionist. He specializes in third trimester killings. I witnessed evidence of the brutal, cold blooded murder of over 600 viable, healthy babies at seven, eight and nine months gestation. A very, very few of these babies, less than 2%, were handicapped...I thought I was pro-choice and I was glad to be working in an abortion clinic. I thought I was helping provide a noble service to women in crisis....I was instructed to falsify the age of the babies in medical records. I was required to lie to the mothers over the phone, as they scheduled their appointments, and to tell them that they were not 'too far along' Then I had to note, in the records that Dr. Tiller's needle had successfully pierced the walls of the baby's heart, injecting the poison what brought death...one day, Dr. Tiller came up the stairs from the basement, where the mothers were in labor. He was carrying a large cardboard box, and ducked into the employees only area of the office so that he wouldn't have to walk through the waiting room. He passed behind my desk as I sat working on the computer, and he turned the corner to go around a short hall. He called out for me to come and help him. the box was so big and heavy in his arms that he couldn't get the key into the lock. So I unlocked the door for him, and , pushing the door open, I saw very clearly the gleaming metal of the crematorium- a full sized crematorium, just like the ones used in funeral homes. I went back to my computer. I could hear Dr. Tiller firing up the gas oven. A few minutes later I could smell burning human flesh. Mine was the agony of a participant, however reluctant, in the act of prenatal infanticide."

    Another abortion provider gave this heart-wrenching account: "The doctors would remove the fetus while performing hysterotomies (removal of the uterus) and then lay it on the table., where it would squirm until it died. We weren't permitted to attend to them. They all had perfect forms and shapes. I couldn't take it. No nurse could." Another wrote: "It is sobering to think that there is an actual human being at the end of the table willingly taking a baby apart." Another eyewitness said: "The procedure changes significantly at 21 weeks because fetal tissues become much more cohesive and it becomes more difficult to dismember" And still another commented: "A long curved Mayo scissors may often be necessary to decapitate and dismember the fetus."

    If we as a nation continue to close our eyes and our hearts to the physical torture and purposeful death that these innocent souls endure for the sake of 'convenience,' then we have no humanity. We truly have a dead conscience.

    I was thinking about what this country stands for - Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. There is one thing for sure when it comes to our Founders - they meant what they wrote and they wrote what they meant. Words mattered to them and the order of words mattered. The sentence structure dictated the exact meaning. "Life" is listed first.

    What happened to our nation's foundation? What happened to the "innate rights of human beings," defined by those seven words - "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" - that our Founders worked so hard to embrace and protect in our Constitutional and to engrain in our national fiber? A living fetus living inside a woman's uterus has no rights under our laws or Constitution yet pregnant women have the right to play God and terminate life, and homosexual men have the fundamental right to sodomy - a form of sexual pleasure against the laws of science because it cannot result in conception. California says there is a fundamental right to marry a same-sex partner, in contradiction to both the laws of nature and the Bible. According to Roe v. Wade, women have the fundamental right to an abortion on demand (up until the last trimester) yet according to Judge Roger Vinson, the district court judge for the Northern District of Florida in the case of the 20 states against Obamacare (Florida v. Sebelius, Oct. 14, 2010), there is no fundamental right in general for a person to determine his or her own medical treatment. Where is our collective conscience? Where is our moral compass pointing these days? Why is it so important that women have the right to terminate a life inside them without condition?

    Just as we knew, in our hearts, that racial segregation was wrong, we also know that killing an unborn is wrong. If our minds try to rationalize things differently, our hearts still tell us it is wrong and inhumane.

    Our society is so uptight about religion in anyplace other than within the church walls or in the home where no one has to know about it. They cry "Wall of Separation" to demand that religion be removed from the sphere of government and absent from the thought process. Religion and morality have no place in the legislative process or in the halls of justice, they cry. Yet the "Wall of Separation" equally demands that government can't support a position that denies God's law. Government may not endorse religion or promote religion over non-religion, yet every decision either has to fall on one side or another, doesn't it. Every decision is someone's moral judgment or reflects someone's view of religion/non-religion. Obama and Nancy Pelosi want Obamacare to cover abortions. They refused to include language preventing government funding for abortion. Well, that's a moral and religious stand. Government is endorsing an absence of religion. Government currently funds Planned Parenthood, the largest national supplier of abortions. Again, that's a position that has the government supporting non-religion.

    We all sense that our country is on the verge of being overwhelmed by the many complicated issues, challenges, and crises it faces. We know that when men like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, George Washington, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry and so many others guided us towards independence and founded this great country... despite their personalities and their varying individual religious beliefs, they acknowledged that the success of their fragile endeavor rested firmly on the grace of God. They invoked the blessings of Divine Providence in government and for over 100 years we prospered greatly. And then we took God out of national life and then ignored him in making our laws.

    We are going to need to ask God's help and His divine providence if we are to pull through the crises - moral, political, and Constitutional - that we face. But first we need to let Him know that his laws are still in our hearts and minds. And the compassion and loyalty we seek from Him is the same we show to our fellow human beings. As Pope John Paul II said: "America you are blessed . . . . The ultimate test of your greatness is the way you treat every human being, but especially the weakest and most defenseless. If you want equal justice for all and true freedom and lasting peace, then America, defend life."

    In closing, I want to share something that touched me when I read it:

"Elegy To The Unborn" by Dr. James R. McLane

One starlit night
As I gazed into the heavens
I knew each star was created by God.
The ocean of stars above me
Spoke of the sea of humanity
Around me and I realized,
I too was created with purpose.
I was created to be born alive
To run and play, to laugh and cry
To work and to grow old.
But most of all
To show love amidst hatred
And to bring hope in despair.
Each one of us was created
With this purpose
And our mother's womb
Became our passageway,
Our first universe.
From the moment of conception
The light of God breathed forth
An immortal soul,
A new human being of untold value.
As the beauty of the stars shone
I cried for my fellow man,
For millions of unborn babies
Had been crushed by humanity
And discarded as garbage.
Let us turn to the glory of Jesus
So all mothers and their unborn
Might be embraced by humanity
To bring glory unto God.


    FURTHER:

    See: Ronald Reagan, "Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation," The Human Life Review, Spring 1983. Reference at: http://old.nationalreview.com/document/reagan200406101030.asp

    Eye-witness accounts from people who are current and former abortion providers. Referenced at: http://www.abortionfacts.com/providers/quotes.asp

    Gianna Jessen, Sept. 15, 2008 at Queen's Hall, Victoria, Australia. Referenced at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5YlJ9CZ9fI&feature=related

    Dr. James R. McLane, "Elegy to the Unborn." Referenced at: http://www.priestsforlife.org/resources/elegy-to-the-unborn.htm

    What the Health: Can We Survive Our Healthcare System?

    Diane Rufino has her own blog For Love of God and Country. Come and visit her. She'd love your company.