culture of death – Page 4 – Mama Needs Coffee

Abortion, Bioethics, Culture of Death, NFP, planned parenthood, politics, Women's Health, Women's Rights

Defund Planned Parenthood and Give Women Real Power

February 27, 2017

Today we interrupt this little blogging sabbatical to bring you a guest piece from Janet Garcia, a smart, tough-minded nurse and mom of two, who has seen from the front lines the cost of our all-in cultural infatuation with Planned Parenthood and all that it entails. I hope you’ll pour yourself a cup and give her words a thoughtful read. She’ll be over on the Mama Needs Coffee Facebook page moderating the civil, respectful discussion that I invite you to participate in.

Last month, Sens. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and James Lankford (R-Okla.) introduced the “Protect Funding for Women’s Health Care Act” to the United States Senate. The bill would transfer federal funding from Planned Parenthood to other women’s health centers that do not provide abortion services. And, just a few weeks ago, the House of Representatives got rid of an Obama-era regulation which didn’t allow states to pull their funding from Planned Parenthood, allowing them to defund Planned Parenthood individually if they so choose. This movement to defund Planned Parenthood across our current Congress is in alignment with the views of most Americans: a poll released last month by Susan B. Anthony List revealed that most Americans are in favor of defunding the abortion provider, 56% in favor to 40% opposed.

Additionally, on February 11^th, rallies advocating for removing federal funding occurred at over 200 Planned Parenthood locations across the US.

Sens. Ernst and Lankford’s bill needs to become law in the United States, and Planned Parenthood must lose its federal funding due to the organization’s involvement in several different ethical scandals and the way that our tax dollars are continuing to fuel the cycle of incomplete, or even incorrect, sexual education of our young people.

In case there was any doubt about this Administration and sitting Congress’s need to pass legislation such as this, recently LiveAction, the non-profit organization led by pro-life pioneer Lila Rose, uncovered yet another scandal involving Planned Parenthood. This time, the abortion giant’s utilization of “quotas” for abortion services within their clinics was brought into the light. (http://liveaction.org/abortioncorporation/ ) Employees or clinics who meet or exceed these numbers have been rewarded with perks such as “pizza parties.” And yet, the Democratic Party that has insisted for years that they want abortion to be “safe, legal and rare,” claims that we would be doing a great disservice to the women of our great country by taking away federal funds from Planned Parenthood.

The disconnect between what these politicians claim they desire for America and how, in reality, our tax dollars are being utilized by Planned Parenthood is staggering. Furthermore, last year, thanks to the Center for Medical Progress and David Daleiden, we also know that Planned Parenthood clinics across several states were involved in the trafficking of infant body parts.

We have in America today a profound disconnect between what politicians claim to want regarding funding for women’s health care, and how this end is ultimately being carried out.

Practically speaking, Planned Parenthood is directly responsible for a large portion of the sexual education received by recent generations. Young women today who have been brought up on the sexual education of our public school systems, oftentimes provided by Planned Parenthood and its affiliates, are seriously lacking in a basic understanding of how their bodies actually work.

They are unaware of the potentially abortifacient effects of hormonal contraceptives.

They are unaware that hormonal contraceptives can cause several forms of cancer, as well as dangerous, or deadly, blood clots.

They are unaware that there are times in a women’s cycle when she can become pregnant and times when it is literally impossible for pregnancy to occur.

Planned Parenthood is feeding our youth with the lies of unrestricted, consequence-free sex, and then when this isn’t what these young women experience and they become pregnant, Planned Parenthood is there to offer their abortion services and perpetuate the cycle.

As a registered nurse, I have had the privilege of bringing education and truth to the minds and hearts of teenage and young adult women about the beauty and the truth of their natural fertility, and the option of Natural Family Planning (NFP). I have seen the shock on their faces as they are told the truth of their own fertility as well the disgust, when they learn about the dangers of the contraceptives they have been told, by the likes of Melinda Gates, are a necessity for their success as modern women.

The same case must be made in defense of our international sisters around the globe. The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) decried President Trump reinstating the Mexico City Policy – something every recent GOP president has done within days of taking office – limiting funds to organizations that provide abortion services. IPPF, along with The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are champions of providing hormonal contraceptives and abortion access to third world countries around the world, in the name of bringing them out of poverty. Nevertheless, these dangerous hormonal contraceptives carry the same concerns around the globe as they do in the US. HIV/AIDS, various forms of cancer, and embolisms are all very real consequences of using contraceptives for these impoverished women.

These women, with less education and very little information at their fingertips, are at an even greater disadvantage and are more likely to be forced or coerced into contracepting and abortion as well, without any sort of “informed consent.”

We need not look any further than the recent “One Child Policy” of China to know that Pope Paul VI was chillingly accurate when he predicted in Humane Vitae that contraceptives would become a, “dangerous weapon… in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies.”

Is this kind of coercion the empowerment that modern day feminists want for themselves and their sisters around the globe?

So, where does this lead us? Obviously, women both here and abroad, deserve comprehensive sexual healthcare and education. If Planned Parenthood loses federal funding, there will be a hole left by the lack of their services. The most wonderful result of defunding Planned Parenthood will of course be the precious unborn lives that will be saved, by eliminating our tax dollars from the largest abortion provider in the US. However, I am hoping for a secondary consequence that will be the responsibility of the Women’s Health Centers, and in reality all of us who are advocating for defunding Planned Parenthood.

Mainstream, liberal, feminism claims to want female empowerment. One of the main principles of the recent Women’s March was “reproductive rights,” under which they ask for “medically accurate sexuality education.” These women claim that Planned Parenthood is a major champion in providing this sexual education; one need not look any further than Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s chic pink scarf to know how infatuated they are with Cecile Richards and her clinics. However, I would like to ask these women if their healthcare providers at Planned Parenthood ever gave them true informed consent regarding their artificial contraceptives: including the risks, alternatives and how exactly these hormones or devices work inside their bodies. I would like to ask them, “Has your healthcare provider explained to you the risk of very early-term abortions which are inherent to nearly all hormonal contraceptives?”

Of course, a portion of women will be unaffected by this information, however, what about those women who believe that when their unborn child’s whole genetic code is determined at the moment of conception, that the child is worthy of protection? Do these women not deserve “medically accurate sexuality education?”

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when women were not given a “seat at the table” or a place in the ballot box; we were not given information, so as to not burden us with it. If we are not teaching women the full truth about contraceptives and fertility, are we really so much better off than we were?

Women’s Health Centers need to become places where women can be educated about their fertility and its awesomeness. Of course, I know it is naïve to believe that a large portion of American women will become users of NFP as the result of the defunding of Planned Parenthood, however, my hope is that more women will be able to see the beauty in their fertility and feel empowered to make a truly informed choice, with complete education and understanding.

Because if our goal is to empower women, we need to explore ways to educate minds and sustain health. NFP can not only assist with preventing or delaying pregnancy, it can also help to achieve and sustain pregnancy through facilitating targeted hormone support ( http://time.com/4629589/miscarriage-progesterone-pregnancy/ )and identifying hormonal or dietary insufficiencies, among other things. Personally, I learned NFP while engaged to be married. Through charting my cycles, I was diagnosed with both hypothyroidism and low progesterone in the luteal phase. Both of these diagnoses carry with them a risk of infertility and miscarriage. I was able to reach maximum wellness in these areas through practicing NFP and do what I could to minimize these risks; how is that for female empowerment?!

All feminists, rightly so, demand that women have equal standing with men in our society. If knowledge is power, I hope that Women’s Health Centers will step up to the plate and help women reach this new level of true empowerment that Planned Parenthood has failed to provide for generations.

Janet Garcia, RN, BSN, is a “retired” registered nurse turned SAHM. During her nursing career she cared for extremely premature infants, patients on hospice and every beautiful soul in between. She enjoys sharing the truth of honest femininity, defending the most misunderstood teachings of the Church, being a political news junkie and binge watching The West Wing and Fixer Upper with her husband. Janet lives in northern Minnesota with her husband and two young children.

Find her on Instagram and Twitter.

Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, deliverance, Evangelization, Family Life, prayer, sin, spiritual warfare

Spiritual Warfare 101: prayers of protection

February 6, 2017

Before our biggest little people scurry out the door on school mornings, there is a prayer we gather to pray as a family apart from the morning offering and the basic “love you, be safe.” We started doing some version of this about a year ago, praying specifically and intentionally for protection from harm – be it physical, spiritual, or emotional – over each other and over the kids at the beginning of each day. Some days we drop the ball, other days one of us might remember later in the morning and a quick phone call will accomplish the feat. But we have noticed a significant difference between the days we pray this way and the days we don’t.

A few things before I get deeper into this. First, praying this way is not magical. Asking God to protect you from accidents, injuries, curses, etc. is not like waving a verbal wand over the 12 hour expanse of day stretched out ahead of you and rendering it “safe.” These prayers focus on staying in the safest place possible: the center of God’s will. And His will is mysterious, sometimes more so than others. So we pray this way with clear eyes and the expectation that God will hear our prayer and apply our petitions in the ways that will accomplish our greatest good, from His perspective.

So we pray with faith, sometimes more distracted than other times, but always with the expectation that as long as we are seeking God’s will and really trying to live it, He is going to do His part for our greatest good and for His greatest glory.

Acknowledging that sometimes God’s plans look nothing like ours, and can even be excruciatingly painful at times, when experienced in a vacuum, has helped me to let go of the magical thinking that goes something like “Well, I asked God for this and I was really specific with Him, and He didn’t deliver. Guess He doesn’t care/isn’t there/isn’t omnipotent.” (Maybe you’re holier than me, or more well-formed, and you never think that way. But just in case there are any other mediocre Christians out there reading this, I thought I’d include it as a pertinent detail.)

I also wrestled a bit with the idea that we would be giving the enemy – satan, you know the guy – too much credibility by praying in a way that was overtly acknowledging his existence and specifically rejecting him. Like, would that make our kids nuts? Do they need to hear us engaging in verbal warfare with an unseen force for evil who is actively seeking to harm them and disrupt their path to holiness?

Then I thought about the renewal of baptism prayer and the St. Michael prayer, and I got over myself. After all, one of satan’s most effective weapons in the modern age is that while the culture is utterly fascinated with witchcraft, dark magic, occult practices and gnosticism, many Christians – can I go so far as to say most? – are ashamed to admit any belief in a person who is evil incarnate and who works tireless for our eternal damnation. LOL JOKE’S ON THEM, he’s got to be thinking.

CS Lewis said as much in The Screwtape Letters, cackling deliciously as Uncle Screwtape over the coup of the century, to hoodwink the world into an oblivious skepticism of real evil, dismissible as fairy tales and ghost stories and utterly not serious and not suitable for contemplation by intelligent people with rational minds. Brilliant strategy, as these things go.

And we now have two big problems on our hands: First, an inability to trust that God has our best interests at heart (isn’t that the oldest one on the books?) and second, a disbelief – or at least a hearty skepticism – that there is anyOne out there who is truly our enemy, and who is actively seeking to destroy us.

It’s a pretty effective recipe for disaster.

Enter the protection prayers, which I consider spiritual warfare 101. After all, the first step is admitting that we have a problem. And Houston, we have a problem. The culture is in full on meltdown mode, and as parents, we’re tasked with doing our best to navigate the waters we dwell in and get these kids home safe, taking as many other people as possible with us.

So, as a first step into this perhaps unfamiliar realm, may I recommend starting your day with a simple prayer of protection.

We have two versions we’ve used. We like this shorter version a priest friend shared with us best, and I think it’s pretty all-encompassing. We printed it out and taped it to our fridge where we would see it every day, and it has proven to be a convenient mechanism for reminding us to actually do it. I suggest you do the same with your spouse and kids, if they’re old enough to read along and pay attention. Some days I’ll pray it again if I’m feeling particularly besieged by what feels like demonic interference, or if I realize we’d forgotten to do it that morning.

Spiritual Protection of the Home

Dear Lord Jesus, please surround me (my family/friends/home) with a perimeter of Your Love and Protection throughout the day today and every day a hundred yards in all directions.

Lord Jesus, render any demons that are here, or should try to come, deaf, dumb, and blind. Strop them of all weapons, illusions, armor, power, and authority. Disable them from communicating or interacting in any way. Bind, sever, and separate them, sending them directly to the foot of Your Cross, without manifestation or harm, to us or to anyone, to be dealt with by you Jesus as you see fit.

May Your Precious Blood cover us, the Holy Spirit fill us, Mary’s mantle of love and protection surround us, St. Joseph guide us, the Holy Angels and Saints guard and protect us from all unfortunate events. Protect us from fire, theft, vandalism, flood, storms, ailments and accidents of every sort, distress, hardship, curse, and all untoward things. I ask this all in your Name Jesus, through Mary’s intercession, now. Amen!

Bottom line? This stuff is real. And even though it marks you out as crazy cakes to start talking about it, it’s even crazier to pretend it isn’t happening.

We are spiritual beings as well as flesh and blood, and as Ephesian 6:12 promises, “We are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

St. Michael, St. Joseph, St. Padre Pio, St. John Paul II, and Mother Mary, pray for us!

Abortion, Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, Evangelization

We are still sisters

January 24, 2017

I was a little astonished by the overwhelmingly positive and peaceful response to yesterday’s post. I credit that to the working of the Holy Spirit, because when I work alone, I tend to be a lot rougher around the edges. I say this with a lot of humility and embarrassment, that I’ve been cruel and capricious with my words in the past, which – even with the conviction of speaking what is true and good – must always, always be spoken with love.

That is not my native tongue.

I am quick tempered, choleric, enraged by injustice and allergic to inefficiency. Ask my poor children, who live with the most autocratic Lego policeman of a mother you could ever imagine. I don’t like taking the time to make the relational connections necessary to have the harder conversations – I like to jump to the punchline and deliver the logical conclusion like a grenade.

Which is a really, really ineffective way to evangelize, it turns out. Who wants to be exploded upon, turns out?

At any rate, for the sake of full disclosure, I wanted to acknowledge that I have been a cruel Christian at times, too insecure in my own position and too angry at the evils the culture is perpetuating on my sisters in particular. I’ve spoken rashly and used the wrong words. But I beg you to look past those mistakes, if you are willing to, and see the deepest desire of my heart, which is that each of us know and love Christ.

In the sea of positive comments and thoughtful critiques, one in particular stood out to me, and I paraphrase: “I left the church. thanks for reminding me why. You are not my sister.”

Which is not true.

No matter how deeply rooted your belief that a woman should be free to choose to abort her child, no matter how divergent our political ideologies, there will never be a moment when we are not sisters.

Take it from a woman who has 4 of the good ol’ fashioned flesh-and-blood variety, but difference of opinion or even radically-divergent worldviews do not the bonds of sisterhood dissolve.

Particularly when we are united – indelibly, inalterably, inextricably – by the bond of baptism in Christ.

It is so essential that we recognize ourselves in the hearts and faces of “the other” who we oppose. Opposition needn’t mean hate. It needn’t mean rejection and vitriol and violence. It can be hard and it can be messy and of course, disagreement is often painful and our interactions potentially pain-filled…but you will never stop being my sister.

If you kill your unborn baby, you will still be my sister.

If you stand on the highest podium in the land and pledge your allegiance to the warped ideology of modern feminism, pledging hand-over-heart fealty to Planned Parenthood, you will still be my sister.

If you can’t stand the sound of my voice, can’t stomach the words on this page, can’t reconcile the notion that a woman who stands opposed to your worldview can still acknowledge your human dignity, you will still be my sister.

Disagreement needn’t make us enemies. I want to invite you to wholeheartedly consider the possibility that even in profound disagreement and anger, we needn’t be that.

I do not hate women who see the world differently than I do. (Or men, either, for that matter.) That’s kind of the entire crux of Christianity, I think.

And if you are away from the Church, or have never stopped to give it a second look after lapsing in your Mass attendance after college, I beg you to reconsider. There are flawed sinners in the pews every Sunday. None of us are doing it perfectly. But we all hunger for Jesus. And He meets us there in the Eucharist, undeserving and imperfect though we are.

I want to invite you to consider the possibility that He is inviting you there, too. And that He has something to say about your life, about the plans for that life, and about the unique mission He has entrusted to you alone.

Even if we can never come to terms with our differences and even if you never make that trek home, know that you will never be my enemy.

Respectfully,

your sister.

Abortion, Catholic Spirituality, Contraception, Culture of Death, politics, pregnancy, Pro Life, Theology of the Body, Women's Health, Women's Rights

To my sisters who marched on Washington

January 23, 2017

I wanted to write something snarky. I wanted to dash off line after line of statistics and data supporting the appalling abuse committed against women and children in the name of “progress” and “equality.” I wanted to drop blistering one-liners about losing our bearings, rejecting our feminist roots and blowing past all the other pertinent issues surrounding women’s freedoms that don’t originate in the pelvic region.

But then I watched some of the coverage of the marches – the big one in Washington and the smaller ones around the country and the world. And I read real women’s stories and saw their tear-streaked faces and I recognized myself in each of them, pink hats notwithstanding.

Because we are all of us desperate for love.

The fire that burns in the eyes of a million demonstrators is not something to be dismissed or derided. However wrong I believe their cause, however appalling I find their tactics, I cannot dismiss the humanity of these angry, hurting people.

For 43 years we have lived a national nightmare. For a hundred years before that, the planks were being diabolically slid into place, building a foundation on rotted, wrong-headed principles that had little to do with true human freedom and everything to do with a new kind of enslavement, to an “enlightened” social order which utterly subjugates the least of these to the caprices of the ones in power.

It is the most clever and effective tactic hell has coughed up since that business in Eden, to turn a mother against her child, and to turn women against their own femininity. And of course, – of course – the Enemy would seek to desiccate the very source of our salvation, the openness of spirit and the willingness of heart and the heroic bravery of a young woman to step boldly into the plan of salvation history, opening her womb to receive the gift of Life itself.

Mary is the most feared creature in the history of all humanity. And the most powerful.

Her yes to God altered reality itself. And her willingness to set aside her own plans and to offer God her very life was key to His achieving our salvation. He could have asked anyone, in any time. He could have asked a man. He could have zapped Himself down to earth and appeared as a 30 year old carpenter, fully equipped to build tables and preach the Gospel without the pesky three decades of life in a dull little family unit in a dirty, backwater town in the Middle East.

But He did not.

He choose to come into our world through the womb of a woman, His mother. And as I scrolled through picture after picture of angry, frightened women wearing vaginas on their heads, carrying signs pledging allegiance to Planned Parenthood and swearing that any lecherous old white man who wanted to deprive them of their contraceptives would have to pry them from their cold, dead hands, my heart broke for the satanic effectiveness of this whole campaign.

As it ever was, from the beginning, the Enemy seeks to divide and conquer, pitting man against woman, mother against child. This modern iteration of “feminism” is anything but; a warped perversion of the profound and beautiful truth of the unique and earth-shattering dignity of femininity.

The culture deafens us with shouts about freedom and equality. What it means by that is that we are all reducible to the sum of our reproductive parts, that we are packages of pregnancy-vulnerable organ systems that must be shuttered at all cost, that our worth lies in our ability to forcibly extract financial support from society at large to keep us carefully sterile, effectively barren.

The modern argument for feminism is intimately tied up with abortion rights. The right for a woman to control her own destiny by killing her child is the highest held sacrament in this pseudo religion. The vow that no woman will ever be made bereft by the sexual caprices of a man who would ruin her life by impregnating her and then abandoning her, is paramount.

“NO” you might be shouting, a card-carrying feminist yourself. “It isn’t that at all! Women deserve equal opportunities that men have by birthright. We will not be enslaved by our reproductive systems, punished by a monthly cycle which persists with the damning threat of new life. Science has freed us from this drudgery, and the law and the culture must follow!”

But this entire system is predicated upon the belief, unspoken or unacknowledged for many though it may be, that something is fundamentally wrong with being a woman.

That women, as they are and as they were created and as they forever shall be recognized, are fatally flawed. And that achieving equality with the “dominant” sex requires the suppression and mutilation and utter rejection of our capacity to conceive and bear new life.

“NO!” I can hear the shouting revving up again. “IT’S THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE WHEN THAT WE ARE FIGHTING FOR!”

And to that I say, we aren’t that powerful. And I don’t mean we as women, but we as human beings.

The freedom to choose whether and when you will take the life of another human being is no freedom at all; it is slavery of the basest sort. To proclaim that the rights of women are founded on the trampled rights of the child is no achievement of civil progress, it is a redistribution of pain and abuse, trickled down to the smallest and meekest ones. MLK would never have advocated for a freedom for blacks predicated upon the subjection of yellows or whites. His understanding cut to the heart of what it means to be human: that we are each of us created equal, in the image and likeness of God.

Each of us.

No matter whether we possess a penis or ovaries. No matter if our bodies are tiny and underdeveloped or wizened with age. No matter if we are beautiful and perfectly pulled together or disgusting and matted with the dirt and the grime of a lifetime of abuse and neglect.

Non of us can take away the dignity of another human being, given by God who sees in each of us the image of His Beloved son.

When we reduce our rights to a laundry list of procedures we ought to have access to, a list of medications which can protect us from becoming mothers, or can clean out the contents of our wombs should the timing or circumstances be tragic, we lose sight of what it means to be human, to be a person created to be in relationship with others, orienting us ultimately toward that greatest Other.

Abortion is not feminism. Sexual socialism, whereby the government subsidizes, with the funds of the populace, a preferred lifestyle of license and debauched freedom, is not feminism. Marching in the streets with self-defacing placards and self-abusing slogans of the vilest and crudest sort is not feminism.

I understand that there is fear. Fear of what a future unplanned and unexpected and unsafe could look like. But that fear is rooted in forgetfulness. We have forgotten who we are, and Whose we are. We have traded the truth for a lie: that we can be like God, choosing who lives and dies, utterly controlling our destinies during our lives on earth.

But perfect love casts out all fear. Perfect love raises up the lowly and the frightened and looks us dead in the eye and says, “you matter. You were created out of love, and for love, and I love you madly. I died for you, and I still suffer for love of you. Look at me and let me tell you who you are, and what you were made for.”

Don’t let Planned Parenthood tell you what it means to be a woman. Don’t let any NGO or government agency or corporation or worldview or popular cultural movement tell you what it means to be female. They didn’t write the manual on you, and they can never show you the depth of your dignity or the fullness of what you are worth.

It is a lie. And we have let our trust in our Creator die and have chosen it, time and again.

The truth is terrifying, but that’s because freedom – true freedom – is the most radical thing the world has ever seen.

You were made for more than this. You were made for greatness. You were made by love, for love. And so long as we rage against love, our hearts will ever be restless, angry, unsatisfied and afraid.

But we have a God who tells us constantly, untiringly,

Be Not Afraid.

You were made for more than what your body is, or what your body can do. You were made for more than casual sex, for more than abortion, for more than mutual masturbation. You are more than a receptacle into which sperm should be deposited and than evacuated. And anyone and anything that has ever convinced you otherwise has been a lie.

If you have never known God, or have only known a broken image of Him, I beg you to reconsider in light of this one question only: what does it mean to have been created a woman? What was I created for?

And let Him whisper the answer to you. Scream at Him if you must. He can take it.

But don’t settle for what this world wants to give you in terms of freedom, of feminism. It’s a counterfeit, and a cheap one at that. Walk past the knockoffs – they’re garbage, poorly made, and unethically-sourced anyway. But you already know that. Keep your chin up and your head held high, and do not settle for anything less than that for which you were made.

You are a daughter of the King, and His plans for your life far surpass those of any of the angry, agitated leaders whose screams echo from podiums or ring out into the vast echo chamber of social media.

You were made for more.

Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, Family Life, mental health, Parenting, politics, sin, Suffering

As a parent, you have one job

December 16, 2016

(I mean, aside from the obvious keep them alive/fed/clothed and try your hardest to get them to Heaven part. Does that go without saying?)

I had someone make the following bold statement to me earlier this year, and it rocked me to my core:

your primary job as parents is to provide and secure the peace in your home.

You know who I thought about when I reflected on that statement? I thought about the dad from “Life is Beautiful.” I thought about his heroic, self-sacrificing and odds-defying performance to erect a brave and shining barrier of innocence over his little boy in the midst of unimaginable horror. As the world literally crumbled around him, his father shielded him as best he could not only from physical harm (and over this realm he had very little control, truly) but perhaps even more critically in their circumstances, from emotional harm.

I feel like we modern parents tend to kind of do the opposite. Whether it’s because many of us were ourselves exposed to pain or danger or brokenness in our family of origin, or because we watched so many of our friends go through hell as kids, many of our generation of parents seem to be questing after some vague sense of authenticity or relatability with their own offspring that is going over, frankly, like a lead balloon.

On the one hand I can understand the earnest desire to be open and honest and reliable with our children, but on the other hand, my kids are going to learn soon enough about the heartache, the danger, and the sin in this world, and it actually isn’t my job to sit them down and tutor them in it.

Because the world is a cruel place. Kids get sick and die. They get abused. Their families fall apart and bombs fall on their cities and their friend’s dads leave their friend’s moms, and vice versa.

But they needn’t know every excruciating detail.

In fact, if and to whatever extent we can possibly spare them the details, I believe it is our sacred duty as parents.

Right now bombs are falling on children the same ages as mine in Aleppo. As Christians, we need to fall on our knees and pray for those affected, and give material aid to reputable organizations (highly recommend the Catholic Near East Welfare Society) who can deliver food and medicine and shelter on the ground. But my kids, at ages 1,3,4, and 6, do not need any details about the tragic circumstances in Syria. They should not be watching the bodycounts scroll by on the news, or listen to me listening to NPR within earshot.

It is essential, in fact, that I shield them from the horror of war and human cruelty as much as possible during their formative years.

Our children will absolutely learn that the world is not a perfect place. That people sin. That people hurt each other. That sometimes kids get hurt, too. But it is critical to their development into healthy, functional human beings that we don’t saddle them with that knowledge prematurely.

When my 6 year old asks why we pray for babies in mommies’ tummies to be safe, that does not open the door for a frank conversation about abortion. If he explicitly asks what abortion is (as has happened before), I deflect and say that sometimes babies get hurt, and that not everybody believes that every human being has the same rights. And then I change the topic.

(I take a similar tack with the sexual curiosity stuff, not because sex is bad in any way! But because it’s not developmentally appropriate for him nor is it necessary that he know the nitty gritty.) Allowing our children to ask questions and answering them in a way that is both honest and honoring of their developmental stage and age is a tricky line, and it’s one I’m learning to walk with some trial and error as the months and years roll by.

I had a little friend of my kids’ come to me earlier this month with a tearful story about another family’s deep pain, their disintegrating home life, and the fear this child felt about the whole situation. As I tried my best to toe the line of appropriateness with a child who is not my own, I reassured this little one that this wasn’t their burden to bear, and encouraged them to give the situation over to Jesus as much as possible and to let the grown ups handle grown up stuff. Because kids have their own work to do that is perfectly suited to being a kid.

I have no idea how effective that was, but my heart ached for the burden this child had been asked to carry, inadvertently or not. There were gruesome and salacious details in the story that could have come from a prime time drama, and this little person’s eyes were filled with tears over it.

This is not okay. And whether our kids are getting it from overhearing us having inappropriate adult conversations within earshot, or by watching programing that is explicitly not suitable for children, or even just hearing an earful from one side of a phone conversation when we think they aren’t paying attention, (they are. Ask me how I know.) we have to be so, so mindful of our duty to them.

Their innocences is our business. And maintaining that innocence requires sacrifices on our parts.

I can’t listen to whatever music I like in the car anymore. Do I still love Dave Matthews Band and Adele? Yep. But I don’t need the 4 year old asking me what does it mean to send your love to your new lover, mommy? just because I couldn’t be bothered to switch on KLove or change the CD during carpool pickup.

I can’t watch shows depicting adult themes and filled with violence and horror when they’re awake. (Should I be watching those shows, period? That’s another post for another day.)

I shouldn’t have sensitive, nuanced conversations about world affairs and politics and war and unrest in earshot of my kindergartener, who has the right to experience the world from a disposition of curiosity and wonder. Soon enough he will know of hatred, bigotry, war, and gruesome suffering. My job is to mold his little heart and soul to be receptive to a good God Who alone can heal those division and redeem that pain. And to ensure, to the best of my ability, that he grows to become an honorable man who will do his part to create beauty and goodness in this world. A child who is robbed of a childhood, who does not have the opportunity to encounter beauty and goodness, is unlikely to grow up to be this kind of adult.

We need to be so careful and so conscientious of their environments. To the best of our abilities. What they’re watching, what they’re reading, whom they’re spending time with and what they’re listening to. And, ahem – looking into the mirror – what kinds of things their parents do or say when they’re stressed, angry, overwhelmed or in pain.

I can just as easily make a chink in their armor with a careless word or an exhausted scream of frustration and anger. And then, when it is I myself who have disturbed the peace in our home, I must kneel down at eye level and humbly ask forgiveness from the little one who depends upon me to keep this space sacred, to keep it safe.

Please hear this: This is in no way an attack on parents whose children have been exposed to violence or inadvertent abuse of any kind. We live in a broken world filled with pain, and the smallest victims are the most tragic. Our little family has not been spared from heartache.

But it is our job as mothers and as fathers to help our children to feel as safe and as secure as possible while they are small. The world outside can wait, and time will ensure that it does not, not for long.

We must take up the mantel of adulthood and respect the profound dignity of the child and the sacred charge that we grown ups have to protect them from evil.

Even if the evil is becoming the norm, all around us.

In our homes, at least, let them feel safe, insulated against the harsh elements in our own little Nazareth, growing and learning and developing all they will need to navigate adulthood. Which will come soon enough.

Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, Evangelization, Homosexuality, JPII, relativism

Conform or be destroyed {but be not afraid}

December 2, 2016

No matter your political stripe, ethnicity, religion, or sexual proclivities, this one should concern you.

It’s the story of a family. Of a couple who have built an empire together, and whose concepts and innovation have almost single-handedly spurred the revitalization of a local economy and an entire community.

And their kids are pretty cute, too.

I’m talking, of course, about HGTV’s darling it-couple of the moment, Chip and Joanna Gaines, and of their wildly popular show “Fixer Upper” and the Magnolia empire behind it.

Their show, if you are unfamiliar with it, centers around showing prospective home buyers “the worst homes in the best neighborhoods” around Waco, Texas, before deciding on one crumbling property which they renovate and redesign on camera with a dramatic “reveal” at the episode’s end. The show is entertaining because while everything about reality tv is carefully scripted, the real star of their concept is their goofy, sweet, mutually respectful and supremely attractive marriage.

They like each other. They like each other a lot, it would appear, from the viewer’s perspective. And they like their children, and they like the life they’ve built together. There is friendly banter, there is teasing, there are eye rolls and sighs of exasperation, but there is no harsh cynicism. No passive aggression. No threats of divorce of ultimatums about behavior “or else.”

It’s just so refreshing.

The thing is, I think it’s as refreshing as it is because it’s real. I think they really do like each other as much as they play on TV. And it’s a beautiful witness to the joy of marriage.

Which is probably the precise reason they were targeted by a bigoted Buzzfeed writer with an anti-Christian axe to grind and a platform from which, she decided, was hers to lob grenades at unsuspecting victims from. Victims whose only crime, as far as I can decipher, is to hold a differing belief system from hers. And to hold it privately.

So basically tolerance in action.

The story gets a little weirder, though. Because the writer in question didn’t have a personal complaint about the Gainses themselves, but about the church they attend, and specifically about something their pastor preached in a sermon.

It’s pretty crazy what he said, though.

He said that God created men and women. And he quoted this radical text from antiquity called “the Book of Genesis.”

I know. Lock that guy up.

Here’s the thing. We live in a time of supposed plurality of beliefs, but some beliefs are more “free” than others. We give lip service to the concept of diversity, but the only diversity that is truly acceptable is narrowly defined and usually trending on Twitter.

Because the Gaines family attends a church that holds a biblical perspective on marriage (in line with the majority of Evangelical Christianity and the entire Roman Catholic Church, so not exactly a fringe-y minority), they are automatically cast as bigots. Excoriated for not vetting the guests on their show for their sexual behavior. Dragged into a career and life-altering witch hunt because a woman with a microphone can’t stand the idea that not everybody shares her belief system.

The Gaines family are probably hurting right now, but I very much doubt they are surprised. To be a Christian is to be a sign of contradiction in a confused and sometimes darkening world. And none of us are going to get out of it with our reputations or our egos intact. Which is a good thing. It really is!

What the Gaines family could use, however, from their fellow Christians is support. Vocal, enthusiastic support. Write a friendly message on one of their social media accounts (Unrelated: Chip retweeted Papa Francesco earlier this week.)Say a prayer for them. Drop HGTV an email saying how much you enjoy their show, or if you’ve never seen it, tune in for an episode this weekend and enjoy.

Hatred, bullying tactics and public lynchings are as old as the human race. In the era of the internet, the megaphone is bigger and the stakes are higher, perhaps, in terms of public notoriety and the heat being turned up, but in a week or two the news cycle with move on to a new victim, and they’ll be left to pick up the pieces and decide if it’s worth it to them as a family to continue to tell their story publicly.

I hope they do. But I completely understand if they don’t.

The stakes have ever been high to proclaim belief in anything, but particularly to proclaim belief in the One who made all things. Because the moment you stake your claim for Christ, you become an enemy to the world that “will hate you because it first hated Me.” We who dwell in reality, living in the world as it actually is, dwell in a place marred and scarred by actual sin. Sin, which in our time is a bigoted concept in itself (look for that storyline to play out in the not-so-distant future, coming soon to a headline near you) has actual consequences. Like pain. Division. Violence. Loss of friendships and reputation. Suffering.

But sin does not have the final word in this story. Not in the Gaineses story, and not necessarily in the angry Buzzfeed writer’s story, either. Wouldn’t it be a cool footnote in the annals of internet scandal one day to read that all this craziness ended in forgiveness and maybe even a change of heart?

Wilder things have happened.

In the meantime, do not be cowed into silence or surrender by the angry rhetoric or the public fallout being heaped upon this family. They are suffering, but they are suffering for Christ. And He can make something beautiful out of that. To be Christian is to suffer. Not because of a lack of love, but because of an abundance of it. Look to the cross.

And do not be afraid of what the world can do to you or take from you. The world took everything from Christ first, after all. And that ended rather well.

And seriously, pour yourself a peppermint mocha and get your shiplap on this weekend. A good family doing good work could use your support.

“When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society.” – JPII, State visit to Netherlands, 1985.

Culture of Death, Evangelization, Family Life, motherhood, Parenting, Pornography, reality check, social media

Why “Don’t Look” won’t be enough

October 10, 2016

I am the mother of three sons and one daughter. My kids are young still, but my firstborn is now within a couple years of the average first age of exposure to pornography. Which means that kids as young as him have seen it, have stumbled upon in accidentally, have been intentionally exposed by an older sibling or cousin or neighbor kid, and are already struggling with feelings of confusion, excitement, shame, fear, and curiosity.

In this digital age, it is all but inevitable that my children will encounter pornography at some point during their childhood. And that breaks my heart.

But I can’t stick my head in the sand and just try not to worry about it, hoping that if I don’t mention it and if we’re careful enough at home and vigilant enough with our network filtering software (which is important!) and discriminating enough about our media consumption (also essential!) and picky enough about how we do playdates (SO huge. You have no idea what your neighbor might be watching late at night, and what might pop up on their son’s tablet during an innocent Youtube search for rocket launches or scenes from Team Hotwheels), we’ll be fine.

That isn’t enough. In other words, I have to equip myself as a mother to help my children navigate the murky waters of the digital world, so awash in pornography and violent, addictive content, and I have to equip my children to face this brave new world.

I can’t leave it up to chance. This one is too big, and the stakes are too high.

While both men and women struggle with pornography in increasing numbers, boys are particularly vulnerable in the era of a smartphone-in-every-pocket. Men are wired for visual stimulation. It’s beautiful and essential and intrinsically masculine, and it is a component of their intentional design that I wouldn’t change even if I could. But there is a multi-billion dollar market built around exploiting that facet of their nature and ensnaring young minds and hearts in a dark web of profitable addiction that is predicated on increasing levels of violence, misogyny, and dehumanization.

And it’s profitable as all hell, make no mistake about that. For every media soundbite or expert opinion that “a little porn is harmless,” or “pornography is a natural competent of a healthy relationship,” a rich pornographer who makes his or her living off of pimping out young women and children is laughing all the way to the bank.

(Porn kills love. For a totally secular perspective and a fantastic resource, check out “Fight the New Drug” and the great work they’re doing, especially with adolescents and college aged kids.)

I wrote a series on “porn proofing our kids” a while back, and afterwards a rep from Covenant Eyes: CMG Connect reached out to me about a new resource designed to empower parents to proactively engage with their kids on the topic of porn, and to help them build a safe, open, communicative family; a “safe haven.”

CMG Connect Parents is full of good video content, articles, and other resources for parents who are in all stages with kids of all ages.

Whether your family is already wrestling with this issue, you’re unsure of where to start (or whether your kids have been exposed yet) of if you’re like us and have young children and are looking down the pike to the future and wondering where to begin, this is a good place to start.

They are also offering a free 30 day trial of their acclaimed “Covenant Eyes” filtering program, a multidimensional resource that filters harmful content, alerts parents to potential problems, and can provide individual accountability and monitoring for help in overcoming an existing addiction. We’ve been hemming and hawing over which filtering software or device to use and when we need to make the leap, but after my husband spent 3 days last spring attending a conference for work, he walked away from the sessions on trafficking and addiction absolutely convicted that the time is now.

Even if your kids are little and aren’t using the internet on their own yet, now is the time to install those guardrails and establish a culture of safe and responsible media use. Not only are you protecting against accidental exposure (and I’ve seen some freaky stuff pop up totally unrelated on Youtube), but you’re also protecting the babysitters or other caregivers who come into your home and may connect to your network, along with houseguests and visitors who may access your WiFi (and in turn, you are protecting your network (hellooooo, targeted ads) against harmful content other people may access via your network without your knowledge. So many people are fighting a great battle, and you truly never know.)

Really, I can’t think of a reason to have unfiltered internet, period.

So do me a favor and start the 30 day trial, will you? And start clicking through some of the video content on CMG Connect. My favorite video is the one featuring two moms, with one mom walking the other through happening upon a probable pornography problem with her 14 year old son. It’s full of common sense, compassion, and a destigmatization of the problem, and it contains some tangible resources and a sort of guide map of what that journey look like for one family.

And of course, above all, we take our cue from Padre Pio: we pray, we hope, and we don’t worry. We don’t wallow in the “what ifs” or the regrets, and don’t anticipate the future with terror. Being proactive, wise, and confidant is a far cry from cowering and fearful. With common sense, open communication, and a helpful toolbox, our kids don’t have to become statistics in an adolescence behavioral journal.

I hope you’ll check it out.

(Thanks to Covenant Eyes whom I partnered with on this post for the industry-leading work they’re doing to empower families to stay safe and healthy. All opinions expressed are my own.)

Abortion, Bioethics, Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Evangelization, Homosexuality, politics, Pro Life, reality check, relativism, sin, Suffering

The power of language and the witness of words

August 9, 2016

It is a curious time to be a Catholic Christian. (Is it ever not, though? I think maybe we all fall prey to a little good old fashioned chronological snobbery, whether or not we care to admit it.)

On the one hand, I live in America and for the most part, shuttered adoption agencies and defunct bakeries and cancelled after-school Bible clubs aside, the persecution that Christians face here is still on the lightish side. And many would shrug off the aforementioned incidences not as persecution at all, but as the rightful assertion of a collective morality over defiant and wrong-headed individual dissenters.

On the other hand, it is gravely concerning how very much the pace of things has accelerated, for society to embrace, wholesale, things that a decade and a half ago would have registered clearly on our collective consciences as “wrong.” There are now plenty of Christians who wouldn’t bat an eye at a 12-week abortion, embryonic stem cell research performed “for a good cause” to fight the horrors of ALS, of helping an elderly parent or terminal cancer patient end his or her life with a prescription written by the hand of their own physician.

In Colorado this last piece is coming to the ballot this November, under the tidy euphemism “physician-assisted suicide,” but more popularly nicknamed “death with dignity.” So as you exit your favorite natural grocery store you might be intercepted by a cheerful, clipboard-wielding volunteer in a neon green t-shirt earnestly inquiring into your concern that sick and elderly people have “dignified end of life choices.” Which is a whole lot harder to answer “no thanks” to than, say, “should Coloradans vote to let people who want to die kill themselves with a prescription written by a doctor?”

Language carries the day. As it always has. And it becomes essential for those of us who believe in a God Who is the Author of life to reclaim these conversations on a linguistic level.

It seems a small thing, a popular word or commonly-accepted term here, a turn of phrase there. Look how much traction gay “marriage” has gotten in a few short years.

When the phrase first came into existence, Christians and other people who recognized the impossibility of two same-sex individuals, however sincere their love, contracting what we all commonly understood to be marriage, had no problem throwing quotes around the term, because it was an imprecise and incorrect application of a recognized reality. But repeated loudly and often enough, we’ve now all but lost that point.

There’s no longer any room in the national conversation to point out “actually, marriage is a covenant contracted between two consenting opposite-sex adults, for the purpose of creating and raising a family and contributing to the development and continuation of civilization.”

I guarantee if you bust out that last sentence at the neighborhood block party, you’d either get a drink tossed in your face or find yourself with a semi-circle of bewildered acquaintances backing away from you in a hurry.

Because we’ve conceded that point on a linguist level and on a legal level. And now we must hide behind our “personal beliefs” or “chosen religious faith” when making the point, which, in a secular society governed almost exclusively by the court of public opinion, is a weak position to operate from indeed.

By forcing religious belief and morality into a corner, meant now to be tucked handily into one’s pocket and not revealed in polite company, the secular Left have employed a chillingly effective strategy, with hardly any real persecution necessary. We zip our own lips instead, avoiding tough topics with friends and coworkers, afraid of causing a scene, afraid of professional fallout, not looking to start a fight.

Guess what? That isn’t going to work much longer.

Every inch that Christians give over as a forgone conclusion: that children don’t deserve to be protected by their parents, that religious belief is a private matter that must be exorcised from the public square, that the government dictates morality to the people, and not vice versa…every one of these small skirmishes that we offer up in embarrassed silence, not wanting to muddy the waters, brings us closer and closer to a civilization in which we have no voice.

Because we stopped using our words.

Because we stopped having conversations at the only level that truly matters: personal, one-on-one, and rooted in trust and authentic relationship.

How on earth can we expect our gay neighbor to ever understand our position, however rooted in love and respect, if she does not hear it from our lips, but relies instead on Rachel Maddow’s punditry to inform her how we – Me! Her friend next door! – really see “them.”

How can our children defend their position on abortion to a school bus full of teammates if they’ve never participated in compassionate and nuanced conversations around the dinner table about human dignity and real feminism and authentic healthcare?

How can we expect our leaders to legislate based on objective morality rather than creating morality based on subjective legislation if all of our voices fall silent, all at once, afraid to break the peace, afraid to ruffle feathers, afraid to look foolish.

It is time to look foolish.

It is past time.

It is time to answer truthfully to the question “do you plan to have more children?” Or “have you thought about scheduling a vasectomy” with His truth, not the truth of the day. It is time to explain to a curious coworker that no, you couldn’t vote for a woman who holds up abortion as a fundamental human right, no matter how compelling the circumstances might seem. To defend your position on the intrinsic evil of torture around the campfire at a guy’s fishing weekend. To explain to a friend with an aging parent that some things are worse than suffering, and that some choices are always wrong.

It is time to struggle with hard topics and harder choices out loud, in a way that is authentic and vulnerable and worthwhile, so that someone else who is searching for the truth might see a glimpse of it reflected in your life, however much you might be screwing it up and failing.

Because that is what it means to be a Christian. It means to wrestle with God, accommodating ourselves to His reality, humbly admitting that we don’t understand, that we aren’t doing it perfectly, and that we’ll get back up again and try – with His grace – to do better next time.

But it does not mean falling silent while evil is perpetrated all around us. It doesn’t mean (guilty here!) sliding into a comfortable, surface-level relationship devoid of authenticity with your neighbors so that nothing unpleasant ever comes up to muddy the waters.

We must use our voices while we still have them, because our words have power, power given to us by the One in whose image and likeness we are created.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Christians, it is time to speak up.

“The days of socially acceptable Christianity are over, the days of comfortable Catholicism are past…It is no longer easy to be a faithful Christian, a good Catholic, an authentic witness to the truths of the Gospel. A price is demanded and must be paid.”

– Professor Robert P. George, Princeton

Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, Evangelization, motherhood, Parenting, sin, social media, Suffering

The news is still good

July 25, 2016

The other evening I found myself cruising down one of the main drags through town, passing a swath of car dealerships on my drive through south Denver. The massive American flags that adorn their lots were all hung at half mast, whipping in a late summer thunderstorm, and as I passed them all in a row I flipped through a mental catalogue of disasters and tragedies, wondering which they referred to.

Was it Paris? Istanbul? Dallas? Baton Rouge? Munich? What horrifying thing has recently happened that I’m forgetting?

The thing is, the flags are always at half mast lately, and it’s hard to keep up with why. Not because any of these tragedies aren’t enough on their own to stand out as moments to grieve and self-reflect as a nation, but because they’re coming so fast and furious that it’s becoming less and less possible to keep track of what exactly we’re in a national state of mourning over.

I’m done trying to follow along.

Not because I don’t care, but because we seem to have crossed a threshold into a state of continual mourning, and the news of late – and the need to mourn for real, precious human lives snuffed out – is so horrifically large that it is, in my opinion, beyond what any one human heart can handle.

There is a real and present danger of social media making us less social, not more so. A strange thing to write on the internet, but an observation I’m becoming more confidant in by the day. As a finite human creature with a limited capacity for understanding, I don’t posses the necessary bandwidth to handle all the bad news from all the places. Not if I want to be effective in any real capacity in my actual, daily responsibilities.

There are moments I can clearly remember as rooted in terrible, show-stopping horror that left an entire nation paralyzed in grief and fascination and rage: Columbine, April 20th, 1999; September 11th, 2001. I remember every detail of those days: the color of the sky, the plaid comforter in my boyfriend’s dorm room where we’d all stopped on our way to class to gather around a tiny tv screen and make sense of the images coming across the airwaves, the low hum of a mini fridge stocked with frozen pizzas and gatorade the only noise in a cramped room crowded with nearly a dozen 18 year-olds.

But we are not meant to stay there, in that place of stuck, shocked, sorrowing, and scared. You cannot live in that place. There’s no life there. We can – and we must – pause, bow our heads, say a prayer … but then we must move on.

Because the only real way that I can combat evil in this world is by living out my particular vocation to my greatest possible ability. If I am actively seeking and responding to God’s particular will for my life, I can change the world.

But flipping channels won’t achieve that.

Whipping my internal dialogue into a frenzy of anxiety and despair after consuming “just one more” video stream about such and such situation unfolding live, watching endless content covering bodycounts, hostage negotiations, memorial vigils, and the like is not going to make me a better wife, a kinder mother, a more attentive neighbor.

When I spend my grief out into the diffused ether of Someone Else’s Tragedy, consuming facts and figures and details I don’t really have the right to know, in the first place, I am made impotent in my own little world, drained of the energy and peace that are essential to my primary vocation.

(And this is not to say that mourning for – and always, always, praying for – strangers is ineffective and unnecessary. It is neither of those. But there must be moderation, for our own sakes, and for the sake of those who depend directly on us for security and care.)

Someone told me once that one of the primary responsibilities of a parent is to secure the peace and sanctity of the home for our children’s sakes.

Am I doing that when I mindlessly glut on the Breaking News Situation du jour? Can I really shift my mind from scenes of massacre and chaos to nursery rhymes and reading sessions and diaper changes?

I am not God.

I cannot take in an infinite amount of information and an endless stream of chaotic grief and remain unchanged.

I can try to be like God. I can attempt to fill my finite mind with enough streamed content to overwhelm an external hard drive.

But I won’t remain unscathed.

I am a human being. I have a limited capacity for horror, and a propensity to paralysis and hopeless anxiety when that threshold is violated. Which it is. Routinely, if I allow myself to consume as much content as is available.

I have noticed a direct correlation between my own ability to unplug and my capacity for intimate, personal engagement with real life neighbors, friends, my children, and my spouse.

Even worse, overwhelmed and numbed by chaos and horror, I may withdraw into an apathetic “I can’t look at that so I’ll pretend it isn’t happening” posture, tucking my head down and staring into the infinity of a smartphone and an endless list of open browser tabs, searching for something, anything, to distract me from the pain of too much reality.

I am not advocating for withdrawing from the world, or even from refusing to watch or read the news. But I am advocating for judicious moderation, especially in these increasingly dark and frantic times.

We needn’t be consumed by the evils rampant in the world, not 24 hours a day.

Aware? Yes. Vigilant? Certainly? But over and above all else, at peace.

Unshakable, Gospel-centered peace that Jesus is Lord, that we are not in charge of our own salvation, even in a temporal sense, and that allowing an endless stream of horror and hatred to filter into our living rooms and emanate from our pockets is no way to be salt and light to a hurting world.

The world needs us to be Christ. And we are not infinite. We are not divine. We must take the gifts He’s given us, accept the grace He pours out, and then boldly go out into our neighborhoods and streets, proclaiming the Good News. And it is still good. He’s still there.

Though the world be burning down all around us, at least from what the cable news channels would have us think, Jesus is still Lord. And if we keep our eyes fixed on Him alone – no small “if” in a world so filled with distraction and pain – He will lead us to a peace that surpasses all understanding.

It is a peace the world does not know. But it’s one I’m desperate to know. So I must fix my eyes on the One who can, and will, deliver it.

Peace be with you.

Abortion, Bioethics, Culture of Death, politics, sin, social media, Suffering

Abortion {still} isn’t healthcare

June 27, 2016

It’s not. And in an ironic convergence of worldviews, I can see why SCOTUS would overturn a Texas law requiring certain minimum medical standards be met by abortion clinics.

Because abortion isn’t healthcare.

Which is why, I suppose, the Supreme Court refuses to hold abortion clinics to the same standards as other ambulatory surgery centers or, as it turns out, Botox clinics.

Makes sense, if what goes on behind closed (filthy, substandard, unhygienic) clinic doors isn’t under the purvey of actual healthcare, anyway.

Because abortion isn’t healthcare.

And since abortion isn’t healthcare, and women’s lives are less valuable than, say, the political capital to be gained in such a move by SCOTUS, overriding common sense and biological reality in the name of so-called reproductive freedom, then the ruling makes perfect sense.

Because abortion isn’t healthcare.

And it is more essential that we remove any barriers – even those pertaining to minimum standards for a surgical facility – so that women may avail themselves of the opportunity to have their fetuses forcibly evacuated from their wombs, than that we pause in any manner of regard for the woman’s health.

Let’s put aside the immorality of abortion for a moment. Abortion, which isn’t healthcare.

And let’s speak of the procedure in a vacuum, as it were, leaving aside the obvious, ludicrously-demonstrable humanity of the baby, and focus solely on the invasive surgical procedure of a second trimester abortion.

And let us examine why it is that today, a friend I know will check into a major hospital for a dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure to evacuate her womb of the remains of her precious unborn baby, now deceased several weeks, in order that her body will heal properly following a tragic miscarriage.

She will be attended by a trained, competent surgeon who passed her medical boards and is in good standing at an actual hospital. Her cervix will be dilated by unexpired medicine. A camera will guide her surgeon’s hands as the contents of her uterus are removed, carefully and methodically. Her vitals will be monitored by licensed nurses assistants, and an RN or perhaps a LPN will see to her post op aftercare. She will be accompanied every step of the way by licensed, trained medical professionals who, to the best of their ability, will keep her comfortable, will honor the dignity of her body and the body of her deceased child, and who will maintain the highest standard of medical care.

Because in her case, the surgery to remove her dead baby’s body from her uterus is healthcare.

But abortion isn’t healthcare.

Does SCOTUS recognize this on some unconscious level? That a D&C abortion procedure, unlike the medically-necessary D&C I describe above, is something harmful. Abhorrent. Relegated to a realm of hidden horror which sees neither the obvious humanity of the unborn child victim nor that of the mother herself.

How else could such a ruling be justified?

How else could a 21st century judicial body – the highest in the land – rationalize the decision to strike down legislation requiring that an abortionist be an attending doctor at an actual hospital, should the procedure incur complications and the need to transport the patient arise. How else could the justification be made that an abortion clinic needn’t meet the same hygienic standards as an outpatient vein clinic, or perhaps a freestanding plastic surgery practice?

Because abortion isn’t healthcare.

And, in a twisted obeisance to reality, the Supreme Court of the United States of America acknowledged that today, by failing to require minimum standards of medical competence – laughably low as they were – that would have at least ensured a higher level of physical protection for women who engage in a practice which is both emotionally and physically catastrophic.

Because abortion isn’t healthcare.

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