'Nuff Said

Gates Foundation and Planned Parenthood-Style Eugenicism

According to a report from The New American, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is taking fire from human rights advocates for funding and promoting the most recent form of the controversial contraceptive drug, Depo Provera.  Following in the Eugenic footsteps of Planned Parenthood, the Gates Foundation's advocacy of the deadly drug is particularly aimed at women in Africa and developing countries. 

Melinda Gates, wife of Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, told the New York Times that she is championing wide distribution of the drug "after talking with poor women around the world." But Kwame Fosu, policy director for the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, says Mrs. Gates’ claims are “disingenuous” because the women she claims to be helping are not being informed about the dangers involved.

“No African woman would agree to being injected if she had full knowledge of the contraceptives’ dangerous side effects,” Kwame Fosu told C-FAM, the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. “In fact,” claimed Fosu, “in countries where women are educated on the harmful complications, Depo Provera use is negligible.”

“Depo Provera, made by the Pfizer Corporation, the most deadly contraceptive (according to the FDA), is being marketed with malice and forethought at our precious women and girls of African descent world wide,” said Dr. Randy Short, a spokesman for the Washington-based Rebecca Project, in a scathing statement earlier this year exposing the Gates-Depo Provera scheme. “Many nations have outlawed it, but it continues to be used in the USA, the Caribbean, Oceania, Latin America, and Africa,” Dr. Short noted. “The use of Depo Provera,” according to Short, “contributes to and in several cases causes life threatening diseases and medical problems: cervical cancer, breast cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, stroke, heart attack, sterility, miscarriages, HIV/AIDS, Chlamydia, and other STIs/STDs.”

Dr. Short said further: 

In the USA, 84% of the Depo Provera is used by Black women. Wherever there are high rates of HIV/AIDS in Africa, the use of Depo Provera is universal. As recently as 2010, human experimentation on African women was done illegally with Depo Provera in Ghana. The USAID sends more Depo Provera to Africa than any other drug, and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation recently raised $2.6 billion dollars to buy Depo Provera to be able to "give" it to 100 million African women. 

Dr. Short notes that “the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation got into trouble in Niger with some vaccination project being done on 180,000 African women.” “The Gates know that the drug is deadly,” says Short. “Mr. Gates' father was an ardent eugenicist.”

An extensive new report by the Rebecca Project entitled "Depo Provera: Deadly Violence Against Women" provides a devastating critique of the unethical and criminal activities of organizations promoting the Depo Provera assault on the world’s poor. Among the many important revelations in the report is the dirty secret of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s ties to powerful “intermediaries.”

“Since it is illegal for Pfizer to promote off-label claims,” notes the report, “it utilizes intermediaries to evade US law who consequently become liable for the fraudulent promotion, marketing and administering of Depo Provera to women.”

According to the Rebecca Project report, the U.S. Department of Justice should charge Pfizer and its principal institutional intermediaries with fraud for the following and other reasons: 

Pfizer with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID, Population Council, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Planned Parenthood, Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health, are engaged in a pattern of fraudulent and illegal promotion schemes with other agents and contractors, to deceive and defraud patients, US taxpayers, ethical physicians, ethical birth control providers, regulators/FDA, insurance companies, federal and state health programs, to cause prescribing and payments for Depo Provera. 

The report also states: 

The United States has created a normative population control worldview directed through a surreptitious patchwork of policies promulgated by organizations whose ideological formation and funding eugenicists have provided. At the top tier of population control policy are organizations created by pioneers and patrons of the eugenics movement: Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), Population Council, UNFPA (The United Nations Fund for Population Activities), and their patrons: the Ford Foundation, (Margaret Hempel), the Rockefeller Foundation, (Judith Rodin) and USAID. The newcomers to this elite group of eugenicist policymakers are Bill and Melinda Gates, welcomed with their foray into promoting the injectable contraceptive Depo Provera while concealing life-threatening harm. 

As The New American has reported previously, Bill and Melinda Gates are members of a secretive, elite clique calling itself “The Good Club,” composed of billionaire eugenicists who champion population control. The members of this group include David Rockefeller, George Soros, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, Ted Turner, and Oprah Winfrey. The Good Club is a major backer of the Obama administration’s Global Health Initiative, which is working, among other things, to further empower the World Health Organization, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Planned Parenthood, and other dastardly Eugenic schemes around the world.

Shades of Caesar

While the new regime of socialized medicine under Obamacare is designed to benefit child-killing behemoths like Planned Parenthood, it will put the squeeze on child-saving hospitals like St. Jude, according to a new report from the Daily Caller.

A provision in Section 501 of the Internal Revenue Code, which takes effect under Obamacare, gives federal bureaucrats a whole new arsenal of weapons, including sweeping investigative powers and the imposition of financial penalties--aimed at tax-exempt charitable hospitals which devote a minimum amount of their expenses to treat the uninsured poor.

The justification for this draconian imposition on institutions that serve the least and the last? It seems that charity to the poor is one of the factors that could discourage enrollment in Obamacare, which requires all Americans to purchase health insurance.

In other words, we will all be punished if we dare try do the right things.

The bottom line is simply that the federal government will tolerate no rivals in its bid to impose its comprehensive program of cradle-to-grave control. Shades of Caesar: “And Jesus said to them, ‘The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors.’” (Luke 22:25)

Planned Parenthood Shilling for Obamacare

As if anyone needed yet another reason to be horrified by Obamacare, Planned Parenthood has appointed itself the chief huckster for the socialized medicine debacle. America’s largest abortion profiteer has even enlisted the help of celebrities to try to get their clients to wend their way the through the boondoggle's bureaucratic tangle.

Actresses Scarlett Johansson, Aisha Tyler, and Gabrielle Union have all recorded phone messages for Planned Parenthood to be used in its child-killing centers across the country in an effort to get more people enrolled in Obamacare—and thus to further entrench itself in the whole sordid mess.

“Did you know you may be able to enroll in new, more affordable health insurance plans?” Johansson, Tyler, and Union ask in their messages.

Then, they suggest, “For more information about the health care law, the new plans available, and what to consider as a woman when choosing a plan, please visit plannedparenthoodhealthinsurancefacts.org.”

Not surprisingly, the Obama administration has tapped a number of Planned Parenthood affiliates to serve as “navigators” to help people enroll in the president’s signature welfare program, channeling more tax dollars than ever before into the abortion giant’s already larded coffers.

Margaret Sanger: The Killer Angel

Coming November 10 from Standfast Books: a newly updated hardback edition of "Killer Angel."

Breaking News! Obama Believes Some Republicans May Be Decent!

As hard as it is to over look the horrific grammar in this sentence, it is harder still to overlook it's horrific sentiment:

"And as far as the budget goes, it's time for responsible Republicans who share these goals -- and there are a number of folks out there who I think are decent folks, I've got some disagreements with them on some issues, but I think genuinely want to see the economy grow and want what's best for the American people -- it's time for those Republicans to step up and they've got to decide what they want to prioritize."

Really, Mr. President?  This sort of brazen partisanship, this kind of patronizing, stigmatizing, polarizing cant is no way to lead.  Seriously.

Man Arrested for Reading Bible in Public!

Killer Angel

Coming soon! A new hardcover edition of my biography of Margaret Sanger.  Due next month from Standfast Books and Press.

PP: Enemy of Women's Health and the Rule of Law

Planned Parenthood has become not only the chief menace to women's health but also to the rule of law and the viability of  our constitutional republic.  

As yet another example of the organization's brazen hubris, it has sought a restraining order to block a Wisconsin law requiring physicians who perform abortions to have admitting privileges to local hospitals!  

Seriously?  Planned Parenthood wants doctors who, in a crisis cannot send their patients to a nearby hospital, to be performing life and death surgical procedures! What incredibly brazen hubris!

Skeptical? You Think?

“If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress, and don’t trust federal judges, to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.” President Obama

Really? You're just now figuring this out? 

After cheerleading for Planned Parenthood, snooping into our e-mails and phone calls, decimating the institution of marriage, targeting conservatives, Christians, and adoptive parents for IRS audits, forcing companies to participate in morally-divisive "health care" programs, and creating a politics of partisan rancor and cultural division, you bet we're skeptical.

Planned Parenthood's Hidden Crimes

A new poll conducted by the National Right to Life Committee indicates just how successful Planned Parenthood and its cronies in the media have obscured and distorted the abortion giant's image.

The survey of registered voters, shows that a majority of Americans have favorable opinion of the vast organization. But according to NRLC executive director David O'Steen, this just shows that Planned Parenthood's favorable image "is really based on not knowing much about the organization," Indeed, according to the survey, eighty-eight percent of the population say that they are familiar with Planned Parenthood, and 44 percent say they're very familiar. But a majority doesn't even know that Planned Parenthood performs abortions--and this despite the fact that it actually accounts for more than a quarter of all the grisly child-killing procedures in the US each year, well over 300,000 each year.

Although 63 percent of those polled said that they had a favorable opinion of Planned Parenthood, including 38 percent of those who identified themselves as pro-life, 55 percent of those polled did not even know that Planned Parenthood performs abortions.

O'Steen asserts, "This is the nation's largest chain of abortion clinics. We do have a job ahead of us in the pro-life movement and in the pro-life media of just telling the truth over and over and over again and breaking through this veil of secrecy that Planned Parenthood wants to hide behind."

Interestingly, the poll show that once people actually do become aware of what Planned Parenthood does in its killing centers all across the nation, the favorable opinion of the tax-supported organization vanishes altogether. For example, 53 percent say they would favor dramatic restrictions on child-killing, either prohibit all abortions, or allowing them only in cases where the life of the mother were endangered, or in cases of rape or incest.

Clearly, it is high time, for Planned Parenthood's hidden crimes to be revealed.

2nd Vote App

Do you know where Planned Parenthood gets its money?  Besides the nearly $1 billion in tax revenues and contracts at the local, state, and national levels, corporations lard the coffers of the abortion industry's largest and most profitable non-profit organization to the tune of nearly another half a billion each year. That's a lot of blood money.

But of course, you can staunch the bleeding.  Just by the way you shop--or rather, by the way you choose not to shop with those companies that do the most damage.

And now, there is a convenient app to help.  The 2nd Vote app is available now for IOS, Kindle, and Android.  It is a must-have tool in the arsenal of every concerned citizen.

Get yours today.  Visit the 2nd Vote website, the iTunes store, Amazon for Kindle, or the Android store--and don't spend another dime with the companies that are despoiling our culture and robbing our future.

Margaret Sanger Speaks for Herself

“We must discourage the defective and diseased elements of humanity from their reckless and irresponsible swarming and spawning.” 

“The mass of Negroes, particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among Whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.” 

“We propose to hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. And we do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” 

“The most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it.” 

“The government of the United States deliberately encourages and even makes necessary by its laws the breeding--with a breakneck rapidity--of idiots, defectives, diseased, feebleminded, and criminal classes. Billions of dollars are expended by our state and federal governments and by private charities and philanthropies for the care, the maintenance, and the perpetuation of these classes. Year by year their numbers are mounting. Year by year more money is expended . . . to maintain an increasing race of morons which threatens the very foundations of our civilization.” 

“We can all vote, even the mentally arrested. And so it is no surprise to find that the moron’s vote is as good as the vote of the genius. The outlook is not a cheerful one.” 

“The dullard, the gawk, the numbskull, the simpleton, the weakling, and the scatterbrain are amongst us in overshadowing numbers--intermarrying, breeding, inordinately prolific, literally threatening to overwhelm the world with their useless and terrifying get.” 

“Birth control appeals to the advanced radical because it is calculated to undermine the authority of the Christian churches. I look forward to seeing humanity free someday of the tyranny of Christianity no less than Capitalism.” 

“Even if we accept organized charity at its own valuation, and grant it does the best it can, it is exposed to a more profound criticism. It reveals a fundamental and irremedial defect. Its very success, its very efficiency, its very necessity to the social order are the most unanswerable indictment. Organized charity is the symptom of a malignant social disease. Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding, and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents. My criticism, therefore is not directed at the failure of philanthropy, but rather at its success. These dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have today produced their full harvest of human waste.” 

“The most serious charge that can be brought against modern benevolence is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents, and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devestating curse on human progress and expression. Philanthropy is a gesture characteristic of modern business lavishing upon the unfit the profits extorted from the community at large. Looked at impartially, this compensatory generosity is in its final effect probably more dangerous, more dysgenic, more blighting than the initial practice of profiteering.”

News Makers and Breakers

Planned Parenthood Endorses Post-Birth Killing

Astonishingly, Planned Parenthood has come clean on their intent to kill even in the case of a child who survives an abortion procedure.

Florida legislators considering a bill to require abortionists to provide medical care to an infant who survives an abortion were shocked during a committee hearing this week when a Planned Parenthood official endorsed a right to post-birth abortion. 

Alisa LaPolt Snow, the lobbyist representing the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, testified that her organization believes the decision to kill an infant who survives a failed abortion should be left up to the woman seeking an abortion and her abortion doctor.

Abortionist's House of Horrors Murder Trial Begins

This just in from The New American magazine:

The trial of a Philadelphia abortionist charged with murdering babies born alive began March 18, as the defense accused officials of pursuing “an elitist, racist prosecution” of the man who ran what has been termed a “house of horrors” abortion clinic.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the 72-year-old physician who owned and operated the West Philadelphia clinic, is charged with killing seven babies who were born alive at the facility, as well as Karnamaya Mongar, a 41-year-old refugee from Bhutan who had gone to the facility for an abortion. Prosecutors charge that Gosnell's staff gave the 90-pound woman a lethal dose of anesthesia and painkillers during the 2009 procedure, and that he is responsible for the woman's death.

According to investigators, Gosnell ignored Pennsylvania's ban on late-term abortions and the 24-hour waiting period enforced before an abortion can go forward, allowing unqualified staff to administer anesthesia and perform risky late abortions on patients who were often poor and underage. The goal was money, said Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore, with the clinic cranking out a high volume of substandard, risky abortions, while killing babies that were born alive.

“The standard practice here was to slay babies,” said Pescatore, “That's what they did.” She told jurors that Gosnell and his staff used inferior drugs and primitive procedures, often forcing women to deliver babies who were born alive and then killed with scissors.

Pescatore laid out a scenario to jurors in which a staff nearly as desperate as the women who came in for abortions followed Gosnell's procedure rather than make waves. She noted that the only other “doctors” on staff at the clinic were individuals who posed as medical professionals, but who were not licensed. She said that the woman administering anesthesia was a sixth-grade dropout who could barely read or write, and one of the operating room assistants was a 15-year-old high school student.

Eight co-defendants who were staff members at the clinic have already pleaded guilty — three of them to third-degree murder — and face jail sentences of 20 to 40 years. The only clinic staff member on trial is Eileen O'Neill, who prosecutors said posed falsely as a medical doctor.

In his opening statement to the jury, Gosnell's defense attorney Jack McMahon (shown, right) accused the prosecution of unfairly targeting his client, whom he insisted was providing a needed service to the poor pregnant women living near the clinic in inner-city West Philadelphia.

“This is a targeted, elitist, and racist prosecution of a doctor who's done nothing but give to the poor and the people of West Philadelphia,” McMahon told the mostly black jury. “It's a prosecutorial lynching of Dr. Kermit Gosnell,” who is also black. He agreed that the case was an emotionally trying one “because we all love babies. It strikes a chord in us.”

As reported by The New American, a grand jury report recalled that in February 2010 federal agents raided Gosnell's clinic, discovering “such horrific conditions that they immediately closed down the facility and suspended the doctor’s license.” Nearly a year later Gosnell was charged with eight counts of murder in the deaths of the seven babies and the mother who died at his facility.

“In their raid on Gosnell’s clinic, federal agents discovered, among other horrors, the remains of 45 infants dumped in milk jugs, juice cartons, and pet food containers — all stored in a refrigerator and freezer on the premises,” reported The New American. “Agents also found jars containing the severed limbs of babies, and conditions they called 'by far, the worst' they had ever seen, with blood on the clinic floors, 'filthy and unsanitary' surgeries, broken and dirty medical instruments and equipment, along with a 'stench of urine' and even cat excrement.
”

In its 260-page report the grand jury speculated that Gosnell and his staff had killed hundreds of babies outside the womb after they were delivered at the clinic, with Gosnell or one of his employees typically plunging scissors into the back of a baby’s neck and severing the spinal cord. “Since Gosnell and his cohorts managed to destroy most of the clinic’s files, state prosecutors were able to file murder charges in only seven of the babies’ deaths, along with a charge of murder in the death of the 41-year-old female patient,” said The New American.

The grand jury report said that killing babies who had been delivered alive by their mothers at the clinic “really had to be part of Gosnell’s plan. His method for performing late-term abortions was to induce labor and delivery of intact fetuses, and he specialized in patients who were well beyond 24 weeks. The subsequent slitting of spinal cords, without any consideration for the babies’ viability, was an integral part of what Gosnell’s employees called his ‘standard procedure.’”

Gosnell faces the death penalty if convicted in the deaths of the babies, and a life sentence on other charges. “I think it's obvious he will be found guilty,” John Stanton of the Pro-Life Union of Greater Philadelphia told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “It's pretty much an open-and-shut case that he violated laws in such a manner that he is guilty of the charges laid on him.”

The Christian News Network reported that prosecutors in the case “accuse government officials of allowing Gosnell’s operation to go undetected because the Heath Department and other entities failed to perform inspections at the facility. State regulations were tightened after the matter, as all abortion facilities in the [state of] Pennsylvania must now conform to ambulatory surgical regulations.”

Hypocrisy Defined

“Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm.” President Obama in his second inaugural speech, January 21, 2013 (on the eve of the fortieth anniversary of the horrific Roe v. Wade decision, a decision of judicial fiat the president ardently flaunts, supports, upholds, and champions).

Planned Parenthood's Bacchanal

"There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm.  There were delirious fancies as the madman fashions.  There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust." Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death

A Lost and Forgotten Habit

"The great intellectual tradition that comes down to us from the past was never interrupted or lost through such trifles as the sack of Rome, the triumph of Attila, or all the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. It was lost after the introduction of printing, the discovery of America, the founding of the Royal Society, and all the enlightenment of the Renaissance and the modern world. It was there, if anywhere, that there was lost or impatiently snapped the long thin delicate thread that had descended from distant antiquity; the thread of that unusual human hobby: the habit of thinking." G. K. Chesterton

"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, and its history; Before long the community will forget what it is, and what it was." Milan Hubl

The Cries of Ramah

“If there's even one life that can be saved, then we've got an obligation to try.... When it comes to protecting the most vulnerable among us, we must act now.... Let's do the right thing... This is our first task as a society, keeping our children safe. This is how we will be judged, and their voices should compel us to change.” President Obama

Today, America's president issued an astonishing 23 Executive Actions aimed at new gun controls--ostensibly to "protect the children of our nation."  But, not one of them would have protected the 3,300 children murdered in the nation's abortion clinics today.  Not one of them would protect the 3,300 children who will be murdered tomorrow.  Not one of them would protect the 3,300 children who will be murdered the day after that.  Or, the 1,000,000 children who will be murdered here in "the land of the free and brave" during the course of 2013.

The heights to which this hypocrisy and hubris rises is beyond fathoming: the president is the chief champion of Planned Parenthood and the child-killing minions of the nation's grisly abortion-industrial-complex.

Predictably, the hue and cry from most Christians has been about governmental assault on their guns, their vaunted 2nd Amendment rights--to be sure, no small thing.  But, where are the lamentations for Rachel's children in our modern day Ramah?

"I tell you, the only way we can change is if the American people demand it.... We have to examine ourselves in our hearts, and ask yourselves what is important? When we say we've suffered too much pain, and care too much about our children to allow this to continue, then change will, change will come. That's what it's going to take." President Obama

The Planned Parenthood Tax Scam

And, the recent spate of bad news continues gets worse: according to Planned Parenthood's just released Annual Report, 2012 was a banner year for the Grand Poobah of the abortion industry.  The world's most profitable non-profit organization performed a record number of abortions and received a record amount of taxpayer funding.

Indeed, according to the brazen behemoth's own accounting it performed more than one out of every three abortions in the US last year. And American taxpayers picked up the tab for most of that grizzly work--doling out more than half a billion dollars in government grants, contracts, and Medicaid reimbursements. That amounts to almost half of all Planned Parenthood's budget.

But even as the lecherous leviathan was larding its coffers with tax subsidies, it was simultaneously cutting the very services those subsidies were supposed to fund: contraception services were cut by 12 percent since 2009, and cancer-screening and prevention services were slashed by 29 percent. By not providing these legitimate healthcare services for women, Planned Parenthood was able to siphon off resources for its much more profitable child-killing business.

Clearly, it is time for us all to get serious about this travesty of truth, justice, and integrity, to hold our elected officials accountable, and to mobilize our local churches to full faithfulness. It is also time for us all to either storm the gates of the GOP or (now, mixing metaphors) leave its rotting carcass behind.

Abortion, Abuse, and Human Trafficking

In the northern states of India where the gender ratio between men and women has been skewed by the illegal--but widespread--practice of sex-selection abortion, a looming crisis threatens the very fabric of the nation according to a startling new report from the BBC.

According to that report, "Tens of thousands of girls disappear in India every year--they are sold into prostitution, domestic slavery. The UN children's agency Unicef says it's a problem of 'genocide proportions' and that 50 million women are missing in India because of female abortion, feticide, and infanticide--the killing of baby girls."

This is the heart wrenching backdrop to the story of widespread human rights cviolations, rape, and violence against women that has emerged from India in recent days.

Astonishingly, "An estimated 25-50 million women in India are 'missing,' if you compare the proportion of women in the population with other countries. As well as infanticide and feticide, some girls die of neglect and abuse. And, rich and modern cities like Delhi, Chandigarh, and Ahmadabad show some of the worst child sex ratios."

This is the unintended harvest of bitterness that has come from the global sowing Planned Parenthood’s ideological bad seed.

Collapsing Under the Weight of Its Own Absurdity

Forty years after the landmark Roe v. Wade decision of the Supreme Court unilaterally changed the laws protecting the sanctity of life in every state in the nation, abortion activists are reeling--having lost whatever moral high ground they once claimed for themselves.  But, is it enough to begin rolling back the hegemony of behemoths like Planned Parenthood?  Not likely.  At least, not yet.

The Valley of the Shadow of Death: Biblical Theology as a Primer for Anthropology

The hue and cry arose to heaven. 

Raw passion gripped men and women alike.  Dark with human frailty, the architecture of their souls scuttled them from one extreme to another: from wailing grief to insane murmuring, from desperate hilarity to catatonic shock, from enraged cursing to soft choking sobs.

Broken bodies.  Cast off lives.  Stark naked tragedy.  Gore and devastation.  Sadness and sorrow.  There before them was the vexing spector of mortality and the awful stench of death.  It was a gruesome panorama that defiled their senses and haunted their every waking thought.

It was a nightmare come to life. The carnage was beyond their comprehension.  The loss was beyond their measure.  But the memory of it would be carved onto the fleshly tablets of their hearts with a dull familiar blade.

It was an all too recognizable scene.  It still is. 

It could describe for us the savage anguish of Israelite mothers after Pharaoh ordered the deaths of all their male children (Exodus 1: 15-22).  It could describe for us the desperate terror that raged through Gilead after the marauding army of Ammon ripped open their pregnant women and raped their daughters (Amos 1:13-15).  It could describe for us the dreadful pall that gripped the families of Bethlehem after Herod slaughtered all their infant sons in a fit of jealousy (Matthew 2: 16-18).  Or, it could describe for us any one of thousands of other vignettes that litter our cultural subconscious like parched bones in the howling wilderness—from the ovens of Auchwitz to the gulags of Siberia, from the prisons of Teheran to the streets of Beirut, from the hospitals of Bloomington to the abortion clinics of New York.

Indeed, such tragedy is a well worn human landscape.  Such calamity clutters the pages of human history.  Such pathos persistently torments the hodge-podge ideals of human hope.  Replayed again and again and again, it has become a semeiotic symbol of the end of man and the end of his doing.

Like a moth drawn to a candle flame, man deals in death.  He always has.  He always will.  For that is his nature in this poor fallen world.

Sadly, because all men without exception are sinners, the most fundamental factor in understanding anthropology is the thanatos factor.  Very simply, what that means is that all men have morbidly embraced death (Romans 5:12). 

At the Fall, mankind was suddenly destined for death (Jeremiah 15:2).  We were all at that moment bound into a covenant with death (Isaiah 28:15). “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death” (Proverbs 14:12; 16:25).

Whether we know it or not, we have chosen death (Jeremiah 8:3).  It has become our shepherd (Psalm 49:14).  Our minds are fixed on it (Romans 8:6), our hearts pursue it (Proverbs 21:6), and our flesh is ruled by it (Romans 8:2).  We dance to its cadences (Proverbs 2:18) and descend to its chambers (Proverbs 7:27).

The fact is, "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23) and "all have sinned" (Romans 3:23). “There is none righteous, not even one; there is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God; all have turned aside, together they have become useless; there is none who does good, there is not even one.  Their throat is an open grave, with their tongues they keep deceiving, the poison of asps is under their lips; whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness; their feet are swift to shed blood, destruction and misery are in their paths, and the path of peace have they not known.  There is no fear of God before their eyes” (Romans 3:10-18). And, “all those who hate God, love death” (Proverbs 8:36).

It is no wonder then that abortion, infanticide, exposure, and abandonment have always been a normal and natural part of human relations.  Since the dawning of time, men have contrived ingenious diversions to satisfy their fallen passions.  And child-killing has always been chief among them.

Virtually every culture in antiquity was stained with the blood of innocent children.  Unwanted infants in ancient Rome were abandoned outside the city walls to die from exposure to the elements or from the attacks of wild foraging beasts.  Greeks often gave their pregnant women harsh doses of herbal or medicinal abortifacients.  Persians developed highly sophisticated surgical curette procedures.  Chinese women tied heavy ropes around their waists so excruciatingly tight that they either aborted or passed into unconsciousness.  Ancient Hindus and Arabs concocted chemical pessaries—abortifacients that were pushed or pumped directly into the womb through the birth canal.  Primitive Canaanites threw their children onto great flaming pyres as a sacrifice to their god Molech.  Polynesians subjected their pregnant women to onerous tortures--their abdomens beaten with large stones or hot coals heaped upon their bodies.  Japanese women straddled boiling cauldrons of parricidal brews.  Egyptians disposed of their unwanted children by disemboweling and dismembering them shortly after birth--their collagen was then ritually harvested for the manufacture of cosmetic creams.

None of the great minds of the ancient world--from Plato and Aristotle to Seneca and Quintilian, from Pythagoras and Aristophanes to Livy and Cicero, from Herodotus and Thucidides to Plutarch and Euripides--disparaged child-killing in any way.  In fact, most of them actually recommended it.  They callously discussed its various methods and procedures.  They casually debated its sundry legal ramifications.  They blithely tossed lives like dice.

Abortion, infanticide, exposure, and abandonment were so much a part of human societies that they provided the primary literary liet motif  in popular traditions, stories, myths, fables, and legends. 

The founding of Rome was, for instance, presumed to be the happy result of the abandonment of children.  According to the story, a vestal virgin who had been raped bore twin sons, Romulus and Remus.  The harsh Etruscan monarch Amulius ordered them exposed on the Tiber River.  Left in a basket which floated ashore, they were found by a she wolf and suckled by her.  Later, a shepherd discovered them and took them home to his wife and the kindly couple brought them up as their own.  Romulus and Remus would later establish the city of Rome on the seven hills near the place of their rescue.

Oedipus was presumed to be an abandoned child who was also found by a shepherd and later rose to greatness.  Ion, the eponymous monarch in ancient Greece miraculously lived through an abortion, according to tradition.  Cyrus, the founder of the Persian empire, was supposedly a fortunate survivor of infanticide.  According to Homer's legend, Paris, whose amorous indiscretions started the Trojan War, was also a victim of abandonment.  Telephus, the king of Mysia in Greece, and Habius, ruler of the Cunetes in Spain, had both been exposed as children according to various folk tales.  Jupiter, chief god of the Olympian pantheon, himself had been abandoned as a child.  He in turn exposed his twin sons, Zethus and Amphion.  Similarly, other myths related the fact that Poseidon, Aesculapius, Hephaistos, Attis, and Cybele had all been abandoned to die.

Because they had been mired by the minions of sin and death, it was as natural as the spring rains for the men and women of antiquity to kill their children.  It was as instinctive as the autumn harvest for them to summarily sabotage their own heritage.  They saw nothing particularly cruel about despoiling the fruit of their wombs.  It was woven into the very fabric of their culture.  They believed that it was completely justifiable.  They believed that it was just and good and right.

But they were wrong.  Dreadfully wrong.

Life is God's gift.  It is His gracious endowment upon the created order.  It flows forth in generative fruitfulness.  The earth is literally teeming  with life (Genesis 1:20; Leviticus 11:10; 22:5; Deuteronomy 14:9).  And the crowning glory of this sacred teeming is man himself (Genesis 1:26-30; Psalm 8:1-9).  To violate the sanctity of this magnificent endowment is to fly in the face of all that is holy, just, and true (Jeremiah 8:1-17; Romans 8:6). 

To violate the sanctity of life is to invite judgment, retribution,  and anathema (Deuteronomy 30:19-20).  It is to solicit devastation, imprecatation, and destruction (Jeremiah 21:8-10). “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked, whatsoever a man sows, that he shall also reap” (Galatians 6:7).

But the Lord God, who is the giver of life (Acts 17:25), the fountain of life (Psalm 36:9), the defender of life (Psalm 27:1), the prince of life (Acts 3:15), and the restorer of life (Ruth 4:15), did not leave men to languish hopelessly in the clutches of sin and death.  He not only sent us the message of life (Acts 5:20) and the words of life (John 6:68), He sent us the light of life as well (John 8:12).  He sent us His only begotten Son--the life of the world (John 6:51)--to break the bonds of death (1 Corinthians 15:54-56).  Jesus "tasted death for everyone" (Hebrews 2:9), actually "abolishing death" for our sakes (2 Timothy 1:10) and offering us new life (John 5:21). “For God so loved the world, that He sent His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

One of the earliest Christian documents--actually predating much of the New Testament--asserts that "There are two ways: a way of life and a way of death."  In Christ, God has afforded us the opportunity to choose between those two ways--to choose between fruitful and teeming life on the one hand, and barren and impoverished death on the other (Deuteronomy 30:19). 

Apart from Christ it is not possible to escape the snares of sin and death (Colossians 2:13).  On the other hand: “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new" (2 Corinthians 5:17). “All those who hate Christ "love death" (Proverbs 8:36); while all those who receive Christ are made “the sweet savor of life” (2 Corinthians 2:16).

The implication is clear: the pro-life movement and the Christian faith are synonymous.  Where there is one, there will be the other--for one cannot be had without the other. 

Further, the primary conflict in temporal history always has been and always will be the struggle for life by the church against the natural inclinations of all men everywhere.

Death has cast its dark shadow across the whole of human relations.  Because of sin, all men flirt and flaunt shamelessly in the face of its spector.  Sadly, such impudence has led to the most grotesque concupiscence imaginable: the slaughter of innocent children.  Blinded by the glare from the nefarious and insidious angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14), we stand by, paralyzed and mesmerized.

Thanks be to God, there is a way of escape from these bonds of destruction.  In Christ, there is hope.  In Him there is life--both temporal and eternal.  In Him there is liberty and justice.   In Him there is an antidote to the thanatos factor.  In Him, and in Him alone, there is an answer to the ages long dilemma of the dominion of death.

Childermas or Kindermord

Often called Childermas or Kindermord, the Sunday between Christmas and Epiphany traditionally solemnizes the slaughter of the children of Judea by Herod. It provides focus for the Christian’s commitment to protect and preserve the sanctity of all human life—thus serving as a prophetic warning against the practicioners of abandonment and infanticide in the age of antiquity, oblacy and pessiary in the medieval epoch, and abortion and euthanasia in these modern times. Generally set aside as a day of prayer, it culminates with a declaration of the covenant community’s unflinching commitment to the innocents who are unable to protect themselves.

“Do unto others as if you were the others.”  Leonardo da Vinci

“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every part of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, then I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Him. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all battlefields besides is merely flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.” Martin Luther

“All the starry hosts of heaven and of earth declare with one voice the glory bestowed on these sublime creatures of the Living God, these creatures made just a little lower than Himself.  We can do no better than to acknowledge our acceptance of Him by our acceptance of them.” Dympna of Gheel

“The Modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.  The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.  Thus some scientists care for truth; but their truth is pitiless.  And thus some humanitarians care only for pity; but their pity--I am sorry to say--is often untruthful.” G. K. Chesterton

Born! Thanks Be to God!

Christ, by highest heaven adored

Christ, the everlasting Lord;

Late in time behold Him come

Offspring of a virgin's womb.

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see;

Hail th' Incarnate Deity,

Pleased as man with man to dwell;

Jesus, our Emmanuel.

Come, Desire of nations come,

Fix in us Thy humble home;

Rise, the Woman's conquering Seed,

Bruise in us the Serpent's head.

Adam's likeness, Lord efface:

Stamp Thy image in its place;

Second Adam, from above,

Reinstate us in thy love.

Hail, the heav'n-born Prince of Peace!

Hail, the Son of Righteousness!

Light and life to all He brings,

Ris'n with healing in His wings.

Mild He lays His glory by,

Born that man no more may die,

Born to raise the sons of earth.

Abortion through the Ages

"For the fetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being, and it is a monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man's house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light." John Calvin

Ordinary Pharmacist; Extraordinary Hero

Samuel Taylor was a proto-typical mild mannered small town pharmacist.  A family man, community leader, and life-long Methodist, he had a natural Midwestern aversion to controversy.  But when the daughter of one of his customers was nearly poisoned by a dose of mail-order abortifacient pills, he sprang into action.  

He discovered that the abortifacient business was booming all over the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century--and that it was an entirely unrestricted, unregulated, and unmonitored industry.  

Without the benefits of a government agency, an institutional largess, or a corporate sponsor, he began a one-man educational campaign--first with his fellow pharmacists, later expanding to physicians, and finally with state legislators--to alert the public to the physical dangers and the moral liabilities of the child-killing trade.  Taylor testified before the Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana legislatures--winning their support for a ban on the sale of all chemical parricides and abortifacients--and he  drafted model legislation that was approved by fourteen other states.

Taylor was a very ordinary man who utilized his very ordinary skills and resources to accomplish something quite extraordinary.