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Do pro-lifers care about people who are already born?

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From Ruth Blog – a post to answer the objection that pro-lifers don’t care about babies after they are born.

Here’s the challenge:

One of the most frequently repeated truisms of the abortion debate is that pro-lifers really don’t care about life. As much as they talk about protecting the unborn, we are told, pro-lifers do nothing to support mothers and infants who are already in the world. Liberal writers such as Matthew Yglesias are given to observing that pro-lifers believe that “life begins at conception and ends at birth.” At Commonweal, David Gibson, a journalist who frequently covers the abortion debate, asks how much pro-lifers do for mothers: “I just want to know what realistic steps they are proposing or backing. I’m not sure I’d expect to hear anything from pro-life groups now since there’s really been nothing for years.”

And an excerpt from the response:

In the United States there are some 2,300 affiliates of the three largest pregnancy resource center umbrella groups, Heartbeat International, CareNet, and the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA). Over 1.9 million American women take advantage of these services each year. Many stay at one of the 350 residential facilities for women and children operated by pro-life groups. In New York City alone, there are twenty-two centers serving 12,000 women a year. These centers provide services including pre-natal care, STI testing, STI treatment, ultrasound, childbirth classes, labor coaching, midwife services, lactation consultation, nutrition consulting, social work, abstinence education, parenting classes, material assistance, and post-abortion counseling.

[…]The Catholic Church–perhaps the single most influential pro-life institution in the United States–makes the largest financial, institutional and personnel commitments to charitable causes of any private source in the United States. These include AIDS ministry, health care, education, housing services, and care for the elderly, disabled, and immigrants. In 2004 alone, 562 Catholic hospitals treated over 85 million patients; Catholic elementary and high schools educated over 2 million students; Catholic colleges educated nearly 800,000 students; Catholic Charities served over eight-and-a-half million different individuals. In 2007, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development awarded nine million dollars in grants to reduce poverty. And in 2009, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network spent nearly five million dollars in services for impoverished immigrants.

The Catholic Church is far from the only pro-life religious group that assists the needy. At the Manhattan Bible Church, a pro-life church in New York since 1973, Pastor Bill Devlin and his congregation run a soup kitchen that has served over a million people and a K-8 school that has educated 90,000 needy students. Pastor Devlin and other church families have adopted scores of babies, and taken in scores of pregnant women, including some who were both drug-addicted and HIV positive. The church runs a one-hundred-and-fifty bed residential drug rehabilitation center and a prison ministry at Rikers Island. All told, the church runs some forty ministries, and all without a government dime.

[….]If pro-life Americans provide so many (often free) services to the poor and vulnerable–work easily discovered by any researcher or journalist with an Internet connection–why are they sometimes accused of caring only for life inside the womb? Quite possibly, it is the conviction of abortion advocates that “caring for the born” translates first and always into advocacy for government programs and funds. In other words, abortion advocates appear to conflate charitable works and civil society with government action. The pro-life movement does not. Rather, it takes up the work of assisting women and children and families, one fundraiser and hotline and billboard at a time.

People think that abortion providers do a lot for women’s health, but Planned Parenthood doesn’t provide mammograms.

You may be interested in this post by Neil Simpson, who volunteers at a crisis pregnancy center.

Excerpt:

The “Pro-lifers don’t care about kids after they are born” line is one of my favorite arguments to rebut.  I teach people how to do it in pro-life training sessions in a two-step approach.  The tone of the conversation is important.  These arguments are powerful and quite effective if they are laid out in a calm, reasoned approach.  You probably won’t convert the rabid pro-choicers, but most of the middle-grounders will get the point.

First, show that pointing out a moral wrong does not obligate you to take responsibility for the situation.

If your neighbor is beating his wife, you call the police.  The police don’t say, “Hey, buddy, unless you are willing to marry her yourself then we aren’t going to stop him from beating her.”  You can use child or animal abuse as examples as well.  Most people get the point pretty quickly.

Or ask the pro-choicer what they would do if the government decided to reduce the number of homeless people by killing them.  Could he protest that without having to house and feed them all himself?

[…]Second, explain that while we aren’t morally obligated to help after the babies are born to be able to speak out against abortion, Christians do many things with their time and money anyway – orphanages, Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs), food pantries, etc.

When I’m teaching CPC volunteers I remind them of all that they and the center do: Pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, food, clothes, diapers, life skill training, parenting training, post-abortion counseling and more – all for free!  And, of course, we share the Gospel with the clients if they are interested (Saving lives now and for eternity!).

The workers are mostly volunteers and the leaders make below-market wages because they believe in the cause.  Most centers receive no government funding, so all the money comes from donations.  There are far more Crisis Pregnancy Centers than there are abortion clinics.

On a completely different topic, I posted an article by Helen Alvare a while back. She is one of the authors of this article. There was a pretty good dispute with a single mother who disagreed her comments to that article.

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Wayne Grudem defends what the Bible says about same-sex marriage

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The thing I love about Wayne Grudem is that every time I read his view on some issue, I find that he does two things well. First, he does a lot of research to know what the Bible says, and I always learn something new about the Bible from his analysis. Second, he confirms and applies what the Bible says using real world evidence, especially statistics. It seems to me that the role of the pastor/theologian, which almost no pastors and theologians do well, is to link what the Bible says to the way the world really is. Pastor/theologians should be concerned with explaining what the Bible and then taking the next step to persuade people to act on what the Bible says by engaging their intellects with arguments and evidence.

Here’s how Wayne Grudem does exactly that in this San Francisco Examiner interview about same-sex marriage.

Question to Dr. Grudem:

…is the subject and practice of Gay Marriage and Same Sex Blessings no longer a controversy and of public and Christian debate and discussion? Is it a done-deal in our society given the success of the “Gay Agenda” in the Military, American Foreign Service, California Courts, Massachusetts, other States in America and even in the present Presidential and Federal Administration’s practice of no longer supporting the federal law known as the Defense of Marriage Act?

Part of his answer:

The main thing I want to emphasize in this discussion is this: The primary question in this controversy is what kind of intimate, cohabiting, potentially child bearning relationship does society want to encourage and reward and protect? Up to this point, American society has decided to encourage and promote marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman, because it gives immeasurable benefits to a society that no other relationship can provide. This relationship is better for raising children, better for protection against domestic violence and abandonment, better for encouraging lifelong companionship and care, better for encouraging sexual faithfulness, and better in many other ways, that I explain in my book Politics—According to the Bible.

But homosexual relationships do not give these benefits. Male homosexuals experience a 25 to 30 year decrease in life expectancy, and much higher incidence of many chronic diseases.

Sexual faithfulness is far different among married heterosexuals: 90 percent of heterosexual women, and over 75 percent of heterosexual men have never engaged in extramarital sex. But among male homosexuals the rate of sexual faithfulness is around 2 percent, even when “faithfulness” is generously defined as ten or fewer lifetime partners. Such statistics are seldom reported in the mainstream media. The question is, is this the kind of relationship we as a society want to encourage, reward, and promote by giving it the status of “marriage” and all the societal encouragement and endorsement that that status carries?

I don’t think any society today should criminalize homosexual conduct (as some legislators in Uganda are now attempting to do), any more than I think society should criminalize adultery or fornication, because these are private acts between individuals that government should not intrude into. But I also don’t think society should encourage and promote such relationships by calling them “marriage” and giving them all the benefits that go with marriage. And so the issue is not whether homosexual couples can get married, but rather, do we as a society wish to redefine marriage in its entirety so that it is no longer a relationship between one man and one woman? The homosexual agenda is attempting to redefine what marriage is, and I think that would be a terrible mistake for our society.

Wow. I’ll bet you that nobody was expecting the conservative evangelical to bring the evidence on a moral issue. But that’s just what Grudem did.

You may recognize many of the points Grudem makes from the research-laden posts that I have written before about same-sex relationships. He is basically saying 1) let’s look at what the Bible says, and then 2) let’s try to see the evidence that proves or disproves what the Bible says. Basically, if you believe the Bible is true, then you should be able to look out at the world and see that… the Bible’s true! And in order to convince Christians and non-Christians to accept the correct position on controversial issues, then you need to approach the issues like Wayne Grudem approaches them. (See the related posts for a few more examples of Grudem in action)

When Wayne Grudem uses evidence, it makes it a lot easier for people who listen to him to do what the Bible says, because he gives them reasons and evidence that they can accept even if they don’t accept the Bible. It’s like if I told you how an automobile works by explaining the internal mechanisms that make the car go, with experiments and statistics to prove each point. After you listened to me explain, then you would understand that gas goes in the gas tank and not in the radiator. “I sincerely believe” is not a reason to believe that I know what I am talking about. I have to show you evidence. My investment advisor may have sincere beliefs about my teeth, but I’m not letting him poke drills into my mouth. We need to be careful that our own natural tendency to be lazy doesn’t cause us to miss the method of persuasion that is taught in the Bible: reason and evidence.

But back to the same-sex marriage issue… If one of the public purposes of marriage is to give children a stable, lasting environment to grow up in, in which they can be nurtured by two parents who have biological inventives to nurture them, then it is clear that same-sex marriage cannot do this as well as traditional marriage, in most cases. The environment of a same-sex relationships is just not the same – and the differences undermine the stability that children need. Obviously, there is more we could do legislatively to help children, such as giving tax breaks for stay-at-home parents, by offering school choice, by cutting income taxes, by making no-fault divorce illegal, and so on. And when we talk about the issue, we need to put the needs of children front and center. This is the reason why marriage exists in the first place. If we focus on the needs of adults who want their “rights”, then we lose. We need to focus on the rights of children – the right of a child to have a mother and a father, in the home with them, nurturing and guiding them to maturity.

Wayne Grudem knows how to make his case

More posts about same-sex marriage

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Former alarmist scientist admits global warming is a “fiction”

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David Evans consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modelling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. And then he stopped working for them. Now that he is no longer obligated to toe the party line, he explains what global warming really is about. (H/T Neil Simpson)

Excerpt:

The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic. Watching this issue unfold has been amusing but, lately, worrying. This issue is tearing society apart, making fools out of our politicians.

Let’s set a few things straight.

The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.

The evidence that was ignored by the global warming alarmists:

Most scientists, on both sides, also agree on how much a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide raises the planet’s temperature, if just the extra carbon dioxide is considered. These calculations come from laboratory experiments; the basic physics have been well known for a century.

The disagreement comes about what happens next.

The planet reacts to that extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas.

This is the core idea of every official climate model: For each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three — so two-thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors); only one-third is due to extra carbon dioxide.

That’s the core of the issue. All the disagreements and misunderstandings spring from this. The alarmist case is based on this guess about moisture in the atmosphere, and there is simply no evidence for the amplification that is at the core of their alarmism.

Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10 kilometres up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the weather balloons found no hot spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide.

This evidence first became clear around the mid-1990s.

At this point, official “climate science” stopped being a science. In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory — that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.

Read the whole thing.

The Blog Prof also linked this useful video in which a Physics professor from the University of California at Berkeley explains the Climategate scandal.

These revelations should mark the end of global warming alarmism, but they won’t, because global warming is such a useful fiction for so many people. As the article noted, it’s a source of endless research grants and prestigious travel budgets for researchers in academia who must apply for government money before they can prove what the governments wants them t0 prove – namely, that government needs to control individuals and corporations. It provides those who reject traditional morality with a way of feeling better about themselves by being “moral” about recycling, turning of their lights and not having any children. It gives people a feeling of pride, because they are better than those greedy oil companies that pay a 40% tax rate, much higher than the 0% paid by companies that are favored by the Democrat Party, like GE. It also provides a useful fiction for the socialists to mislead the public into voting for them to “solve” the “crisis” with bigger government, higher taxes and less individual liberty.

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