A Christmas Story

Professor Pete Tigchelaar at Calvin College (USA) has a story relevant to the Christmas season. For many years, Tigchelaar used a three-month old pre-born baby encased in plastic to explain pre-natal development in his biology class. One day a young female student asked if he still had the model. Tigchelaar said he did, and the student told him an interesting tale.

She said that many years before, her mother had been a student in the professor's biology class. Tigchelaar did not know it, but this student was three months pregnant at the time. The student had already been to a pregnancy clinic, where workers told her about the "products of conception" and the "contents of her uterus." She had made an appointment for an abortion the next day. But when she saw the foetus-with its fingers, eyes, outline of a liver, and other features-she declined the abortion and six months later delivered a girl. "I am that girl", explained the student. "Thank you for my life".

Tigchelaar still gets emotional when he tells the story. "In this season when we celebrate the birth of someone who came to give each of us eternal life," Tigchelaar says, "I am reminded that the unwed Mary would have been the perfect candidate for a similar procedure. I am thankful that her response was, 'I am the Lord's handmaid. Be it to me as you say.'"

In this Christmas season, let us remember and emulate the heroism of Mary in giving her unplanned baby the gift of life. Let us also remember and emulate the heroism of Joseph, who protected and nurtured mother and child through those difficult nine months and beyond. The heroism of these two individuals helped make the world a much richer place. No to abortion; yes to life.

Story from Calvin News, 18 December 2008

Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at www.letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

This space has spent nearly 88,000 words defending human life from conception to natural death. But as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Some pro-life advocates believe that people will thoroughly reject abortion when they see what the procedure really does. With that principle in mind, Father Frank Pavone posted numerous photographs of aborted children on his website. View them at www.priestsforlife.org/images. Be warned that these are graphic photos. If you find these photos upsetting, consider whether the procedure that produced them really advances a society. No to abortion, yes to life.

Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com

The Poverty of Abortion

Mother Teresa spent much of her life helping the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, India. Mother Teresa's concern for the weak and poor extended to unborn children. Father Frank Pavone, director of Priests for Life, has this to say about her:

Reflections on the life and work of Mother Teresa characteristically focuses on her "love for the poor." She did love the poor. But her understanding of what poverty is was much deeper than that of most observers. To understand it, we need to appreciate her message about what human beings are called to do. We were made to love and be loved, she would often remark. To give and receive love is the calling and greatness of human beings.

The fundamental poverty, then, is to fail to give and receive love. That is why a society which throws away its children by abortion is poorer than one which does not have many material resources. The society that permits abortion fails in its calling to give love, to welcome the inconvenient person. To fail to love is poverty. To fail to love to the point where the other person is not even recognized as a person, and is legally destroyed, is poverty to the extreme. Abortion is this extreme poverty in action.

Mother Teresa picked up the dying from the streets of Calcutta with the same love with which she pulled women away from abortion facilities. Love is indivisible. It means making room for the other person, whether that person is in the street or in the womb. It means feeding that person, not just with food for the body, but with the recognition, attention, and compassion that their personal dignity demands.

May Swaziland never fall into the deepest poverty, a poverty which discounts the life of a child as a disposable burden. May the nation protect her greatest resource-human beings-from conception to natural death.

Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com

Homosexuality

Recently the Times has run news stories and opinion pieces about homosexuality. Before people decide that being gay is just another lifestyle choice that should be regarded as normal, they might consider these findings:
*According to the Gay Community News, "The statistics do point to the gay community, particularly gay men, as being most at risk of becoming alcoholics."
*The Archives of Sexual Behavior says "The levels of depression and anxiety in our homosexual subjects, whether HIV positive or HIV negative, are substantially higher than those found in representative general population samples."
*A 1978 study by Alan Bell and Martin Weinberg, 18% of white gay men reported trying to kill themselves at least once; 3% of white heterosexual men said they had tried to commit suicide.

Significantly, the publications and individuals reporting these data are very much in favor of the societal normalization of homosexuality.

Mary Eberstadt wrote the following in a short article to First Things magazine in February 2004: "None of that evidence, of course, will suprise those who actually minister to homosexual persons from a traditionalist perspective. But this same evidence is almost entirely unknown, because culturally verboten [forbidden] throughout the secular world and particularly among our secular elites".

No one wishes gay men and women to suffer the afflictions documented above and elsewhere. Nevertheless, the push to normalize gay behaviour is rampant throughout what is commonly called the "mainstream media". Before we confirm that way of life for individuals, however, we would do well to consider if it is good for them. The statistics indicate that it is not.

Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com

Abortion and Poverty

During a recent discussion about abortion, a thoughtful young man brought up this hypothetical (and perhaps not so hypothetical) situation. "Mr. Poglitsh, what if there is a girl who is pregnant; she has no job, no husband, no resources. Wouldn't abortion be better in this situation?" Wouldn't it be more compassionate, this young man was saying, to both the girl and the child with no future to have an abortion?

The first answer to the question of abortion in such a circumstance is "No", because it is always wrong to kill an innocent person. The child is not responsible for the hard circumstances; thus, an unborn child should not be put to death because of them.

A second answer comes by way of an anecdote. Consider this true situation. A husband and wife already have four children. The man has syphilis, the woman has tuberculosis. One child is blind, another deaf and unable to speak, another has tuberculosis, and the other has a deformity. The wife is now pregnant with a fifth child. Should she abort? Wouldn't it be better, for both the family and the child in the womb, for that child not to be born?

The mother did choose life for her son; he was Ludwig Van Beethoven, one of Europe's most celebrated composers. So the second answer to the question of aborting a child because of the hard circumstances is "No", because no one knows what good a child might do. Mother Theresa, the famous nun who worked among the poor of India, is credited with saying "The scientist who would have solved the AIDS problem has already been aborted."

Beneath the surface of the "abort because the child will have no future" argument lurks a threat to all of us. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that it would be okay to kill the child in the womb because the mother's circumstances were bleak and the future looked equally bad. Well, if killing someone due to poverty is now "okay", then why should it be the baby who dies? After all, lots of other people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and older have had their opportunities to enjoy food, clothing, and shelter; why not kill one of them and give the resources (job, home, car, etc.) to the expectant mother and her unborn child? Surely this is more "fair", as the previous owner has enjoyed these possessions for many years, and the life of the baby has just begun.

Of course this argument is morally reprehensible, but the logic leading from "abort due to poverty" to "kill the 40-somethings and share the wealth" is sound. Tragically, this logic is already working itself out in some nations like the Netherlands where, according to Dr. John Willke, "130,000 people die each year in Holland and over 20,000 are killed, directly or indirectly, by doctors. As many as half did not ask to be killed." Dr. Willke continues: "Hospitalized seniors are routinely visited by an organization that offers to oversee their case to prevent their doctor from killing them."

We must defend life from conception to natural death. Declaring some humans expendable to alleviate poverty puts everyone at risk. For the sake of our own lives and the lives of others-no to abortion, yes to life.



Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com

The Good Samaritan

Abortion damages women and kills children. We can take courage, however, from Jesus' parable of The Good Samaritan. Father Frank Pavone of the group Priests for Life illustrates the parable in this way. "On the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, a man fell in with robbers. A priest and a Levite came by, but did not stop to help. Despite their knowledge of the Law and Prophets, they walked right by. Why?

One of the reasons may be that they were afraid. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho is a steep and dangerous road. At the time of Jesus, it had come to be known as the 'Bloody Pass'. Because of its numerous curves, it lends itself to attacks by robbers who can easily hide not too far from their victims. Perhaps the priest and Levite who passed by that man said to themselves, 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me? Maybe the robbers who attacked him are still here. Maybe they're hiding just around the bend. This is a dangerous road. I better keep going.'

And then the Good Samaritan came along, and he reversed the question. He didn't ask, 'If I help this man, what will happen to me?' The Good Samaritan asked, 'If I do not help this man, what will happen to him?' And that's the question for us. If I do not address this evil, what will happen to the unborn? If I do not get involved, what will happen to those who are vulnerable, to those who are marginalized in our society, those who are oppressed, those who have no one to speak for them?"

Father Pavone's illustration applies to both the unborn and their mothers, because both are powerfully damaged by abortion. May we be like the Good Samaritan and ask ourselves "What will happen to this mother and child if I do not help them?" May we answer our own question by giving life-affirming support to women and children. No to abortion; yes to life.

Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com

Abortion and Women's Mental Health

Abortion advocates promote abortion as a solution to the problems generated by an unplanned pregnancy. With regard to abortion and his own daughters, US President Barack Obama has said "If they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby."
Doctor Priscilla K. Coleman, research psychologist at Bowling Green State University (USA), recently published the article "Abortion and mental health: quantitative synthesis and analysis of research published 1995-2009" in The British Journal of Psychiatry. She reviewed nearly 15 years of research examining abortion's effects on the mental health of the women who undergo the procedure. Her review encompassed 22 studies from 6 countries; taken together, the studies included over 800,000 women, 163,000 of whom had undergone abortion.
Her results? Subjecting the studies to rigorous statistical methods in order to draw meaningful conclusions, she found "that women who have had an abortion experienced an 81% higher risk of mental health problems of various forms when compared with women who had not had an abortion." In specific areas, women who underwent abortions suffered higher rates of alcohol use (110%), overall anxiety (34%), suicidal activity (155%) and depression (37%) than women who had not had abortions. Coleman also mentioned the common finding that women who carry a child to term have significantly lower suicide rates compared to the general population.
President Obama is right when he suggests that its a mistake to have a child outside marriage; the best situation is to save sex for marriage and to keep it in marriage so that children can be conceived and reared in an environment of support and love. Nevertheless, extensive research demonstrates that fixing the "mistake" of an unplanned pregnancy with abortion punishes the mother.
May Swaziland protect the well-being of her daughters and mothers by saving sex for marriage and keeping it in marriage. May the nation avoid the tragic "One dead child, one wounded mother" syndrome of abortion. No to abortion; yes to love and life.

Rudy Poglitshrpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com