Tough Topics

From the Mouths of Babes

Posted on by Amy

Yesterday, in honor of the March for Life, I started working with my girls on Pro Life Prints. We continued today. We talked about the sanctity of life, particularly the wonder and fragility of preborn babies and how we need to pray for their protection, all while doing artwork. Kids listen better when there’s paint involved, I think.

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I didn’t plan to talk to my girls about abortion. We have been praying for the March for Life and for an end to abortion during family prayers, but I don’t ever use the word “abortion,” and they are not familiar with the term or the concept. We simply pray for all unborn babies and their moms.

Yesterday, however, when we were talking about protecting unborn babies, Miss said that one of her friends had told her that “the lady who also wanted to be president” thinks that it’s okay to kill unborn babies. Then she asked, “Mom, how could that even happen?”

This was not a discussion I wanted to have. But that’s really the question isn’t it? How could that even happen?

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My stance on discussing grown-up issues with my kids is that I will answer all questions truthfully, but in an age-appropriate way and only as much as they ask for. So I started by explaining that some people do not understand that preborn babies are precious and should be protected. Then I said that there are doctors who sometimes cause babies to be born too early. So early that they aren’t able to live outside their moms’ tummies.

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The girls didn’t ask much more about it, but a little bit later I did talk to them about how important it is for us to keep doing the things we do, like praying for babies and moms and giving to the local crisis pregnancy center, because we have to help moms and dads as part of helping babies. They seemed to like that idea. They asked me if I had needed help from a crisis pregnancy center when I was pregnant with them, and I told them I hadn’t, because I have their dad, who is so wonderful, and their grandparents, and aunts and uncles and lots of friends. So many people supporting me. I told them that some moms don’t have that and so they get scared. (We have talked about this to some degree before because they have many friends who are adopted and so we’ve addressed why their birth parents might not have been able to care for them, and what a brave and loving choice it was for them to allow someone more able to be the parents of their babies.)

I think it’s important to include the support for parents, particularly moms, in the discussion of why and how we are pro-life.

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Through doing this project and hearing a lot about the marches of the past week, I found myself thinking about the way that unplanned pregnancy is typically talked about in this culture. It got me thinking about how I want to teach my little part of the next generation about life and parenthood and unplanned pregnancy.

I don’t want them to ever see a new life as a tragedy or an inescapable problem. I don’t ever want them (or anyone) to think that if they do experience an unplanned pregnancy, that they have no choice but abortion. I have found that this small art project we’ve worked on for the past two days is one small way of opening up some age-appropriate discussion and starting to shape their thoughts on the topic.

Naturally, my husband and I will have discussions with our kids about making good choices, being responsible, and why it is better to wait until they are married to have children (that’s a whole ‘nother ball game that I won’t go into here!), but it will never include,”Your life will be ruined if you get pregnant (or get someone pregnant) before you’re married.” We have family members who have faced unplanned pregnancies and have chosen life, with beautiful results. They will know those stories.

For now, we will keep working on our Pro-Life Prints. We will keep talking about the miracle of new life and how to help protect it. We will keep talking about the beauty of God’s creation.

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I will continue to pray that we will all keep asking the question, “How can this even happen?” and working to make it stop.

Praying for Our Nation, 14 Years Later

Posted on by Amy

Today during school, I taught my girls about 9/11 for the first time.

Our lesson started quite naturally after we said the Pledge of Allegiance. Lass asked if the Pledge is a prayer.

“No,” I said. “It’s something we say in the USA to show that we love and are loyal to our country. We say it to show that we believe our country is the best place to live and that we will take care of it.”

That provided a fairly natural segue into our discussion of the events of September 11, 14 years ago.

I told them about the twin towers and how incredibly tall they were. I showed them pictures. We talked about the airplanes and the men who made them hit the buildings. I told them about the Pentagon and the people who fought back on the fourth plane to keep it from hitting another building.

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I was pretty nervous about having this conversation with them. I didn’t want to scare them. But I thought they were old enough for a basic description of the events of 9/11. I wanted them to begin to understand patriotism. I wanted them to see that people sometimes do evil things, but that good and God are still more powerful.

I’m glad I talked about it with them. They didn’t seem scared. They were very curious about the men who had taken over the planes. They wanted to know why they did it. We talked about how some people can do very terrible things if they let hate take over their hearts, and that that’s what those men did. They hated our country, and so they did something horrifying. We talked about how we should pray for them and for people like them.

As we were having this conversation, I was dismayed to find that my conviction faltered a little bit on some of my patriotic comments. I felt a little false even. My love for our great nation is still deep and strong and true, but right now I really don’t like Her very much sometimes. I hate to type this, but I feel like my own patriotism has waned of late.

I’m shocked and saddened and angered by so many things I see going on in our country. Things like how people don’t seem to care one bit about Planned Parenthood selling baby parts and that our president hasn’t even watched the videos showing evidence of it. Things like people being sued and losing their businesses and even being jailed for following their beliefs.

I get this sense of impotent rage, alternating with helplessness, because I feel like so many things are wrong here in our country, but I don’t feel like I can do anything about it.

Today, when I talked with my girls about 9/11, I wrapped up our conversation with the story of St. Paul’s Chapel. I just learned about this church today. I told my girls about its rich history and the fact that it is right next to where the towers stood, and yet when they fell, not even one window of the chapel was broken. I told them about how it was used as a place for rescue and recovery workers to rest and find some comfort during the hours and days following the tragedy.

We talked about how God must have protected that Church, and how He is so much stronger than any bad things people do.

I ended by telling the girls that, even though those men attacked our country and did something that hurt us very much, we were not broken or ruined by it, and in fact we came together to help and serve each other even more after that happened.

During the course of the lesson with my girls, and in my reflections on it and my own feelings afterwards, I managed to realize that no matter what laws are made, no matter what trash is spewed all over Facebook and TV, no matter how things may seem to be wrong in this country, it is still the country that I love, and I would not want to live anywhere else.

On this date 14 years ago, our nation came together in such a remarkable way. The attack on our country only served to make us stronger and to reinforce within our hearts what our we stand for. The men who flew those planes that day hated us, and they hated the religious beliefs that the majority in our country hold. It seems this is not very different from some of the issues we are facing today, except now we are attacking each other.

I told my girls that we can pray for the men who hurt our nation fourteen years ago and others like them. We will also be praying for a return to American strength and unity, for an end to divisiveness and hatefulness and persecution of those who think or act or believe differently than we do.

Let us never forget 9/11.

On Abortion – I Used to Look Away Too

Posted on by Amy

Sooo, Planned Parenthood.

I’ve been sitting on this post for almost a week, trying to decide whether or not to hit publish. There’s so much out there about this right now. I wasn’t sure I wanted to throw my voice into the mix. But I see people defending Planned Parenthood and dismissing the videos from the Center for Medical Progress, and I couldn’t help but think about myself, and how I used to do the same thing.

See, I used to think Planned Parenthood was great. I used to defend the organization staunchly against people who said it was bad. I thought it did great things for women and provided important “health services” for women who couldn’t afford to get them elsewhere.

I also used to be pro-choice. I thought a woman should have the right to do whatever she wanted with her body. I thought that the government and “those” religious groups had no right to interfere with what should be a decision strictly between a woman and her doctor. I said that I was personally against abortion, but I defended a woman’s right to “choose.” In my thinking about abortion, somehow I never, ever thought about what was actually happening during the procedure. That a tiny baby was being crushed or vacuumed or poisoned to death.

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A lot of people I know have a very hard time understanding how anyone could possibly believe abortion is okay. Or how anyone could defend Planned Parenthood, even now when the videos are being released showing how callous they are about killing babies and that they are selling the body parts of these babies.

But I understand. I understand exactly how someone could think it’s okay, because I thought it was perfectly acceptable, up until about two years ago.

People can think it’s okay because when we talk about abortion in our society, it’s kept very vague. When we talk about abortion in our society, it’s presented as something that every woman has a RIGHT to. Mainstream society makes it clear that to suggest abortion is anything other than a personal medical decision that every woman should be able to make about her own body makes you a woman hater, or religious zealot, or heaven forbid, a right-wing conservative nut job.

If you talk about the other person involved in an abortion, the one most directly affected, the baby, you are being insensitive to the women who choose abortion. No one wants to talk to about the babies. They call them fetuses, as if that makes them any less alive and important.

I even saw someone post on a friend’s Facebook page just the other day that “fetuses, by definition, are not humans.”

That. Is. Insane.

And by the way, not true.

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People can think that abortion is okay, because they associate the pro-life movement with conservative craziness. The mainstream media shows us “Christians” like the Westboro Baptists, and then everyone seems to feel like it’s okay to dismiss the “religious right” as a bunch of bigoted, narrow-minded, anti-progress losers who have no relevance in our current society.

I used to do this.

I used to drive by the billboards with the pictures of the tiny developing babies and the slogans like, “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart” and I’d scoff, “Geez, these religious crazies will go to any lengths, won’t they?”

I was so entrenched in my own way of thinking, that when I’d see something that challenged my beliefs and my certainty that access to abortion was a good and necessary component of any civilized society, I mocked it or simply dismissed it as the product of radical conservative loonies.

Our society discredits Christians and Christian beliefs as crazy and backwards and extreme.

I’ve been there, done that. I used to simply dismiss, without a second thought, all conservative viewpoints simply because they were conservative, and right-wing, and, I thought, crazy.

So I decided to go ahead and publish this post, because I can see this same thing happening right now with the videos that have been released by the Center for Medical Progress featuring high-ranking women from Planned Parenthood.

People are trying to automatically dismiss these videos because they don’t want to acknowledge what they are showing. People are trying to explain away the disgusting fact that Planned Parenthood is selling baby body parts by complaining that the videos were obtained secretly and that the undercover people who filmed them were goading the Planned Parenthood people into saying what they said. People are saying that the videos aren’t valid because they have been “heavily edited.” A judge has actually issued a restraining order to prevent any more videos from being released!

I have to wonder if the people who are saying these things have actually watched the videos. If they’ve even thought about what the doctors in them are saying. Because that first doctor, Dr. Nucatola, talked about crushing little babies’ bodies in just such a way as to avoid damaging the organs that would be wanted for research.

She’s talking about crushing a baby’s body.

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That wasn’t made up. They didn’t dub the video to make it look like she said something she didn’t say. She said that. Who cares how the question was asked or if she wasn’t aware that she was being filmed?

Some people are trying to explain away the videos by saying that they aren’t selling the body parts, only accepting payment to “defray costs.” If that’s true, why don’t they have a specific policy in place stating exactly how much should be paid for each organ? Why do we see Dr. Gatter haggling over prices and trying to see what other people are getting so she doesn’t get “low-balled”?

Others’ are trying to spin the videos as “not that bad” by saying that it’s always gross to hear doctors talk about medical procedures, and that doesn’t make it wrong. They compare Dr. Nucatola’s statements, describing a baby with a tiny body, containing tiny organs, and how she’s going to crush it, to those of a surgeon describing a heart transplant.

Can we all just stop a moment and see how twisted that is?

Listening to a doctor explain a life-saving medical procedure is not disgusting at all. It’s fascinating and thrilling. A life-saving surgery is a beautiful thing. An abortion, which kills a living being, is a terrible tragedy. If I saw a video showing a diseased organ removed from a body with doctors looking at it and poking it in a dish, I would probably think that was a little icky, but I would not gasp in horror, as I did when I saw the tiny baby parts being pushed around in a dish. A little leg. A hand.

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I know exactly how someone can avoid this truth by turning away. By following the herd of the mainstream media in glossing over what abortion actually is and thinking of it only in terms of women’s rights.

I understand it because I used to do it, but that doesn’t make it okay.

It doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Muslim, atheist, or Buddhist. Killing is wrong. Abortion kills a human baby.

Can we please stop looking the other way? Can we stop dismissing what abortion is because pro-life messages might come from people with whom we tend to disagree?