Illustration: Lisa Nolan

There is much rejoicing tonight in pro-life circles over the conviction of Dr. Kermit Gosnell on first degree murder charges for his having cruelly severed the spines of babies born alive in his abortion house of horrors. I don’t begrudge folks their joy at justice for the little ones. I’m just not there.

Much as I am opposed to the death penalty, this 72 year-old serial killer should spend the rest of his life on death row fighting off the efforts of those in power over him to take his life. That might bring about some much needed insight into who and what he has become and what it is that he did. Apart from the babies killed in utero, his decades of infanticide, if evidence could show it, would make Gosnell the biggest serial killer in American history. There is less joy and more a sense of relief when a serial killer is neutralized by incarceration.

But this day only serves to highlight the psychosis of American jurisprudence. Were the same spinal cord severings carried out in utero, Gosnell would be regarded as a model abortionist, a man practicing legal medicine.

Location, location, location…

If that sounds glum, it is equally an opportunity moving forward. Having been convicted of first degree murder, Gosnell has perversely catapulted the argument away from justifying abortion on the grounds that we are not sure when life begins, and into its rightful home: personal predilection. If the murder of these babies is indeed regarded as first degree murder because of their location, then their abortions would have been no less an act of murder five minutes earlier when inside their mothers.

If Gosnell is put to death by the state it will not be for taking these babies’ lives at the developmental stages when they were killed. No, Gosnell will be put to death for not following medical protocol as dictated by law, namely failing to call 911 and to keep the baby alive because it couldn’t be murdered in a place prescribed by law.

That’s the true insanity and malignant evil in this case. Are we too far gone to recognize that it is our jurisprudence that is riddled with cancer? Giving abortionists the death penalty is not the answer, and I pray that Gosnell lives thirty years longer with all of his mental faculties intact, that he might repent and atone for his monstrous evil.

Curing the American character after 55 million murders is going to take a bit longer, if indeed we are not already too far gone.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell is on trial for his life in Philadelphia because of how he ran his medical clinic, the “Women’s Medical Society” at 3801 Lancaster. That impressive establishmentarian-sounding title belied a business which reflected the abortion philosophy lived to its fullest expression and logical conclusion. In the final analysis, the Gosnell case reveals much more than who Kermit Gosnell is. It has revealed to us who we have become as a nation.

The Grand Jury Report reads like a a horror novel. So callous and cruel is this page-turner that it simply beggars the imagination. In it, the report details how instruments were not sterilized, and were the cheapest disposable instruments reused from patient to patient. In the process, Dr. Gosnell spread disease like a fly. One can only imagine if HIV was spread in his “clinic”.

Women of color were more often than not attended to by Gosnell’s staff of medically untrained and unlicensed personnel, including a fifteen year-old girl who administered anaesthetics, while Dr. Gosnell saw to the white women in slightly less squalid rooms, because as he said, that’s the way the world is. A black man who graduated from Thomas Jefferson Medical College abandoned black women to untrained, unskilled laypeople.

Looking past all of that, the blood-stained blankets, floors, and treatment tables, the toilet bowls women delivered their babies into (A common delivery method at abortuaries elsewhere), there was so much more.

Gosnell was frequently absent as women were being given their abortion procedures, and hundreds of babies were born alive. Here Gosnell would insure that there was no ambulance to come and discover his macabre shop, and here is where his most heartless proclivities became standard operating procedure. He would cut into the backs of these babies’ necks, crush through their spinal columns with scissors, and then sever the cervical spinal cords, essentially producing an internal decapitation. It is not likely that death was instantaneous for all the babies whose brains remained perfused with oxygen until the cessation of heart and lung function.

In the research experiments on rat spinal cords and brains for my MS degree in Cell and Molecular Biology, we worked on rats, and I decapitated quite a few with a special guillotine. Once decapitated, the feet ran in place, the tail twitched violently, and one could see the animals’ eyes still blinking until unconsciousness overcame the animal. It was horrid work and helped motivate me to work with bacteria in my doctoral research. I cannot imagine the pain experienced by these babies undergoing internal decapitation.

Yet, even that begs a deeper analysis. Why are we so repelled by these severings of spinal cords, what Gosnell and his criminal employees glibly referred to as ‘snippings’, as though one were simply gliding through a lock of hair? Why can physicians suck out brains, dismember the babies alive in utero, but be charged with murder for the same barbarism once the baby simply changes location?

Why do we consider the baby a patient in its own right only if it is extruded alive from the birth canal?

Here is where we discover Gosnell the monster is really Gosnell the reflection of American Jurisprudence at its own sublime and depraved worst.

The answer to the questions is simple. We have decided that the same baby, simply by being attached to an umbilical cord is not his/her own person, but an extension of the mother’s body. By that logic, an astronaut doing a spacewalk and connected to the ship by an umbilicus should have no more moral worth than the spacecraft itself. Were a fellow crew member to shut off the air supply intentionally, would they be charged merely with vandalism?

As the major media emerge from their blackout on this case, and the nation tunes in, we find ourselves at an interesting juncture. We are united in horror at the depravity and inhumanity of it all. It is a case that makes us consider the biological reality of the child whose murder would not have been murder if only proper protocol had been followed, and therein lies the madness.

Murder is not murder if proper protocol is followed.

We cannot long survive as a civilization of rational human beings with that sort of mentality. American exceptionalism has been consumed by radicalized autonomy, and in the process biomedical ethics, politics, and common decency have been savaged.

What is sickest about the Gosnell case is that Dr. Gosnell is really us. The only real distinction is that he stepped outside of the boundaries we established for our American psychosis. Abortion can only be permissible if we assuage ourselves with certain boundaries of propriety for the mass murder of our citizens. There is no greater pariah in the asylum than the one who upsets the rhythms of the asylum.

The filthy conditions in that clinic would have been a twenty-four hour news story, as would have been the severed feet in jars. It was the decapitations of babies who could be seen and heard that merited him six of the seven counts of murder. Again, it comes down to a matter of protocol. The baby only becomes a patient when it is extruded from the birth canal, which is a radical departure from the traditional two-patient model of obstretric medicine.

To look into the face of Kermit Gosnell is to look in the American mirror, a rare glimpse of clarity as the fog temporarily lifts from the mirror. With more than fifty-five million babies aborted in forty years, it is time to use the Gosnell trial as an opportunity for some national soul-searching. But will we, or have those parameters for the national psychosis become too fixed and immovable? Will we offer up Gosnell as a sacrificial offering, a way to assure ourselves of the validity and functionality of the boundaries of psychosis that were breached?

One wonders.

A Statement by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius

Plan B One-Step is an emergency contraceptive, sometimes referred to as the “morning after pill.” Plan B One-Step is currently labeled over the counter to women ages 17 years and older, but is sold behind the pharmacy counter. It is available by prescription only to women 16 years and younger. My decision does not change any current availability of the drug for all women.
In February 2011, Teva Women’s Health Inc. submitted to the FDA a supplemental new drug application for Plan B One-Step. This application sought to make Plan B One-Step available over the counter for all girls of reproductive age. The science has confirmed the drug to be safe and effective with appropriate use. However, the switch from prescription to over the counter for this product requires that we have enough evidence to show that those who use this medicine can understand the label and use the product appropriately. I do not believe that Teva’s application met that standard. The label comprehension and actual use studies did not contain data for all ages for which this product would be available for use.
FDA has recommended approval of this application in its Summary Review for Regulatory Action on Plan B One-Step. After careful consideration of the FDA Summary Review, I have concluded that the data, submitted by Teva, do not conclusively establish that Plan B One-Step should be made available over the counter for all girls of reproductive age.
The average age of the onset of menstruation for girls in the United States is 12.4 years. However, about ten percent of girls are physically capable of bearing children by 11.1 years of age. It is common knowledge that there are significant cognitive and behavioral differences between older adolescent girls and the youngest girls of reproductive age. If the application were approved, the product would be available, without prescription, for all girls of reproductive age.
The Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible, acting through the FDA Commissioner, for executing the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Today’s action reflects my conclusion that the data provided as part of the actual use study and the label comprehension study are not sufficient to support making Plan B One-Step available to all girls 16 and younger, without talking to a health care professional. Plan B One-Step will still be available over the counter to women ages 17 and older.
Because I do not believe enough data were presented to support the application to make Plan B One-Step available over the counter for all girls of reproductive age, I have directed FDA to issue a complete response letter denying the supplemental new drug application (SNDA) by Teva Women’s Health, Inc..

Sebelius received Obama’s support for her decision. From news reports at the time of the ruling:

Obama said that as a father of two daughters, he thinks the government should “apply some common sense” to rules governing over-the-counter medicine. He said he understood Sebelius’ concern about letting medication with potentially adverse side effects be available to 10-year-old girls “alongside bubble gum or batteries” at drugs stores.
“I think most parents would probably feel the same way,” he said. Asked point blank if he supports Sebelius’ decision, Obama said, “I do.”

While the Judge today said that his decision was supported by science, it remains for the Judge to enlighten both the regulatory and scientific/medical communities as to what secret studies he was privy to in his decision-making. The truth is that every study, including those by Teva, the manufacturer of Plan B, indicate that half of al women taking the drug were incapable of following the directions on the product insert for correct use of the drug and/or failed to understand that Plan B is not meant to replace regular contraceptives or be used more than once in a menstrual cycle.

Further, studies have indicated that when used by teens the rate of Chlamydia infection rose (presumably from increased sexual activity). Additionaly, studies have indicated that the incidence of teen pregnancy was not lowered by the use of Plan B.

Perhaps even more disturbing is the lack of understanding by the judge that children’s medications are dispensed on a milligram of drug per kilogram of body weight basis. This is because standard adult doses would be double, triple, or even quadruple the necessary amount in children whose bodies are often 1/4 the mass of an adult’s. There are NO KNOWN STUDIES of the effects of the single, adult dose of Plan B on girls under age 18, which makes the specter of girls twelve and thirteen years old purchasing this drug over the counter just as frightening as can be. There are also no long term studies of Plan B’s. effects on adults, either. So the whole enetrprise is one, large human experiment.

It isn’t impossible to imagine a young girl whose body mass is half that of an eighteen year-old’s taking this dangerous hormonal drug after every act of sex, up to several in one month. This drug is several times the dose taken daily by women using oral contraceptives. Recall that half of all grown women studied couldn’t grasp this reality.

Our daughters have become lab rats in Judge Korman’s great experiment. Better he should leave such matters to those of us trained in the field, and that he stick to the law. It is now open season on girls, whose gynecologic standard of care would be improved if they were accorded the same standards that govern veterinary medicine. If vets did to animals what we do to our women, they would lose their licenses and be prosecuted for cruelty. That’s how far gynecologic medicine and its governmental regulation have sunk.

Below, an interview I gave earlier this year at a medical conference in Washington, DC, dealing with this issue of targeting children.

New data using infrared light date the Shroud of Turin to the time of Jesus. This is heartening news for believers, as the new data are at odds with a 1988 carbon dating analysis which placed the age of the shroud at the 13th or 14th century.

Criticism of the 1988 study centers on the possibility that the small swatch of fabric taken from the shroud may have actually been a patch added around the time of the 13th century when a fire scorched parts of the folded shroud. Could the scientists in 1988 have made such a methodological blunder?

Sure.

But even if they didn’t, and if they took a swatch of the original cloth, there is still an interprative blunder that has been made regarding the carbon dating data. First, a brief explanation of exactly what happens in carbon dataing.

The procedure is simple. A sample is placed in a test tube and burned. The resulting carbon is analyzed and the amount of radioactive carbon (carbon-14) is measured compared to non-radioactive carbon (carbon-12).

How the dating is performed is based upon the fact that radioactive carbon (carbon-14) decays by half at a steady rate of every 5,730 years in what is known as its half-life. So, for instance, if we start with a pound of C-14 today, 5,730 years from today one-half of it would have decayed, leaving a half-pound of C-14. In another 5,730 years there would be 1/4 pound remaining. 5,730 years after that, 1/8 pound would remain, and so forth.

Living organisms incorporate C-14 from the atmosphere and serve as the baseline for the C-14 content that is measured in fossils and other archaeological artifacts. By comparing the C-14 content of an archaeological sample with the avaerage C-14 content of a comparably weighted modern organism, one may establish the age of the sample.

So, to use round and simple numbers, if a modern sample of human bone contains 5 nanograms of C-14, and a sample from bone found in an archaeological dig contains 2.5 nanograms of C-14, then the bone is approximately 5,700 years old. If the C-14 content of the found bone is 1.25 nanograms, then it is approximately 11,400 years old.

The same method holds true for dating cloth.

In the case of the 1988 carbon-dating of the Shroud, assuming that an original piece of the Shroud was tested, and assuming that the Shroud indeed dates from the time of Jesus, how could the results be off by 1,300 years? How could there be more C-14 present than there should have been?

A variable I have never heard mentioned is the fire that scorched the Shroud. Recall that C-14 analysis requires the burning of the sample to produce a readily analyzable sample of carbon. That fire carried soot from the church, and produced soot from the burned portions of the Shroud which deposited and permeated into the fabric of the Shroud. Add to that the soot from burning candles in churches and private halls in all the years the Shroud was opened and venerated.

All of this soot carries C-14 which, when deposited in the fabric of the Shroud, would artificially push up the age of the Shroud when C-14 analysis is performed. For example, suppose a sample of the Shroud ought to contain 1 nanogram of C-14 if it were from the time of Jesus. Soot deposits would actually raise the amount of C-14 present in the sample, leading researchers to believe that the sample is from more recent times.

Of course, even if all of the scientific evidence were to date the Shroud to Jesus’ day, science can never, ever ascertain that the image it contains is that of Jesus. But that is not important. What matters above all is faith, not so much in the image of a dead Jesus impressed in fabric, but in the sure and certain knowledge that He rose again and lives.

That singular reality is what has changed the world, offered hope to billions, and is the focal point of today’s Easter joy.

A review of the Popes in the twentieth century find them fighting a fierce battle against the forces of secularism, atheism, and malevolance that have consumed Western Civilization. Collectively these forces, referred to as “Modernity,” are merely contemporary expressions of the evils that have collapsed empires and civilizations for thousands of years. The election of our new Holy Father, Francis, must be evaluated in light of the twentieth century popes, beginning with Pius XI.

Just a few months after the Lambeth Conference of 1930, where the Anglicans opened the door to contraception, Pope Pius XI issued Casti Connubii, the great defense of marriage that resonates especially today in the United States:

Venerable Brethren and Beloved Children, Health and Apostolic Benediction.

How great is the dignity of chaste wedlock, Venerable Brethren, may be judged best from this that Christ Our Lord, Son of the Eternal Father, having assumed the nature of fallen man, not only, with His loving desire of compassing the redemption of our race, ordained it in an especial manner as the principle and foundation of domestic society and therefore of all human intercourse, but also raised it to the rank of a truly and great sacrament of the New Law, restored it to the original purity of its divine institution, and accordingly entrusted all its discipline and care to His spouse the Church.

5. And to begin with that same Encyclical, which is wholly concerned in vindicating the divine institution of matrimony, its sacramental dignity, and its perpetual stability, let it be repeated as an immutable and inviolable fundamental doctrine that matrimony was not instituted or restored by man but by God; not by man were the laws made to strengthen and confirm and elevate it but by God, the Author of nature, and by Christ Our Lord by Whom nature was redeemed, and hence these laws cannot be subject to any human decrees or to any contrary pact even of the spouses themselves. This is the doctrine of Holy Scripture;[2] this is the constant tradition of the Universal Church; this the solemn definition of the sacred Council of Trent, which declares and establishes from the words of Holy Writ itself that God is the Author of the perpetual stability of the marriage bond, its unity and its firmness.[3]

Pius XI’s successor, Pius XII would famously condemn Nazism and help orchestrate the rescue of Jews, going on to win the universal praise of Europe’s Jews both during and immediately after World War II. The greatness of the man and his actions would only be rivaled by the magnitude of the calumny against him a generation later by a socialist playwright.

Pius XII responded more in action than by Encyclical, and 80% of the priests and religious of eastern Europe paid with their lives for the response of the Church through the sheltering of Jews.

Pope John XXIII set the Church on the course toward engaging the world in a new and fresh manner by calling for the Second Vatican Council. Himself a veteran of the First World War, as stretcher bearer and chaplain, John served Pius XII as Cardinal during the Second World War, orchestrating the rescue of Jews. During his papacy, as reported by Wiki:

In 1965, the Catholic Herald quoted Pope John as saying:

We are conscious today that many, many centuries of blindness have cloaked our eyes so that we can no longer see the beauty of Thy chosen people nor recognise in their faces the features of our privileged brethren. We realize that the mark of Cain stands upon our foreheads. Across the centuries our brother Abel has lain in blood which we drew, or shed tears we caused by forgetting Thy love. Forgive us for the curse we falsely attached to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we know what we did.”[6]

In the time between the Lambeth Conference of 1930, and 1968, the year it seemed the world was teetering on the brink of anarchy, the world had seen WWII, the Holocaust, Cold War, Korean War, Vietnam War, Wars to end colonialism around the world, a rash of assasinations, the advent of the sexual revolution, Margaret Sanger’s Negro Project, the eugenic sterilizations of scores of thousands of humans, the development of the birth control pill, and the complete abandonment of the unified condemnation of contraception by all of Christendom except for the Catholic Church.

In that year of 1968, Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed 2,000 years of Catholic Christian teaching on the right use of sex in marriage, and which underscored Casti Connubii. Five years later the United States would adopt legalized abortion, going on to slaughter 56 million babies, adding to the 1.8 Billion abortions worldwide since 1960.

In that time, a little-known bishop from behind the Iron Curtain would write an even less well-known book, Love and Responsibility. He would follow Paul VI as John Paul II, who would take on radical feminism, communism, capitalism, and the sexual revolution in the most intellectually and theologically proliferative pontificates of all time.

Along the way, the formality of the Papacy began to change. John XXIII dropped the regal “we” when visting youth in institutions, using the more personal, “I”. The Second Vatican Council changed a great deal, and Paul VI ended the practice of papal coronations. John Paul II eschewed a great deal of formality and reveled in the presence of youth.

Pope Benedict XVI eliminated the papal tiarra from the papal coat of arms, a practice maintained by Pope Francis, who has also eschewed the use of the papal apartment, wearing of the Apostolic Stole during his first appearance, and has adopted a host of other less formal and common touches.

While the papacy has undergone something of an informal transformation in recent decades, the responses of the popes have only grown firmer and more frequent in the face of Europe’s and America’s civilizational collapse. Benedict made an outreach to Europe the thrust of his papacy, an attempt to convert the cradle of Christianity from the embrace of ‘modernity’ and return her to her former dignity and glory.

He was roundly rebuffed, and so the torch has been passed to the brown peoples of the Southern Hemisphere where the Church is alive and growing, where nations battle against United States and European demands for legalization of abortion, gay marriage and contraception as prerequisites for financial aid.

From this hemisphere comes a pope who rode the bus to work, eschewed a palace in favor of a small apartment, and who cooked his own meals. He was the bishop of an impoverished people and sees the world somewhat differently than those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. He will not bend to us, but bend us to his vision of the world as seen through the eyes of a shepherd whose people’s plight has been largely unseen by America and Europe.

Pope Francis has dealt with the evil of poverty and the evil of a United States and Europe who have tried to leverage his people’s poverty by coupling the abandonment of the faith as a prerequisite for foreign aid. There will be many who find his approach difficult to bear. Wounded pride will be the leaven of that difficulty.

Those in the media and on the left who are praising his simplicity will be disappointed, bitterly so, when that does not translate into an embrace of a “liberal” agenda. This Pope, like his predecessors, begins from where his predecessors have left off. It is too early to say where he will place his emphasis, but I suspect that the artificial dichotomy between the life issues championed by the orthodox wing of the Church, and the social justice issues championed by the anarchist wing, may well be reunited by a Pope uniquely positioned to do so.

We in the north have largely abandoned the faith. It will be interesting to see how the south leads now that the light of faith and universal leadership has been handed to them.

Time will tell.

During the singing of the passion today I sat and contemplated something I’d heard a thousand times and never really gave much thought: St. John tells us it was Caiaphas the High Priest who first floated the idea to the Jewish people the advantage of having one man die for the people. Immediately a thousand pro-choice arguments along similar lines crowded in on me.

Caiaphas was the High Priest, the mediator between God and man, the one who offered animal sacrifice for the remission of the people’s sins, for the Mercy of God. Somewhere along the way Caiaphas lost his faith in God, and he eventually became no better than the Canaanite priests who offered human sacrifice to appease the gods. Caiaphas would offer a man to the Romans, and in so doing he would elevate Caesar above the one true God of the universe.

For Caiaphas, Caesar alone had the power to save and deliver, and he would be offered a human sacrifice in exchange by God’s High Priest. That’s stunning.

The complete perversion and implosion of the priesthood. The God who delivered Israel repeatedly, who blessed Israel abundantly was abandoned by his own High Priest.

Why?

It’s easy to cast stones at old Caiaphas. He’s the villain of today’s narrative, but he’s also pretty tame by today’s standard. In truth, we’ve eclipsed Caiaphas long ago.

The main reason(s) for sacrificing the most innocent of our age have much to do with Caiaphas’ theme of blood sacrifice for material benefit. In the inner-city the narrative is that babies keep girls from becoming all they can be, that they hold girls back from completing education. With 20 million dead Black babies in 40 years, the Ivy League colleges ought to have annexes in Harlem, Watts, and Detroit.

Better the babies should die, that the mothers might live.

However, the truth is that these centers of slaughter are more violent, squalid, and desperately poor than ever before. That’s the real payout from blood sacrifice of humans.

Today’s high priest in the White House has ordained through his healthcare plan that people at age 75 or older may not receive cancer treatments or pacemakers if the physicians can’t guarantee at least five more years of quality life. Such rationing also saves quite a bit of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and government pension benefits for a nation that is dead broke.

Better for them to die that the nation might live.

Caiaphas let Satan lead him into the death cult mentality, and we have followed suit. Thirty-seven years after Caiaphas sold out, the Temple in Jerusalem was leveled by those same Romans to whom Jesus was offered as a peace offering. Thirty-seven years after the embrace of legalized abortion (beginning in New York) we were saddled with a president who has torn down the pillars of American society.

That’s the price of embracing human sacrifice to appease Satan and his lies.

That’s the price of turning one’s back on God.

False gods have a nasty way of enslaving their followers, as Americans are beginning to learn.

But Easter’s coming…

Yesterday North Dakota became the first state in the Union to pass a personhood ammendment that covers humans in their embryonic stages of development. Read it here at HuffPo. For all the work involved in getting to this day, the easy part is over, and the real fight lies ahead.

The lesislation, SCR4009, states:

“The inalienable right to life of every human being at any stage of development must be recognized and protected.”

While this amendment is beautiful in its absolutist elegance, it presents the Pro-life Movement with a constellation of challenges in selling this proposed amendment to the North Dakota voters who must now vote to ratify it. That won’t be an easy sell when the voters move past the noble principle and consider the specific applications in the lives and reproductive health of North Dakota’s women.

The first objection that will need to be overcome is what is to be done in the case of ectopic pregnancy, which occurs at a rate of 19.7 per 1,000 in North America. This is no small question, as even pro-lifers are split on the approach to this potentially fatal condition. All would agree that it is out of tyhe question to sit back and let nature take its course. Read here for a good article about ectopic pregnancy.

While many case spontaneously resolve, with the embryo being resorbed by the mother’s body, many do not. In the case of tubal pregnancies there are two basic approaches, only one of which is morally acceptable to Catholics. The first, and morally unacceptable method, is to treat the mother with drugs such as methotrexate, which target the baby for death. Proponents of this method prefer it, as it preserves the Fallopian tube for future pregnancy.

The direct targeting of the baby is morally unacceptable to Roman Catholics, leaving salpingotomy (removing the tube with the baby inside), as the only morally acceptable solution. This approach satisfies the moral principle of Double-Effect, which according to the David Solomon article just linked states:

four conditions [need to] be met if the action in question is to be morally permissible: first, that the action contemplated be in itself either morally good or morally indifferent; second, that the bad result not be directly intended; third, that the good result not be a direct causal result of the bad result; and fourth, that the good result be “proportionate to” the bad result.

A question that arises is whether Catholic pro-lifers are willing to endorse methotrexate over salpingotomy in the case of ectopic pregnancy. If not, count on the other side arguing that we are trying to force our morality on the public through this amendment. When asked, how will we respond?

Will fidelity to our moral compass fracture the absolutist tone of the amendment’s language? If so, what other concessions will be sought and made? How rapidly will personhood be eviscerated?

These questions require answers now, today, as North Dakota voters are forming their impressions as we speak.

More potential objections and exceptions in Part II.

There is good news in North Dakota this week as the legislature there has passed two bills: one outlawing gender-selective and eugenic abortions rooted in genetic anomalies, and the other outlawing abortion once a heartbeat is detectable. Get the N.Y. Times story here.

This news comes hot on the heels of Arizona’s banning abortions at 12 weeks, and adds to the victories in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma, which have banned sex-selective abortions. While this is all good news, we must stop and consider what is happening here, what is being accomplished, and how far we have fallen.

There was a time when the American Civil Liberties Union actually championed the rights of the weakest and least among us to the fullest protection of the law. Times have changed, as we’ve seen last week in North Dakota. From the Times article:

“We urge the governor to veto all of these bills to ensure that this personal and private decision can be made by a woman and her family, not politicians sitting in the Capitol,” said Jennifer Dalven, the director of the A.C.L.U.’s Reproductive Freedom Project.

But again, and again, the central issue remains the great unanswered question, one which Ms. Dalven and her organization would have answered with ease in a bygone era:

Do politicians sitting in the capital, or judges in courtrooms have the right to determine who among us is human and what the criteria for being considered human ought to be?

This isn’t a religious question, but a civil one, and hinging on it is nothing less than the fate of American jurisprudence, as well as scientific and biomedical ethics. Before one can pass a law, make a legal judgement, or perform a scientific or clinical manipulation, one must first determine the identity and status of the object under consideration.

People of reason and good will recoil at the consideration of our slave-holding past in America. They similarly recoil at our segregationist past, as well as our past with eugenic sterilization. All of these issues are repellent to the ACLU as well, and as Ms. Dalven would have to agree, these issues scorched the American landscape precisely because the legislators sitting in capitals failed to rein in justices and judges who were out of control.

Ms. Dalven would also have to agree that these issues scorched the American landscape precisely because a political elite arrogated to themselves the power to define personhood criteria. This was done as the sole means of usurping the ability to control those rights defined by the Founders as unalienable and granted solely by the Creator.

Having abandoned the protection of the weakest among us and championing the “rights” of those who prey upon the weak, the ACLU has gutted itself. In championing the right to murder little girls for being little girls, and for championing the murder of the genetically imperfect, the ACLU has become indistinguishible from the slaveholding and segregationist class it once despised and against whom it found its organizational identity.

Such is the malevolent power of abortion to corrupt.

In Roe v. Wade the justices argued that the absence of scientific evidence supporting a definitive beginning of life was their rationale for permitting abortion. Using arguments from the Middle Ages, such as ‘quickening’, they ignored the embryology texts of their day that fixed the beginning of human life at fertilization. With the advances in embryoscopy and ultrasonography today one would think that the last vestige of doubt would have been destroyed by science, warranting a revisiting of Roe by the Court; but that would require intellectual honesty and human decency.

Instead, today, forty years later we are now arguing the right to target what science shows as fully formed human beings because of their genetalia, or because of some atypical genetic constellation.

Instead,, today, forty years later Planned Parenthood has dropped the euphemisms such as “pro-choice,” no longer seeing them as necessary or servicable.

Similarly, the attempts to defeat the fetal heartbeat bills bespeak a duplicity from the outset. What can be more human or romantic than the sound of a beating heart?

Taken together, those are profoundly troubling developments. We have defined deviancy down. We are arguing over a degree of malevolance that makes the original argument pale in comparison.

The Democrat Party defeated attempts in Congress last year to outlaw sex-selective abortions. In those and other similar measures, both they and the ACLU have abandoned the moral high ground. Let’s hope that the Republican governor of North Dakota has the courage to pick up the fallen battle standard of the left and soldier on.

Mark Shea shares an delicious pearl from our new Holy Father:

In the Aparecida Document, a joint statement of the bishops of Latin America, Cardinal Bergoglio commented on the worthiness of individuals to receive the Eucharist. The text states in paragraph 436 that, “We should commit ourselves to ‘eucharistic coherence’, that is, we should be conscious that people cannot receive Holy Communion and at the same time act or speak against the commandments, in particular when abortion, euthanasia, and other serious crimes against life and family are facilitated. This responsibility applies particularly to legislators, governors, and health professionals.”

We’ll see how this plays out here in the U.S. in the months to come, but there can be no mistake about the Holy Father’s position. As the Culture of Death continues its acceleration, we have come to the end of dialogue, posturing, and semantic games; the end of the diplomatic charade on the left. The souls of our Catholic leaders on the left are in peril, and Cardinal Bergolio has defined for the Church the proper disposition for approaching Holy Communion.

Sorry, Nancy, but you need to make a choice. Eternal salvation, or a few more years of temporal power.

Choose wisely.

We’re praying for you.

“No exceptions. No compromise.”

That is the goal of every true pro-life citizen when it comes to abortion legislation. Rape, incest, and the life/health of the mother have been wedge issues that have been used to establish the principle for acceptable/legal abortion that have led to the more liberalized laws accounting for 55+ Million abortions over the past 40 years.

While “No exceptions. No compromise,” are the goal, the question arises as to an appropriate response to legislative proposals that have the standard exceptions language written into them. Can Christians in general, and Catholics in particular support legislation that seeks to limit the extent of this grave moral evil, without abolishing it altogether? Can it ever be acceptable to use the same language of rape, incest, and life of the mother to severely and immediately restrict abortion, just as they were once used to establish abortion?

To hear some in the pro-life movement, the answer is an emphatic, “NO!”

The powerful witness by many who were conceived in rape is a vital ministry and has won many hearts and minds by giving a face, identity, and human story to those who are singled out for destruction because of the circumstances surrounding their conception. But some use an emotional arm-twisting tactic, wherein they say that support of exceptions clauses means that the supporter would have had them aborted.

It’s flawed logic, and counter-productive. It’s meant to shut down opposition, but in reality it frequently shuts down productive and vital dialogue.

Nobody would support the rape that led to the activists’ conceptions, but that doesn’t mean that such a moral position means we are implicitly wishing they had never been conceived. In the same way, if it can be shown that it is morally acceptable to embrace pragmatic, incremental legislation as the best available means of limiting abortion en route to abolishing it altogether, it does NOT suggest an implicit endorsement of the abortions allowed in the exceptions clauses.

Here is where Pope John Paul II added much-needed clarity in his 1995 Encyclical, Evangelium Vitae.:

A particular problem of conscience can arise in cases where a legislative vote would be decisive for the passage of a more restrictive law, aimed at limiting the number of authorized abortions, in place of a more permissive law already passed or ready to be voted on. Such cases are not infrequent. It is a fact that while in some parts of the world there continue to be campaigns to introduce laws favouring abortion, often supported by powerful international organizations, in other nations-particularly those which have already experienced the bitter fruits of such permissive legislation-there are growing signs of a rethinking in this matter. In a case like the one just mentioned, when it is not possible to overturn or completely abrogate a pro-abortion law, an elected official, whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well known, could licitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality. This does not in fact represent an illicit cooperation with an unjust law, but rather a legitimate and proper attempt to limit its evil aspects.

{Emphasis added, G.N.}

Thus, in the ordinary teaching of the Catholic Church, it is permissible to limit the grave evil of abortion if incremental legislation is the only currently available option.

For those who say, “It’s not up to me to say who lives and who dies,” my own opinion is that the polar opposite is true. What we must first realize is that the current liberal application of abortion is the default condition.

What we are offered, frequently, is a compromise law that would restrict, but not eliminate abortion. In other words, we are being offered the lives of the babies not conceived through rape and incest (which are the vast majority of abortions). For many who can’t see this reality, they turn down the opportunity to save tens of millions until the day comes when they can save the remaining thousands. In the interim, the millions who could have been saved perish with the thousands who could not.

This because some pro-lifers wanted an all-or-none reality. Such an approach would be intolerable in a police hostage negotiator, but in certain pro-life quarters it is the epitome of virtue.

Pope John Paul II helped us see that the moral Magisterium of the Catholic Church sees it differently.

We abhor EVERY abortion, but are loathe to ignore the lives being offered to us through less than perfect legislation. Along with the missed opportunity to save millions, there is another missed opportunity.

A derivative benefit of incremental legislation is the conditioning, or forming, of the public conscience about the sanctity of pre-born human life. Outlawing the majority of abortions becomes a societal statement that elevates the public conscience. It is precisely through that elevated conscience that society will come to an appreciation for the humanity of those conceived in rape or incest.

If, unlike Superman who is able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, we cannot achieve our aim in a single stroke, it remains for us to take the stairs.

Thank you, Pope John Paul II, for your enduring witness to the moral Magisterium of the Church.

Pope Benedict XVI’s impending resignation, announced this morning, has opened the usual spate of questions prior to a conclave, as well as new ones about the status of a living Pope emeritus. Among some pro-lifers there is lots of buzz about whether the new pontiff will be pro-life, as was John Paul II. It’s an earnest question with beautiful intention, but it misses an essential truth about Catholic DNA.

“Pro-life” is not a plank in a conservative party platform within the Church, as it is in secular politics. There are several encyclicals from several popes spelling out the two-thousand year teaching of the Church. Some of these encyclicals, such as Humanae Vitae, Evangelium Vitae, Donum Vitae, Dignitas Personae, and Casti Connubii, establish for the faithful the constant teaching and witness of the Church.

The new Pope does not begin from scratch, but from where all of his predecessors have taken the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

To be Catholic is to be pro-life.

Of course, many are either ignorant of, or reject the teaching of the Church. Nevertheless, the tenets of the faith are binding on popes and laity alike. To be Catholic is to be pro-life.

Rumors, questions, concerns will all swirl in the weeks ahead. Two things are certain:

First, no matter what happens Jesus will continue to keep His promise to the Apostles at the Ascension: “I will be with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Second, Jesus will continue to keep another promise to the Apostles: “I will send you my Holy Spirit, and He will lead you to all truth.”

Thus, for the Church and the pro-life community there is a good future. We lift up Pope Benedict in our prayers, thanking God for his papacy and for a gentle and peaceful retirement. As we pray, our prayers should be less for a pro-life pope than for a laity that will abandon their deepening enslavement to secularism and return to the liberating witness of the Church.

No amount of encyclicals will matter if they don’t.

Good news this week from Dr. Mary Davenport, President of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG). RU-486 abortions can be reversed in many cases where the mother has second thoughts. It’s beautiful news during this 40th anniversary week of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. Links to help lines follow at the end of the post.

How Reversals Are Possible

Unlike surgical abortions which are immediately lethal, RU-486 (mifepristone) works over a period of 36-72 hours. The drug binds to progesterone receptors in the uterine lining, blocking progesterone from binding. That’s key, as progesterone is the hormone that keeps the uterine lining (endometrium) intact. If progesterone is blocked by RU-486, then the endometrium begins to break down, losing its ability to supply the baby’s placenta with oxygen and food. Over a period of a couple of days, the baby is suffocated as the placenta detaches. At that point the drug misoprostol is ingested, inducing uterine contractions to expel the baby.

The good news is that women can receive shots of progesterone if the baby is still alive. These shots will overwhelm the RU-486 and keep the endometrium intact. Dr. Davenport has sent along a few links that are helpful.

The first is a website for more information: abortionpillreversal.com

The number for women to call to find a doctor to prescribe progesterone is 877-558-0333.

To Call Dr. Davenport directly for more information: 510-417-5445

Finally, to read the peer-reviewed journal article co-authored by Dr. Davenport in The Annals of Pharmacotherapy, click here.

Christmas Eve, late at night, burning the Advent wreath down, listening to Christmas hymns, the children and Regina finishing the decorating, and contemplating the Nativity in a year that has challenged us all like few others. I’m not thinking of peaceful nativities and Hallmark images.

I’m thinking this Christmas Eve of how much the real nativity speaks to the weariness in so many hearts this year. Specifically, I’m thinking of my best friend who endured three heart surgeries and almost died as many times, of Father Luke McCann who was the most influential mentor in my life who died on Columbus Day, of Superstorm Sandy having laid waste my community, and the horror at Sandy Hook Elementary.

It’s been quite a year, yet the story we tell tonight reveals the main characters, not as humans without a care because of God’s design for their lives, but as characters who suffered greatly because of God’s design for their lives: a design that required the deepest faith to accept, and the most difficult burden to bear.

“Faith,” as Father Luke McCann would remind me, “isn’t for when we have all the answers, but for when the roof is caving in and we don’t know what’s coming next.”

Mary had to endure a lifetime of taunts, of deep suspicion and gossip over her fidelity to Joseph, and her divine son’s legitimacy. She had to walk Joseph through the doubt about her fidelity and sanity, and it would still require the assistance of angelic visions to convince Joseph to stay with her.

Then there was the unimaginable selfishness of a society that had become so calloused and coarsened to life that not one person would give up their bed for a young girl in labor.

Not one.

The indignity of a barn awaited the birth of the King of Kings. They wouldn’t be long in the barn because the government, in the person of the king, had decided to butcher every male under the age of two in an attempt to slaughter Mary and Joseph’s child. They would need to live on the road, on the run, as they fled into Egypt; far from either of their families, and with none of the help that a new and young mother needs from the older women of the family.

Homelessness, death, privation, targeting of babies for death…

Not much has changed in 2,000 years. But God came to earth and showed from the moment of His human conception that He would identify with the poor and the least among us. Having escaped murder several times, He would eventually suffer that indignity as well. The nativity narratives tell us not only of God’s great condescension in taking on our humanity, but in His great identification in all things with the suffering of the world. It is the coupling of the great condescension and the great identification with the poor and the least that point to the majesty of God, a majesty whose might is shown in His infinite mercy and forgiveness.

When people look to the tragedies of this year and ask, “Where was God?”, what is really being asked is why God could permit such evil. For me this evening, as I look at the nativity set, the answer is that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph suffered mightily as well. I often wonder what went through Mary and Joseph’s minds and hearts as they contemplated all of those children slaughtered in the effort to get their child. The joy of the birth swallowed up as their hearts must have broken beyond description.

God was right there, physically there, in the midst of it all. So it is that He remains right here with us in the midst of it all.

If it’s true that there was a murderous Herod with designs on the child’s life, then it is also true that there were Magi who returned by a different route, having left gifts to sustain the young family in Egyptian exile.

If it’s true that there was the indignity of a stable, it’s also true that there was the great Theophany, when Heaven opened onto earth and the Angels sang.

If it’s true that there was the parsimony of the residents in the inns, there was the adoration by the shepherds and the Magi.

If it’s true that Mary suffered ridicule and the opprobrium of the women of Israel, it is true that her fidelity to the Father and the Son was rewarded greatly in Heaven.

If it’s true that the slaughter of innocents heralded the first coming of our Lord in His humble origins, then it is true that this mass slaughter of innocents in the womb and the classrooms of America and the world will herald the Second Coming of Jesus in glory.

So, on this quiet night as I reflect on a year that has tried our souls, I contemplate the sufferings of Mary and Joseph, of the mothers and fathers, grandparents and families of Herod’s victims, but also on all of the goodness that God sent into their darkness. I also think of the immense outpouring of charity in the wake of that killer storm in October.

I praise God for our modern Magi; the thousands of volunteers who came from around the nation to help us rebuild, for the endless convoys of truckloads of food, clothing, and supplies. I praise God for the goodness that so much suffering elicited–mainly from church groups acting in the name of Jesus.

I praise God for the outpouring of love, and prayers, and toys for the children and residents of Sandy Hook and Newtown.

I praise God that evil never has the last word, and always evokes a far greater expression of goodness and virtue.

I praise God for all of the good people whom God has sent into my life, whose goodness has been the sign of His constant love and presence, especially for Regina and the children.

Most of all, I praise God for the witness of Mary and Joseph. In their darkest hours they never questioned God’s presence, or His love, or His goodness, or His fidelity. Their faith told them that there was a purpose beyond all human understanding and that He was with them always. They are our perfect role models in this difficult year.

Theirs is a nativity for our time.

To all here at Coming Home, a Blessed Christmas filled with peace and joy, and a very healthy and prosperous New Year!

“And when we give each other Christmas gifts in His name, let us remember that He has given us the sun and the moon and the stars, and the earth with its forests and mountains and oceans–and all that lives and move upon them. He has given us all green things and everything that blossoms and bears fruit and all that we quarrel about and all that we have misused–and to save us from our foolishness, from all our sins, He came down to earth and gave us Himself.”

~Sigrid Undset