Tag Archives: Abortion

MUST-LISTEN: Jennifer Roback Morse explains how socialism undermines family

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

New podcast featuring Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse discussing marriage and family. You can skip through the first 5 minutes because it’s just introductory. This is a great interview – highly recommended! There is a fair amount of Catholic stuff in the interview, so be forewarned. The interviewer just goes through some of her essays and asks her about them.

When I hear a woman who has this much of an understanding about what marriage is about and what forces are arrayed against marriage, it just makes me want to run out and get married, because she makes it sound so interesting that I want to try it out and see if everything she says is really true. She has such a good understanding of who her opponents are and what they think and what they are trying to accomplish. A very serious woman.

The MP3 file is here. (54 minutes)

Topics:

Why are socialists so hostile to the natural family? (essay)

  • socialists oppose monogamy
  • socialists view marriage as a structure that oppressive because of gender roles
  • socialists favor “group marriage”
  • socialists believe that children should be raised by the collective, not by parents
  • socialists intend to achieve this by imposing their vision through government power

How does the welfare state discourage people from having children? (essay)

  • high taxes make having more children unaffordable
  • state regulation of marriage and parenting opens door to risk of legal trouble
  • welfare payments to individuals means that relationships can be exited easily
  • e.g. – women can divorce and substitute welfare for a husband/father

What is the sandwich generation? (essay)

  • boomers complained about having to take care of children and elderly parents
  • with the normal timing for having children, this doesn’t happen
  • but if child-bearing is delayed, then this problem occurs
  • also, there are fewer siblings available to help with aging parents
  • this opens up the need for government to take over care for dependents
  • women are encouraged to focus on education and career during fertile years

What is the effect of welfare states mandating high minimum wages? (essay)

  • minimum wage laws increase unemployment rates
  • if you require employers to pay high wages, then employers offer fewer jobs
  • young people are just not productive enough to get those jobs
  • so young people stay in school more and delay adulthood and child-bearing
  • welfare states also make it hard to fire people, causing more unemployment
  • when government raises minimum wages and benefits, it hurts young people
  • when young people finally get a job, they are already in their 30s

How do Catholics respond to the socialist emphasis on equality? (essay)

  • making everyone equal requires the abolition of differences between people
  • for example, feminists try to make men have the same careers as men
  • but this requires women to diminish the fact that they want children
  • Catholics don’t want to make everyone equal, but to defend the weak
  • Christianity supports private property (thou shalt not steal)
  • Christianity supports the family as being ordained by God
  • Rerum Novarum says that inequality and imperfection in society is OK

Who is excluded from socialism’s drive for equality? (essay)

  • children are excluded from equality because they are dependent
  • children impose obligations on people to take care of them
  • the same is true for the elderly

MUST-READ: What does the Bible say about forcing pro-lifers to perform abortions?

Story from the New York Post. (H/T Hot Air – Cassy Fiano)

Excerpt:

A Brooklyn nurse claims she was forced to choose between her religious convictions and her job when Mount Sinai Hospital ordered her to assist in a late-term abortion against her will.

The hospital even exaggerated the patient’s condition and claimed the woman could die if the nurse, a devout Catholic, did not follow orders, the nurse alleges in a lawsuit.

“It felt like a horror film unfolding,” said Catherina Cenzon-DeCarlo, 35, who claims she has had gruesome nightmares and hasn’t been able to sleep since the May 24 incident.

The married mother of a year-old baby was 30 minutes into her early-morning shift when she realized she had been assigned to an abortion. She begged her supervisor to find a replacement nurse for the procedure. The hospital had a six-hour window to find a fill-in, the suit says.

Bosses told the weeping Cenzon-DeCarlo the patient was 22 weeks into her pregnancy and had preeclampsia, a condition marked by high blood pressure that can lead to seizures or death if left untreated.

The supervisor “claimed that the mother could die if [Cenzon-DeCarlo] did not assist in the abortion.”

But the nurse, the niece of a Filipino bishop, contends that the patient’s life was not in danger. She argued that the patient was not even on magnesium therapy, a common treatment for preeclampsia, and did not have problems indicating an emergency.

Her pleas were rejected, and instead she was threatened with career-ending charges of insubordination and patient abandonment, according to the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Brooklyn federal court.

Feeling threatened, Cenzon-DeCarlo assisted in the procedure.

She said she later learned that the hospital’s own records deemed the procedure “Category II,” which is not considered immediately life threatening.

WARNING: I am now going to be really mean. Please don’t read the rest of this if you don’t like me being judgmental against atheists.

I was thinking about the kinds of things that atheists think are “moral” and interpreting those things within a Biblical framework. I know that atheists support abortion because they don’t want to be compelled to diminish their own happiness by tending to the needs of their own baby, conceived as a result of their own irresponsible sexual behavior. So when they force a pro-life nurse to perform an abortion, what they are really saying is “I don’t want anyone punishing other people with the unhappy consequences of their own selfish pursuit of happiness, because then no one will judge and punish me when I do the same as they did”.

The problem is that atheists don’t want to be thought of as people who are willing to go as far as killing others in order to avoid facing judgment and consequences for their own actions. They have to invent some myth that justifies the abortion, instead. If they could only invent some plausible-sounding myth that would convince other people, and themselves, that their abortion was justified by some greater good. With the right myth, they could continue their pursuit of pleasure unimpeded by consequences and social disapproval. What possible myth could possibly provide moral justification for something as extreme as abortion?

Well, atheists decided to invent several myths to provide rationalization for abortion:

  • Darwinism – animals do it, and we’re just animals, so let’s do it!
  • overpopulation – we’ll all starve by 1970! Oops, I mean 1990! 2050!
  • resource exhaustion – we’ll be out of oil by 1970! Oops, I mean 1990! 2050!
  • global warming – too many people are driving cars so some have to go away!
  • embryonic stem-cell research – it will turn lead into gold, you’ll see!
  • rising crime rates – who cares about what economists say!
  • etc.

So basically they are inventing myths in order to justify abortion as a legitimate means of pursuing happiness in this life. And this made me think of how child sacrifice was used by pagan nations in the Bible. It’s exactly what is predicted in Romans 1:18-32, which is arguably the most useful passage in the Bible for understanding what our existence here is really about. They didn’t want to take responsibility for those demanding, expensive children they conceived during unmarried sex, because those children would reduce their selfish pursuit of pleasure. So they invented a variety of baseless myths in order to make abortion appear “moral” to themselves and to others.

The Bible mentions the habit of inventing “speculations” in order to avoid having to obey the moral law. Atheists feel that they are too “smart” to be restrained by authentic morality, especially one that is constantly under fire in the public schools, the mainstream media and pop culture. So they do destructive things and then are surprised to feel guilty about it. They want to be happy while sinning, and to avoid the natural consequences of sin that serve as warning signs of the judgment to come. If anyone dares to imply that there is any morality higher than selfishness, (say, by wearing a cross in public or by questioning Darwinism), then they use the power of the state to silence them.

That’s atheist “morality”. The Bible’s diagnosis of sin really hasn’t changed in 2000 years. The people who rebel against God have just found more sophisticated myths to justify their selfish pursuit of pleasure. Before, it was Molech. Today, it’s overpopulation causing global warming. And they are not afraid to enforce these myths on religious people using the power of the state. Anything to make everyone celebrate their destructive actions as though they were in fact good. And if they have to kill many people to pursue happiness, well, that’s fine on atheism – there is no “right to life” on atheism. It’s survival of the fittest. Morality is just an illusion created by evolution.

And that is why a pro-life nurse was forced to perform an abortion – because she made people who reject God feel guilty by calling attention to a real standard of objective morality which defies atheistic efforts to rationalize hedonism with speculative myths. She was telling them that we should not take the life of an innocent unborn human being just because it makes us happier to do so. She was opposing their hedonistic purposes, and the speculative myths that they had invented to justify their selfish, irresponsible pursuit of pleasure. Christian morality isn’t a headlong pursuit of selfish pleasure. It’s about self-denial and self-sacrifice – which is not pleasurable.

As I wrote before:

The great moral accomplishment of atheists in the last 100 years has been to murder 100 million people. And this is not counting the millions of deaths caused by abortion, and environmentalist bans on DDT. It also doesn’t count the millions of broken homes caused by the sexual revolution, or the social costs of raising children without fathers who go on to commit crimes.

When the intuitive awareness of God’s moral requirements conflicts with the atheistic desire for selfish happiness, atheists first do the crime, then they search around frantically for some fig-leaf to justify it as “moral”. Any speculation will do, and the “evidence” can be manufactured (at taxpayer expense) to fit the myths. They believe that if they could just get everyone to see that evil is really good, and to celebrate their selfish hedonism, then their feelings of guilt would vanish, and their happiness level would increase. Their attempts to demonize Christianity and Christians is also part of their plan – they want to celebrate their own behavior as moral and deride the behavior of authentic Christians as immoral.

The very concept of morality is illusory on an atheistic worldview.

And lest anyone think that I can’t defend the Christian worldview as true, click here and start engaging.

Lila Rose announces new undercover mission to expose Planned Parenthood

Exciting news from Stop the ACLU. (H/T ECM, Neil Simpson)

Excerpt:

Lila Rose, founder of Live Action Films, has done a lot of groundbreaking work doing undercover investigations of Planned Parenthood. From exposing Planned Parenthood’s cover-ups of sexual abuse to accepting donations targeting black babies, she’s uncovered it all. There were videos of Planned Parenthood across the country, in multiple cities in multiple states, using similar tactics and techniques at each clinic.

Now, Lila Rose has unveiled a new project, the Rosa Acuna Project. This is designed to show how Planned Parenthood lies and manipulates women to coerce them into getting abortions. The first video, from Appleton, WI showcases just how far their “counselors” will go to get another sell.

Here’s the video:

If you can’t watch the video, here’s a summary:

New undercover footage from an Appleton, WI Planned Parenthood abortion clinic shows clinic staff, including the abortion doctor, lying to two young women about fetal development and encouraging the one who is pregnant to obtain an abortion because “women die having babies.”

In the undercover video, when the two women ask a Planned Parenthood counselor if the pregnant woman’s 10-week-old unborn child has a heartbeat, the counselor emphasizes “heart tones,” and answers, “Heart beat is when the fetus is active in the uterus–can survive–which is about seventeen or eighteen weeks.” On the contrary, embryologists agree that the heartbeat begins around 3 weeks. Wisconsin’s informed consent law requires that women receive medically accurate information before undergoing an abortion.

The counselor then says, “A fetus is what’s in the uterus right now. That is not a baby.” Dr. Prohaska, the abortion doctor, insists, “It’s not a baby at this stage or anything like that.” Prohaska also states that having an abortion will be “much safer than having a baby,” warning, “You know, women die having babies.”

[…]“Planned Parenthood is a billion-dollar organization with nearly $350 million of government funding, and stands to gain hundreds of millions more from national health care,” says Rose. “Do we really want to subsidize an organization that gives women in need atrocious misinformation and predatory abortion practices?”

Well, if the abortion providers were smart, they’d take that money from the government and say whatever they needed to say to women to perform as many abortions as possible, and make even more money. And, if the Republicans tried to taxpayer funding of abortions, the abortion providers could just give lots of money to Democrats to get lots of Democrats elected. And those Democrats could vote for government funding of abortion and defeat any amendments to block funding of abortion.

Gateway Pundit reports that Senate Democrats have just blocked an amendment to block funding of abortions with taxpayer money.

Excerpt:

Democrats rejected legislation that would have banned federal support for abortions in their nationalized health care bill. That means the democratic health care legislation will result in the biggest expansion of taxpayer-funding of abortions since Roe v. Wade.

Follow the money.