On January 7, 2019, The New York Times reported, “With Hillary Clinton to his right, female elected officials seated before him and cheering women filling the audience, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo promised to protect women’s reproductive rights by expanding the state’s abortion laws within the first 30 days of the new legislative session.”
This is nothing new for the modern Democrat party. The Intelligencer reported on November 18, 2018, “Pro-choice activists frame the presence of pro-life Democrats as an existential threat to an endangered civil right. ‘When we compromise our values, everyone loses,’ Meg Mikolajczyk, public affairs manager for Planned Parenthood Voters of Nebraska, told the Omaha World-Herald in 2017 amid controversy over the party’s candidate for Omaha mayor, who was personally opposed to abortion.”
The Democrats are increasingly becoming the party of abortion on demand. It is an appalling concept, but not a new one.
The Associates for Biblical Research reported in the spring of 2019 edition, “In 1921 the largest cemetery of sacrificed infants in the ancient Near East was discovered at Carthage. It is well established that this rite of child sacrifice originated in Phoenicia, ancient Israel’s northern neighbor, and was brought to Carthage by its Phoenician colonizers. Hundreds of burial urns filled with the cremated bones of infants, mostly newborns but even some children up to age six years old, as well as animals have been uncovered at Carthage.”
Several civilizations sacrificed children to their gods. The Baals and Moloch were offered the innocent lives of babies. It was and is still viewed as a barbaric and horrific practice. One must ask has anything changed? Are we still sacrificing the lives of babies? To what gods? Convenience? Independence?
John Block, in the January 14, 2019 edition of National Review, wrote, “On January 18, thousands will gather in cities across the nation to join in the March for Life, where we will proudly show that Americans believe science, and we will proudly use scientific facts to prove that every human, from every background, should be welcomed in life and protected in law.”
The simple, but irrefutable fact, is becoming more and more inconvenient to the Democrats. Conception marks the first moment of a new and distinct human life.
Block continues, “Harvard Medical School’s Micheline Matthews-Roth says: ‘It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception, when egg and sperm join to form the zygote, and this developing human always is a member of our species in all stages of its life.’ Matthews-Roth reaffirmed her statement in sworn testimony given in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, stating that ‘each member of the human species indeed starts his or her existence as one cell, the zygote.’”
Most of what I’ve cited here isn’t new. People have known for a long time that a child in the womb is a human being. Our culture wants to redefine it when it wants to do something it knows is wrong. It’s as if calling it by another term, like ‘fetus’, makes killing it less immoral.
This is an old battle, though, so why does it matter in 2019?
The March for Life is this Saturday and millions across the nation will gather to stand for the unborn. Many of us celebrated when Justice Kavanaugh was confirmed and we are prayerfully optimistic that the days of Roe v. Wade are numbered. However, we cannot become complacent. We must continue to let our voices and votes be heard in the public arena. The other side, though having lost a few battles, has not conceded. They are already trying to push back as Governor Cuomo’s actions in New York suggest.
Standing for life is important, too, because it is morally the right thing. A culture that debases life is a culture that has signed its own death warrant. I read Cheryl Chumley’s article in The Washington Times from November 27, 2018, and celebrated a bit. She reports that “So it’s with utter nonpartisan cheer that federal statistics showing the falling rate of abortions in the United States ought to be received.” She continues, “’The U.S. has seen a steady and significant drop in the number of abortions in recent years. In 2014, the number of abortions was at its lowest since 1976 — and had dropped almost in half in the last 20 years,’ Focus on the Family wrote.”
However, the fact remains that 55 million babies have been aborted since 1973 and it continues today. We must keep the vigil.
Being Pro-Life is also, historically, a non-partisan issue. There were pro-life Republicans and Democrats. Politico reports, “Shortly after Democrats for Life’s founding nearly two decades ago, its website listed as many as 43 House Democrats in the group’s coalition. Today, Democrats for Life endorses two sitting House members and three senators. Its leaders won’t reveal the group’s membership numbers, but in a nod to their scarcity, members jokingly refer to themselves as political ‘unicorns.’”
It used to be that abortion wasn’t a political issue. It was an issue of morality. We must demand that today.
Mother Teresa summed it up well at the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast when she said, “The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love, and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts.”
That was true then and it is now.
