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